Mobile Devices and the CBDTPA
Article By Dave Ruske | March 26, 2002
Category: not categorized
A multimedia PDA is only as good as the content you can use on it. Now a bill called the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act mandates security measures that will limit your use of music, movies, and even eBooks. Mobile device users, unite!
Imagine using your future PDA, the Tootywinkel 9000. Just before boarding your jet, you wirelessly download a copy of "Star Drek 43: Veeger's Revenge" from your home collection, complete with surround sound and Swedish subtitles. During the flight, while Sprok battles an evil pudding, you notice the pretty woman next to you activate her bracelet to make a call on its tiny screen. You notice the woman again at the arrival gate, talking to two men and pointing at you. They arrest you for violation of the DMCA and the CBDTPA.
"Hey," you cry, "what good is my Tootywinkel if I can't watch my own videos on it?" That, says one of the men, is something you should have thought about back in 2002.
2002 may be remembered as the year when things went from bad to worse with respect to the data you can carry with you. 1998 saw the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law. Among other things, the DMCA made it a crime to circumvent copy protection, even for "fair use." That eBook you purchased for your Palm handheld can't be read on the Tootywinkel 9000 unless the publisher specifically allows it. The DMCA shifted control over your legally purchased content to the content provider.
How nice. You get to purchase the same content over again, just because you upgraded to a new device. Rather than punishing people who make illegal copies, the DMCA takes the tack of punishing everyone. Everyone, that is, except for Hollywood and the content industry, who'd love nothing more than to make you pay again, and again, and again.
So 1998 marks the shift of copyright's delicate balance away from the rights of consumers. Now a new bill, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), aims to make it illegal to even create a device that doesn't conform to federally mandated security standards. In other words, your next PDA may contain special hardware to prevent you from enjoying copies of eBooks, music, and movies, even if you legally purchased the original. Bypass that security and go to jail.
As PDA users, we should be outraged at the government imposed limitations on our use of media. It is the honest users who are hurt by these laws; criminals will continue to be criminals, and will most certainly find ways to defeat whatever encryption gets put in place.
The balance of copyright must be preserved. Authors, artists, and movie studios deserve to profit from their work, and consumers should have the right to use that content and carry it with them to next generation mobile devices. Adoption of a Consumer Technology Bill of Rights as proposed by DigitalConsumer.org would serve to encode and enforce our fair use rights now and in the future.
We can paint ourselves a brighter future for our mobile technology, but only if we get off our collective behinds and take action. Sign the petition, then follow the links below to see how else you can help:
http://www.digitalconsumer.org/active.html
http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html
http://www.stoppoliceware.org/
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