Thank the RIAA for Your iPod Playlist

Trust me -- I'd really rather be talking about cell phones, televisions and really cool gadgets right now, but the RIAA and MPAA keep distracting me with their antics. Here's the latest, courtesy of a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: fourteen organizations, including the two mentioned, have submitted a filing as part of the DMCA's regular review process of exemptions to the DMCA's provision against tampering with technological protection measures. As part of this filing, the argument is being made that copying a CD that you bought to your iPod does not, and has never, constituted fair use.

Let's break this down for the non-lawyers in the room. In essence, all rights to copy anything are held by the copyright owner. Those rights can be sold or assigned, which is why a record label can reproduce and distribute a given musician's songs. Since copyright holders haven't given you specific permission to make a copy of a song, you aren't allowed to, by the letter of the law.

Within American law, "fair use" is an exception that, among other things, allows people to make copies within certain circumstances and constraints. So making a copy of a CD for your own personal use is within the scope of fair use. That's the way copyright law has worked for quite some time. (We Canadians don't have fair use; we have its cousin, fair dealing.)

Except now this filing claims that the right to tote your CD's contents around on your MP3 player were never expressly given, and that, for some reason, fair use doesn't apply. The implication is that all this time, they've been graciously allowing us to make tapes and MP3s from the CDs we've bought for our personal use. No need to thank them. Really.

It seems like the RIAA will only be happy when we have to pay each and every time we listen to a song.

(For additional laffs, download the PDF of the filing and wade through the part where they make the claim that access controls -- DRM -- have only increased legitimate access to copyright works.)