DIGITAL RADIO DEVELOPER SAYS CONTENT PROTECTION POSSIBLE
Digital radio developer iBiquity could easily add content protections sought by the RIAA, but only if the industry agrees on what those protections should be, iBiquity CEO Robert Struble said in an interview. Struble also downplayed concerns that digital radio will be very useful in the near term for recording digital copies of music, which could be re-distributed via the Internet (WID April 16 p3).
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Struble endorsed the FCC’s decision to begin an inquiry on possible IBOC content protections being sought by the RIAA: “We're a very strong supporter of intellectual property protection.” At the same time, iBiquity doesn’t favor limiting consumer fair use rights that already have been established, “so we're trying to strike that balance there,” Struble said.
RIAA said it was told by iBiquity in meetings late last year that content protection could be implemented easily in the IBOC technology. Whether such protections would take the form of encryption or a broadcast flag type of mechanism, “we can do that,” Struble said. But “our position has been that it’s difficult for us to do that as a technology developer unless there’s some sort of consensus among the various parties as to what that should be,” he said: “Said another way, I'm not in the business of designing and pushing on industries copy protection schemes. I'm in the business of developing digital radio. So it’s difficult for us to envision ourselves unilaterally deciding what the solution’s going to be.”
Struble downplayed the immediate threat of using digital radio for Internet retransmission. Much of the Internet retransmission functionality that RIAA has said it fears in future generations of IBOC receivers “certainly is not available in first-generation radios, and I doubt it will be available in 2nd-generation radios,” Struble said. “So I don’t think there’s a huge pressure on time” to devise a solution, he said. Moreover, with IBOC still only a fledgling technology at retail, “we're talking only tens of thousands of receivers sold this year, and perhaps hundreds of thousands next year, and it’s therefore difficult to believe this is going to be an insurmountable threat,” Struble said. As a result of the limited base of IBOC receivers projected as being in circulation in the next year, he said any threat from unprotected IBOC content would pale in comparison with that from the “tens of millions” of computers that can download and retransmit audio without authorization. “We're pretty early on in the game, and I certainly don’t feel a ridiculous time pressure at this point.”