I am not that educated as to what this all means for the future of CD's and DVD's. Someone who is familiar might take a look and let the idiots among us (me) know what this all means and whether it is time to start emailing our Congress critters:
Proposed law would make fair use fairly useless: So you're feeling pretty happy about all your new entertainment gadgets and the time- and place-shifting options they offer? Life is good, right? Well, get off your complacent consuming butt and get to the barricades, because the concept of "fair use" as we know it is in constant jeopardy these days. The Electronic Frontier Foundation alerts us to the latest threat, a piece of draft legislation called the Digital Content Protection Act of 2006, which, in addition to planting broadcast and audio flags into content, would replace the standard of fair use by permitting only "customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law."
As the EFF puts it: "Had that been the law in 1970, there would never have been a VCR. Had it been the law in 1990, no TiVo. In 2000, no iPod. Fair use has always been a forward-looking doctrine. It was meant to leave room for new uses, not merely 'customary historic uses.' ... Now the RIAA and MPAA want to betray that legacy by passing laws that will regulate new technologies in advance and freeze fair use forever. If it wasn't a 'customary historic use,' federal regulators will be empowered to ban the feature, prohibiting innovators from offering it. If the feature is banned, courts will never have an opportunity to pass on whether the activity is a fair use. Voila, fair use is frozen in time." And Ars Technica elaborates: "In other words, if it does anything heretofore unheard of with the digital content that it receives, then it's illegal. And if it does anything 'customary' that could also possibly lead to unauthorized redistribution, then it's also illegal. So all the bases are covered!"
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