RIAA and the Tech Industry Kiss and Make Up?

Several media sources, including the hometown Washington Post,
reported that various members of the tech industry and big media decided not to pursue legislatively
mandated electronic copyright enforcement. What does that mean? It means big media (the
RIAA, but not the MPAA) won’t go to Congress to get computer and electronics
makers to put chips in their products that do “Digital Rights Management.” But note the absence of
the MPAA: Hillary Rosen and her record industry cronies are running out of money and/or
patience with their war on music “piracy,” but Jack Valenti and his movie industry folks aren’t. And
yet, Rosen is not really losing out. She now has major players in the tech biz like IBM,
Microsoft, Intel, and Dell committed (or so they say) to “aggressive enforcement against digital
pirates,” whatever that means and entails.

The RIAA may have dropped the call for some sort of technical solution, the sort I
witnessed tech giants like Phillips telling Valenti and company were totally worthless, but they’ve
got a commitment from the techies to do something about all this awful piracy. But, if not a
legislatively mandated technical solution of the hardware variety, what can the techs offer?
Software? That’s arguably even weaker in terms of “defeatability” of copy protection. I guess they
could write pleading messages on the MP3 players they sell in vast quantity (“please
don’t pirate music. Please? C’mon, be a sport..”).

But regardless of all this mess, I’m psyched that John McCain is now heading the Senate Commerce
Committee, previously run by Hollywood puppet Ernest Hollings who’s had a hand in some nasty
anti-tech, anti-consumer, anti-American legislation. Republicans (and McCain is only Republican by
title) are generally less inclined to sell out to Hollywood. My theory is Big Tobacco doesn’t like
them traveling to cigarette-hostile Los Angeles.