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"Don't Let Congress Shackle Digital Music
The new Congress has barely begun, but the major record labels are already up to their old tricks.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein has re-introduced the PERFORM Act, a backdoor assault on your right to record off the radio. Satellite and digital radio stations as well as Internet webcasters would have to adopt digital rights management (DRM) restrictions or lose the statutory license for broadcasting music. Letters from constituents like you helped beat this dangerous proposal last year -- take action now to block it again.
This bill aims to hobble TiVo-like devices for satellite and digital radio. Such devices would be allowed to include "reasonable recording" features, but that excludes choosing and playing back selections based on song title, artist, or genre. Want to freely move recordings around your home network or copy them to the portable player of your choice? You'll be out of luck if PERFORM passes.
This bill would also mess with Internet radio. Today, Live365, Shoutcast, streaming radio stations included in iTunes, and myriad other smaller webcasters rely on MP3 streaming. PERFORM would in effect force them to use DRM-laden, proprietary formats, so you can say goodbye to software tools like Streamripper that let you record programming to listen to it later."
Letters from constituents like you helped beat this
dangerous proposal last year -- take action now to block it
again:
The new Congress has barely begun, but the major record labels are already up to their old tricks.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein has re-introduced the PERFORM Act, a backdoor assault on your right to record off the radio. Satellite and digital radio stations as well as Internet webcasters would have to adopt digital rights management (DRM) restrictions or lose the statutory license for broadcasting music. Letters from constituents like you helped beat this dangerous proposal last year -- take action now to block it again.
This bill aims to hobble TiVo-like devices for satellite and digital radio. Such devices would be allowed to include "reasonable recording" features, but that excludes choosing and playing back selections based on song title, artist, or genre. Want to freely move recordings around your home network or copy them to the portable player of your choice? You'll be out of luck if PERFORM passes.
This bill would also mess with Internet radio. Today, Live365, Shoutcast, streaming radio stations included in iTunes, and myriad other smaller webcasters rely on MP3 streaming. PERFORM would in effect force them to use DRM-laden, proprietary formats, so you can say goodbye to software tools like Streamripper that let you record programming to listen to it later."
Letters from constituents like you helped beat this
dangerous proposal last year -- take action now to block it
again: