MESSAGE
| DATE | 2004-06-15 |
| FROM | Ruben I Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] NY Times Article on DRM
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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.
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