Today the Digital Fair Use bill was introduced into Congress.

Huh what does that mean for us?

Here is what the bill’s authors have to say

“The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the public’s right to fair use,” Boucher said in a statement. “Without a change in the law, individuals will be less willing to purchase digital media if their use of the media within the home is severely circumscribed and the manufacturers of equipment and software that enables circumvention for legitimate purposes will be reluctant to introduce the products into the market.”

That fits in PERFECTLY with what this project is trying to do!

Just in case you guys missed it Gizmodo published an Anti-RIAA Manifesto earlier today. I am going to pick out a piece of it that is relevant to our goal here.

Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is the software that makes it so music you buy from the iTunes Music Store can’t play on any other player other than the iPod, such as a Zune or Sansa. In an effort to keep people from sharing legally purchased music, DRM actually goes much farther than copyright law dictates, denying paying customers the fair use of the music they buy. You should be able to do what you want with an album once you’ve paid for it; like a CD or a record, you now own it for life.

However, music wrapped in DRM software cannot be played on devices other than those explicitly tied to the store you brought it from. Furthermore, listening to your music across multiple computers, or moving your music to a new computer when you upgrade, is often a huge headache that ends with you needing to repurchase your songs.

That is one part of the symptoms we are trying to treat here. Still, it is a symptom not the disease itself. The RIAA is the disease and I hope that you all will join me in a full out boycott of the RIAA this month.

I have been asked in quite a number of emails and elsewhere just *when* this project is going to be done.

The short answer is that I don’t know.

The medium answer is that people are working on it and it will just take time.

The long answer is that we have two guys actively working on this problem right now, David Hammerton and Mark H. (no they are not related or even on the same continent) and this is a tough nut to crack. They haven’t kept me abreast of the hours poured into this project just yet but I do know it is a lot so far.

Keep checking back

I hope to have a few more tidbits in the next day or so.

Remember that we are on the path now. There is forward progress, even if it doesn’t seem that way right this second.

Spread the word!
Dunno about you but this excites me. Not sexually or anything, pervert, but in another good, if less tingly, way.