WASHINGTON, January 8, 2007–Both the high-tech and the mainstream press go ga-ga over the Consumer Electronics Show. Forty years old, it’s the country’s largest annual trade show, and it officially opens this morning in Las Vegas.
What’s not to like in more than 1.2 million square feet of electronic glitz and glimmer? On Sunday night, Microsoft’s Bill Gates previewed how your car will communicate with your electronic address book and your digital music player. Verizon Wireless demonstrated how you will soon get television from Comedy Central, Fox, and NBC directly on your cell phone. And NetGear announced a “media receiver” for watching TV, movies and Internet videos from the comfort of your leather couch. Think of it as video iPod with an HDTV connection.
The impresario of all these digital goodies is Gary Shapiro, the chief lobbyist for the Consumer Electronics Association. CEA is the tech trade association that sponsors the annual event, raking in more than $80 million. But for Shapiro, who looks and acts like the proverbial kid in the candy shop for four days every January, the show is about more than just money. It’s about scoring points for his group’s public policy agenda in Washington.
The consumer electronics industry needs a lot of that right now. Here in Washington, Shapiro is regarded as a bit of an anomaly among lobbyists. The CEOs of his peer organizations–the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, the National Association of Broadcasters, and National Cable and Telecommunications Associations–are all smooth-talking political operators. They were hired because of the politicians they know, and how they could influence them.
Back in the 1980s, MPAA’s Dan Glickman was a Democratic Congressman from Kansas. (He later become President Clinton’s Agriculture Secretary.) RIAA’s Mitch Bainwol was a budget analyst in the Reagan administration, going on to become the right-hand man to former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. At the time, Glickman and Bainwol probably never imagined their future in the entertainment industry. And the current bosses of cable and broadcasting were so young that they hadn’t even begun their lobbying careers.
Shapiro, by contrast, is gadget geek made good. He rose through the ranks of the CEA’s predecessor organizations. He was present at his industry’s epochal event: its fight against Hollywood to preserve the Sony Betamax video cassette recorder from copyright-infringing lawsuit. He worked as a yeoman attorney in Universal Studios v. Sony Corp., the gadget industry’s 1984 Supreme Court victory.
But to hear Shapiro talk today, you would think that Betamax was never decided. Content companies want new forms of control over the cool technologies that Shapiro’s members design and mass-produce. And with the Democrats back in power, Shapiro faces the prospect that Congress will be even more sympathetic to the entertainment industries.
That’s one reason for Shapiro pre-emptive strike last October. Teaming up with academic and media-oriented non-profit organizations, CEA branded its agenda “Digital Freedom.” It introduced a “bill of sights and sounds,” and attacked “a handful of big record labels and movie studios” for attempting to undercut the Betamax doctrine that permits consumers to make fair use of copyrighted works.
Five years ago, Hollywood was more aggressive in seeking tech controls on televisions and computers with the explosion of digital file-sharing. Today, it is RIAA that is pressing hardest on Washington.
The record labels last spring sued XM Satellite Radio, a major CEA member, for its Inno receiver. The sleek device–introduced at CES 2006–allows XM subscribers to digitally copy music that they pay to listen to. The labels’ campaign against XM included the introduction of legislation to limit Inno’s capabilities. Among the bill’s sponsors were Frist in the Senate, and California Democrat Rep. Howard Berman, the new chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property.
XM, Shapiro and the Digital Freedom crowd say that XM’s digital copies can’t be uploaded to the Internet and shared with millions. They point to specific authority under the copyright law for the device. RIAA says that “satellite radio services should be required to obtain a license in the marketplace to offer the capability to cherry-pick individual songs and then permanently store them in a digital library.” Without such legislation, XM can turn a broadcast-style business (and its dramatically lower its copyright fees) into an iTunes-style competitor.
But even among his partners in the technology industries, Shapiro isn’t finding much company in Washington. The only industry group that joined Shapiro’s campaign was the Computer and Communications Industry Association. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the biggest business lobbies, went so far as to blast Shapiro for “pursuing a self-defeating strategy [of] demolishing the rights of creative artists.”
So where can Shapiro turn now? How about Hollywood itself? It has always appreciated a showman of Shapiro’s caliber. This year CES turned over two of its five prime speaking slots–one of which is always reserved for Bill Gates–to the CEOs from CBS and Walt Disney. And this year the association is tracking show attendance from the entertainment industry. As of last Thursday, 11,000 had registered. There will surely be thousands more.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.