aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, June 17, 2005

Rush Limbaugh, copyfighter?

Commentator Rush Limbaugh can’t include his song parodies in his podcasts. Boing Boing had this from Rush on Wednesday:

But I just want to tell you we’re continually working on it, which at this point simply means monitoring developments in this whole copyright and piracy law. I know the Millennium Copyright Act is what this is all about, and until that’s changed, none of this is going to change. In fact I just saw a story in my RSS reader today that Sony is coming out with a new system to copy-protect their CDs. There’s software on their CDs that will allow a maximum of three dubs, three copies, and then it shuts down. So if somebody goes and buy a CD, they can copy it three times, but that’s it and it’s not on all their CDs. It’s a new technology that they are embedding in the CDs, and of course the DVD industry has gotten even much tougher than the music industry has, but it’s a huge deal and we have looked at it in every which way and that’s what we have been told by the legal eagles.

I’m not finding it on his website. But I do find this:

I keep getting questions, “Why no music?” Let me go through this once again… We simply don’t have the license to give away somebody else’s product, which is what we’d be doing if we downloaded music… We’re always trying to change these things and get permissions from various entities to include their work, but we’re running up against a brick wall because so much piracy is going on out there, and once you steal something, it’s easy to spread it around to your friends and they’re just trying to get a handle on this. So that’s why. If we wanted to write and produce, create our own bumper music and do that, we could, if we wanted to give that away, but somebody else’s we just can’t. So for now it’s audio only.

So is it that the media cartel just “trying to get a handle on it” or is Rush beginning to understand what’s really going on?