MESSAGE
| DATE | 2002-10-02 |
| FROM | Ray Connolly
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] fair use bill
|
SILICONVALLEY.COM
Posted on Tue, Oct. 01, 2002
New bills aim to protect consumers' use of digital media
By Heather Fleming Phillips
Mercury News Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - The battle being waged in Washington over copyright in the
digital age ratchets up a notch this week as new legislation is introduced
aimed at clarifying consumer rights.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, plans today to introduce the ``Digital Choice
and Freedom Act,'' Silicon Valley's response to a host of Hollywood-backed
bills tilted in favor of copyright holders.
Lofgren's bill would ensure consumers can copy CDs, DVDs and other digital
works for personal use, just as they now do with TV shows and audio tapes.
``This would not authorize someone taking their digital content and sharing
it with a million of their best friends,'' Lofgren said in an interview
Tuesday. Instead of creating new rights for consumers, she said, her bill
would ensure that ``the rights they have in the analog world, they have in
digital.''
Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., plans to introduce similar legislation Thursday.
Lawmakers are wrapping up their business for the year within weeks, and
neither measure has any chance of making it through Congress by then.
Rather, the bills are aimed at staking out the technology industry's
position in a festering dispute that could result in congressional action
next year.
The bills also would amend a 1998 law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
that makes it a crime to circumvent technological protections built in to
copyrighted works. Instead, consumers would be allowed to bypass the
technology if the intent is to make a copy for personal use.
The legislation will vie with Hollywood-backed proposals, filed by Sen.
Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., and Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Los Angeles, that
would embed copy protection into PCs and an array of consumer devices, and
allow the music and film industry to use aggressive anti-piracy technologies
to thwart unauthorized downloading over the Internet.
``The laws that have passed in recent years have imbalanced the historical
balance between owners of copyrighted works and users of copyrighted
works,'' Boucher said in an interview Tuesday. ``The balance has been tilted
dramatically in favor of owners at the expense of users.''
The film and music industries cast the debate in terms of piracy, arguing
that copy protections are needed to ensure people don't download movies and
music without compensation to the copyright holders.
The tech industry counters that free-flowing downloads of movies, music and
other digital works could drive demand for broadband Internet connections,
which it hopes would in turn spur innovation and increase sales of new
technologies.
``If this bill were to pass, it would render ineffective, worthless and
useless any protection measure we would have in place to protect a $100
million movie,'' Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association
of America, said of the Lofgren bill. ``You could download a million movies
a day, and no penalty for it.''
Caught in the middle of the debate are consumers, whose ``fair use'' rights
are in limbo. The courts have long upheld consumers' rights to make personal
copies of songs, TV shows and other copyrighted works. But the move to
digital raises the question of where to draw the line, when near-perfect
copies can be easily shared over the Internet with large numbers of other
users.
``Lofgren's bill aims to restore what Congress thought it was doing --
preserving fair use for people who have lawful rights to use stuff,'' said
Paula Samuelson, a law professor at University of California-Berkeley's
Boalt Hall School of Law. ``The Lofgren bill offers meaningful protections
for a number of ordinary activities by consumers that should be lawful under
copyright law but about which the law is presently ambiguous.''
____________________________
New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
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