MESSAGE
| DATE | 2004-06-15 |
| FROM | Ruben I Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [hangout] NY Times Article on DRM - Follow Up
|
WASHINGTON ? Some lawmakers are introducing a bill that Hollywood is not
happy about ? one that would allow consumers to make personal copies of
digital entertainment like DVDs to be played on whatever device they
want.
Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., author of the Digital Media Consumers' Rights
Act (search), says consumers should not always have to worry about being
slapped with a lawsuit every time they make a copy of their favorite
videos.
"We are seeking to empower the purchasers of digital media so that they
can use the media in ways that are more convenient to them," Boucher
told Foxnews.com.
Boucher said that empowerment would mean "for example, by being able to
move digital material ? whether it's video on a DVD or materials on a
compact disc or the text of an electronic book ? around from digital
device to digital device in their home or in their extended personal
environment."
The new bill amends the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (search) of
1998, which allowed copyright holders to put digital locks on their work
and makes it illegal to break those locks.
Boucher's bill allows owners of DVDs and other works that have a digital
lock to bypass the security and copy the work so long as the user is
engaging in "fair use" of the product and not infringing upon its
copyright.
A hearing on the bill has been tentatively scheduled for Wednesday.
The Motion Picture Association of America (search), which represents
Hollywood's interests in Washington, D.C., has been the most vocal
critic of moves to change the DMCA to allow people to make personal
copies of movies.
"Anything that allows you to decrypt the DVD would not be a legal
product," said MPAA spokesman Rich Taylor.
"There is no right in the copyright law to make backup copies of motion
pictures, so the whole argument that people should have the right to
make backup copies of DVDs has no legal support whatsoever," said Fritz
Attaway, executive vice president of the MPAA.
"It's against consumers' interests to permit devices that make backup
copies," he added, "because there is no way that a device can
distinguish between a backup copy for personal use and making a copy for
friends, family acquaintances or even selling on the street corner."
The MPAA recently sued 321 Studios (search), which makes a tool commonly
called a "ripper," which circumvents the digital locks so consumers can
make back up copies of DVDs.
321 Studio's software does include piracy provisions ? a screen is
inserted into the copy warning the user that the copy is only for
personal use within the home and watermarking technology allows each
copy to be tracked and traced.
Judges have ruled against the technology, but the company says it's
merely helping people get the most for their money and that Boucher's
bill would help further the "fair use" cause.
One former lawmaker said he didn't realize that the DMCA would restrict
digital-content copying to the extent that it has.
"I, like most members of Congress, had no idea that what would be deemed
to be fair use for books, CDs, and TV programs is not the case for DVDs
? and nobody intended that the people that would enable you to make a
single copy of a DVD should be held criminally liable and go to jail and
that's insane," Bob Livingston (search), former U.S. Republican
representative from Louisiana and House Appropriations Committee
chairman, told Foxnews.com.
Livingston is now a lobbyist for 321 Studios.
"Moms and dads shouldn't have to fork over another $20-$30 every time
little Johnny or Suzie scratches their DVD. The technology exists to
prevent them from having to do that," said 321 Studios President Robert
Moore.
"We're not talking about free use here and we're not talking about
providing consumers the skeleton key to everyone else's property," he
added. "We're talking about giving people lawful use of the property
they lawfully acquired."
Livingston and others say the MPAA was merely trying to maintain a vise
grip on content and pointed out that MPAA President Jack Valenti
(search) in 1982 famously said the VCR would prove to be the "Boston
Strangler" of the movie industry.
"They make the same argument about the new technology that's come out
within the past 50 years ... from the VHS to the CD burner to now this
technology," Moore said.
"The MPAA has chosen to seek a scapegoat for their very real problems
that occur in China and other countries where they get their movies
knocked off in mass production lines and sold for a tremendous
discount," Livingston added.
The MPAA argues that it's in consumers' best interests that the digital
locks not be bypassed.
"These products like 321 allow people to be free riders," Attaway said.
"It's the concept of buy-one-get-one-free, only it's not just
get-one-free but it's get-as-many-as-you-want-to-make-free ... It raises
the prices for legitimate copies and it also reduces the availability of
the copies."
Boucher has been spending the past two years garnering support for his
bill. The likes of Intel, the Consumer Electronics Association, the
American Library Association, the Digital Future Coalition, Consumers
Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are now throwing their
weight behind it.
"Making this change is manifestly in the public interest. It's in the
interest of empowering the consumer," Boucher said. "Once the consumer
is more empowered to use media he lawfully acquires ... he will want to
buy more media ... even the content creators, the people who oppose this
bill, will in the long-term, benefit."
Livingston said he thought support existed for the bill but 321 still
may not have luck.
"We think that when the average member of Congress who voted for the
DMCA in 1998 understands the inequity here that these people will make
their case very clearly and simply and be overwhelmingly approved by a
majority of members of Congress," Livingston said. "The trick is getting
members to pay attention in a political [election] year."
On 2004.06.15 11:15 Ruben I Safir wrote:
>
> ermissions on Digital Media Drive Scholars to Lawbooks By TOM ZELLER
Jr.
>
> Published: June 14, 2004
>
> When some 20,000 first-year American medical students reported to
their
> schools last summer, they received a free 20-minute multimedia collage
> of music, text and short video clips from television doctor dramas,
past
> and present, burned onto a CD-ROM.
>
> "The patients you meet in the coming years may have doubts about you
> because of the doctors they see on prime-time television," the
> introduction reads. "The aim of this presentation is to explore why
that
> is, and suggest what you can do about it."
>
> But the CD was perhaps more of an education for its developer, Joseph
> Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg
School
> for Communication.
>
> "It's crazy," Professor Turow said of the labyrinth of permissions,
> waivers and fees he navigated to get the roughly three minutes of
video
> clips included on the CD, which was paid for by a grant from the
Robert
> Wood Johnson Foundation. The process took months, Professor Turow
said,
> and cost about $17,000 in fees and royalties paid to the various
studios
> and guilds for the use of clips. The film used ranged from, for
example,
> a 1961 episode of "Ben Casey" to a more-recent scene from "ER."
>
> This Friday, Professor Turow and other experts will meet at a
conference
> sponsored by the Annenberg School to debate how digital media fits
into
> the concept of "fair use" - a murky safe harbor in copyright law that
> allows scholars and researchers limited use of protected materials for
> educational or commentary purposes.
>
> The conference title itself is a lament: "Knowledge Held Hostage:
> Scholarly Versus Corporate Rights in the Digital Age." Many scholars,
> librarians and legal experts see rich promise for the use of
multimedia
> materials in research and education. But the possibility of litigation
> over file-sharing and confusion over digital copyright protections
have
> scholars feeling threatened about venturing beyond the more familiar
> world of printed texts, Professor Turow said.
>
> "It's a pain in the tuchis, frankly," said Rachel Durkin-Drga, the
> production manager at the Performing Arts Center at the University of
> Texas at Austin, recalling 10 years of attempting to secure permission
> to use various pieces of music. Even when educators seek to pay for
use,
> she said, simply finding and contacting all of the people and agencies
> necessary to get clearance can be prohibitively daunting.
>
> In one instance, she tried unsuccessfully for months to secure
> permission to use a song to accompany a piece choreographed by a
faculty
> member for students in an undergraduate dance program. The dance was
> performed in silence.
>
> Edward W. Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton
> University, was at the center of a legal battle in 2001, when
> representatives of the recording industry threatened to sue him and
the
> university over the publication of a paper analyzing a set of digital
> watermarking technologies designed to secure music files. The
recording
> industry based its claim on the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
> which makes it a crime to circumvent antipiracy measures built into
> digital media.
>
> "After a long legal fight involving withdrawal and later resubmission
of
> our paper, and our filing of a lawsuit against the parties who tried
to
> suppress our work," Professor Felten wrote in response to a call from
> conference moderators for tales of copyright woe, "we won the right to
> publish our paper. Attempts to create a research exemption to the
> D.M.C.A. have failed thus far."
>
> Whether academia's difficulties in navigating the world of multimedia
> copyrights is entirely the result of corporate bullying is a matter of
> debate, however.
>
> Bruce A. Lehman, who ran the federal patent and trademark office from
> 1993 to 1998 and who was at the forefront of the contentious battles
> over digital rights legislation, has long insisted that criticisms and
> complaints about copyright controls are overblown. He has argued that
> academia and industry simply need to find ways of streamlining the
> licensing process for digital media in the same way they have for
> printed material.
>
> "There is an element in the user community that just wants to get it
all
> for free," said Mr. Lehman, who is now senior counsel in Washington at
> Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, a law firm. He added that
demonizing
> copyright holders simply causes "fear where there really shouldn't be
> any."
>
> That echoes the thinking of Peter Andrew Jaszi, a professor of law at
> American University's Washington College of Law and one of the panel
> members scheduled to speak at Friday's conference. Professor Jaszi
> concedes that "in some cases, the fair-use doctrine in copyright law
may
> actually not be adequate in its present form for the uses of
> researchers," but he also believes part of the problem is that
scholars
> are poorly informed about what they can and cannot do.
>
> "The likelihood of litigation is low to begin with," Professor Jaszi
> said, but the lack of coordination in academia on these issues
probably
> makes the confusion worse.
>
> "There are no disciplinary rules of best practice for cultural
> historians or film scholars or medical historians," he noted. "And, in
> the absence of that kind of collective understanding, it's no wonder
> that individuals give up the game before it begins."
>
> The conference is intended, in part, to change this situation. But
> persuading scholars to test the boundaries of fair use in the digital
> age will be an uphill battle.
>
> "A lot of this is self-censorship," Ms. Durkin-Drga said, "but,
frankly,
> who can afford to take a chance?" After all, she pointed out, the
> Recording Industry Association of America "is going after teenagers."
>
>
> Free Trial of The New York Times Electronic Edition.
>
> -- __________________________ Brooklyn Linux Solutions
>
> So many immigrant groups have swept through our town that Brooklyn,
like
> Atlantis, reaches mythological proportions in the mind of the world -
RI
> Safir 1998
>
> DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
> http://fairuse.nylxs.com
>
> http://www.mrbrklyn.com - Consulting http://www.inns.net <-- Happy
> Clients http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
> http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive or stories
and
> articles from around the net http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/downtown.html -
> See the New Downtown Brooklyn....
>
> 1-718-382-0585
> ____________________________
> NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
> Fair Use -
> because it's either fair use or useless....
> NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
>
--
__________________________
Brooklyn Linux Solutions
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://fairuse.nylxs.com
http://www.mrbrklyn.com - Consulting
http://www.inns.net <-- Happy Clients
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive or stories and
articles from around the net
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/downtown.html - See the New Downtown
Brooklyn....
1-718-382-0585
____________________________
NYLXS: New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
NYLXS is a trademark of NYLXS, Inc
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