Fight for your digital right

What's the story with digital rights?

Whether it's listening to music on iPods, talking on our mobile phones or surfing the web, most of us have embraced the digital lifestyle. Technology, however, is changing faster than the legislation covering our use of it. So while new technology promises a revolution in the way we consume and interact with different media, it is also giving content providers new ways of controlling our use of the music, movies and information we purchase.

Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) is a recently formed lobby group "devoted to defending civil, human and legal rights in a digital age". It hopes to raise awareness of the ways our digital rights are being compromised.

So, when you download a track or buy a DVD, where exactly do you stand?

MUSIC The iPod has revolutionised the way we listen to music, but it has also opened a legal minefield. "As it stands in Irish law, it seems to be illegal for you to make a private copy of a CD that you've bought, so it's illegal to copy a CD on to your iPod," says TJ McIntyre of Digital Rights Ireland. "Needless to say, the music industry would like to be in a position where they sold you the music once on vinyl, once on cassette, once on CD and they'd now like to make you pay for the privilege of listening to it on your iPod."

In May, the British Phonographic Institute (BPI) recommended that the law be changed to reflect a new reality in which people routinely convert their purchased CDs into MP3s. However, Sean Murtagh of Irma, the Irish equivalent of the BPI, says it has no plans to make a similar recommendation here. Only last week, however, the BPI was given the go-ahead to sue the owners of a Russian website, allofmp3.com, on which customers could download music extremely cheaply.

MOVIES With the advent of video iPods and Sony's Playstation Portable (PSP) it seems that our DVD collections will eventually join our CD collections in our pockets. However, unlike CDs, DVDs are encrypted to protect the film studios' copyrights. That is a matter of debate among certain copyright activists - if our CDs are unencrypted, why are our DVDs encrypted? Furthermore, it is illegal to create technology that circumvents copyright-protecting technology. So while copying CDs and putting them on portable players is legal in many countries - though not here - it is impossible to do the same with DVDs.

Movies will have to be purchased in a new format for portable players, even though the technology exists for them to be copied as CDs are. "The beauty of it is that [ the film studios] don't have to persuade the market," says McIntyre. "If they can come up with the technology and legislation that prevent fair use, they can ignore the wishes of the consumer."

TELEVISION In the good old days, you watched something on channel A, you recorded whatever it was you wanted to watch on channel B, and then watched the tape. What's more, you were legally entitled to do so. But that legal entitlement to fair use is under threat. As the technology moves beyond the VCR to "timeshifting" personal video recorders (PVRs) such as Tivo or Sky+, we should be able to digitally record programmes to a hard drive, skip the ads and move those programmes on to our iPods or PSPs.

However, a "broadcast flag" is being introduced by US networks. Certain programmes would be digitally flagged as, for instance, unrecordable, or watchable only once, or not entitled to be moved to a portable player. "Broadcasters would like to stop via technology what they couldn't stop by legislation," says McIntyre. "First they create the technology that stops people doing something [ the broadcast flag], and then they make it illegal for them to circumvent ."

MOBILE PHONES "There has been great pressure from the music industry to make mobile phones inoperable with your computer," according to McIntyre, "because they don't want you shifting music from your computer to your mobile. They would much prefer that the only way you can get music on to your mobile, in terms of a ringtone, is for the operator to charge you for it as a download."

INTERNET The internet burst into our lives with relatively few strings attached. Unlike television or radio, for instance, it is an open technology, allowing both content creators and consumers to post and read what they want. Now, however, a number of issues are causing concern for digital rights campaigners.

Net neutrality is the primary ground for debate. The large internet service providers are lobbying to gain further control over the net by essentially setting up toll booths, prioritising data from companies that pay a toll over the data from companies that don't pay. The result would be that certain sites would load faster depending on which provider you used.

Another cause for concern is broadcast rights. The Broadcast Treaty, currently being debated by the UN's World Intellectual Property Rights Organisation, grants a whole new level of copyright to companies who carry or broadcast content. For example, this means that someone could create a podcast, allow it to be distributed copyright free, but whoever distributes the podcast would have copyright-type rights over the material, even though they didn't create it. This would also affect TV and radio broadcasters, meaning a sea-change in how copyright and fair use operates.

Finally, there have been much-publicised attempts to charge for e-mail, mostly by AOL, under the excuse of preventing spam, though it is remains to be seen how succesful this will be.

"Our concern is that rights that people traditionally enjoyed are being eroded, and eroded by stealth, because it's technobabble to most people," says McIntyre. The digital age might be revolutionising how we use media, it seems, but it is also revolutionising our traditional rights in relation to that media.

www.digitalrights.ie