My column in the May issue of Popular Science magazine is online: this month, I talk about how the RIAA is trying to create a Broadcast Flag for digital radio:
Today you can buy similar devices for radio—sometimes called RiVos—including Griffin’s Radio Shark and Neuros’s MP3 Computer, that connect to your computer and record programs to your hard drive. The next generation of these gadgets will go those one better, recording all of the radio stations in a frequency band simultaneously, then picking out individual songs and arranging them into playlists. Goodbye channels, chatter, idiot DJs and throwaway music. Who needs live radio when you’ve got a RiVo?
The problem is that tomorrow RiVo may be illegal. A new generation of radio called Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB, a.k.a. digital radio) is coming, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is dedicated to making sure no RiVo-like device for digital radio ever reaches the marketplace. DAB is just beginning to show up in the U.S., but it will eventually replace analog FM and AM broadcasts. What worries the RIAA is that a DAB signal sounds better than analog, and it can carry information such as names of tracks and artists and be easily recorded to a hard drive. RiVo functionality could be in every DAB tuner.
