[DMCA-Activists] NY Times: Recent Exclusive Rights Actions

[Seth Johnson]

(Forwarded from NY Fair Use list, address@hidden)

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 02:51:47 -0400
From: Ruben I Safir <address@hidden>

 
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/29/technology/29DIGI.html


The entertainment industry's campaign to rally Congressional
support for new methods of copyright enforcement is yielding
results. And it is raising alarm among some technology
executives and consumer advocates who fear that proposed
regulations would excessively limit how people consume
information and entertainment in digital form.

The major movie studios, worried about how to protect their
works in a digital age, have been pressing technology
companies to voluntarily incorporate copy-protection
mechanisms into hardware and software. But lately, Hollywood
has had more luck in Congress than in private negotiations,
where technology executives remain wary of the expense and
skeptical that any technical solution can effectively
eliminate the sort of digital piracy that is already common
with music and is finding its way into movies and
television.

"The debate about copy protection has clearly been joined in
Washington," said Alan Davidson, associate director of the
Center for Democracy and Technology, a consumer rights
advocacy group. "But there are a lot of questions raised by
the potential solutions that haven't been answered. Internet
users should be very concerned about whether they will be
able to do the things that today they reasonably expect to
do in the future."

In a flurry of activity on digital copyright protection,
several members of Congress urged the Federal Communications
Commission last week to require that makers of computers,
television sets and recording devices embed technology into
their machines to prevent TV viewers from redistributing
digital broadcasts over the Internet.

Consumer groups worry that the agency will act without
examining how such a move would affect the kinds of machines
people can buy and what they can do with them. Under the
system proposed by the studios, a person would not be able
to record a show in one place and retrieve it over the
Internet to watch someplace else ? even in another room of
his or her house.

In a separate action, Representatives Howard L. Berman,
Democrat of California, and Howard Coble, Republican of
North Carolina, introduced a bill that would immunize
copyright holders from laws governing computer intrusion if
they disabled or impaired a "publicly accessible
peer-to-peer network" to prevent their works' being traded.
In other words, movie studios could legally hack into
computers that used file-trading software like Kazaa or
flood the networks with large files to bring traffic to a
halt, as long as this did not deliberately damage a user's
computer.

Music and movie industry representatives applauded the
measure. But providers of file-sharing software, who say
their services are used for legitimate means like trading
music with the copyright holder's permission, as well as
piracy, assailed the bill for encouraging "vigilante
justice" that places copyright holders above the law.

And a draft Senate bill, originally intended to update laws
that outlaw the counterfeiting of holograms and other
measures used by software producers to guarantee the
authenticity of CD's, has quietly been expanded to cover
movies, music and other consumer products. Should that bill
become law, a consumer who removed a watermark from a DVD or
electronic book to send it over the Internet could be liable
for fines up to $25,000. Internet providers are worried that
they could be held responsible for material using their
networks if someone had disabled the authentication
mechanism.

The bill, which was offered by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.,
Democrat of Delaware, is being viewed by some technology
companies as a back-door attempt by Hollywood to push
through broad copy-protection legislation that was widely
criticized when it was packaged in a bill by Senator Ernest
F. Hollings of South Carolina earlier this year. The draft
contains no provisions for removing a watermark for research
or to use excerpts of protected material for satire or
commentary, which has customarily been viewed as acceptable
under copyright law.

"This started out as a pretty unexceptional
anti-counterfeiting bill," said Stewart Baker, general
counsel of an association of Internet service providers,
"and with almost no notice or discussion has been turned
into a digital-rights management protection bill."

The attention to digital copyright protection is fueled
largely by the conviction among lawmakers that broadband
Internet services and digital television would be more
widely adopted if consumers knew that they could get movies
digitally.

Jack Valenti, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of
America, said the studios were eager to inaugurate a new
delivery system ? and presumably new revenue ? for their
products. But he says it makes no sense for them to provide
their most valuable assets in digital form without assurance
that consumers will not be able to make perfect copies and
swap them over the Internet.

Still, some analysts say that the slower growth in the
adoption of broadband, or high-speed, services this year has
little to do with the lack of mainstream entertainment
available on the Internet and more to do with overblown
expectations.

Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a public-interest
group focused on intellectual property issues, suggested
that the lack of copy protection was just one fairly minor
reason why the entertainment industry had not provided its
material over digital television. "Why aren't they doing
it?" Ms. Sohn said. "It's expensive, and they haven't
figured out a business model."

Ms. Sohn said she had told legislators that if they thought
they must pass additional laws to protect Hollywood's
copyrights, they should also insist on an agreement that the
studios would actually deliver their material over the new
channels. She noted that they had already promised to do so
in 1998, after Congress gave major copyright holders
additional protections in the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, but that so far there had been little to show for that
agreement.

But as Congress prepares to leave town for the summer,
Hollywood's best bet may be to return to private
negotiations with technology representatives. To that end,
Mr. Valenti is scheduled to meet today with Kenneth R. Kay,
executive director of the Computer Systems Policy Project,
an organization of chief executives from 11 major technology
firms, including I.B.M., Intel and Microsoft. 

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