The RIAA’s attempts through the FCC to promote digital content pr...

showing that an actionable problem exists,” CEA Pres. Gary Shapiro told RIAA Pres. Cary Sherman in an April 15 letter. RIAA is seeking IBOC copy protection to prevent recording digital music for redistribution via the Internet (CD April 19 p5). RIAA said it didn’t wish “to limit the ability of consumers to record over-the-air radio broadcasts, but Shapiro said the recording industry “apparently” wants “to force them to buy what they have received for free since the invention of radio. “Hundreds of thousands” of digital radios already have been sold in the U.K., “yet you offer no proof of harm to the recording industry,” Shapiro said. “Indeed, the various consumer recording practices your letter warns of could be easily accomplished today using commonplace analog radio data service (RDS) technology combined with the digitization of FM broadcasts, but there is no evidence this is occurring. The FCC docket is also devoid of any showing linking digital radio to the unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing of music.” Rather than seeking federal mandates on IBOC content protection, the more “appropriate course would be to devise a technical proposal and work with the appropriate standards bodies,” Shapiro told Sherman. He cited the multi-industry Copy Protection Technical Working Group (CPTWG). But Shapiro said RIAA stopped attending CPTWG meetings after it devised the unsuccessful Secure Digital Music Initiative “and has not returned.” Shapiro said: “In fact, the CPTWG was meeting at the very moment you sent your letter, but to my knowledge no one from your organization was in attendance.”