TimeTrax blazes a new music trail

My latest interview with a tech CEO is up at Engadget: The Engadget Interview: Elliott D. Frutkin, CEO of TimeTrax. Excerpt:

Frutkin: The RIAA is lobbying Congress to change what the rules are with copyright laws and the definition of fair use. Ever since the invention of the tape recorder and the VCR, the industry has tried to stop technological progress. But for the movie studios, it’s a good thing in the case of the VHS and DVDs that they didn’t succeed.

Let’s examine where things are going and to build a business model around it. TimeTrax can do for the music industry what the VCR did for the movie industry. ...

What kind of DRM do you use?

We don’t want to encourage people to distribute what they capture with TimeTrax over the Internet, so we encode the satellite signal into each recording that’s made, with a specific identifier for each user. Besides that, we don’t have any other restrictions on what people can do with their recording. We just want to encourage people to be responsible, and yet not punish them at the same time.

That sounds perfectly reasonable. Are you insane? What if this catches on?

You know, this approach takes the responsibility off us in a certain way and puts it on the user, where it belongs.