Posted on 12/14/2007 11:24:12 AM PST by antiRepublicrat
Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), also known as Congressman Hollywood, is one of the most powerful members of the House when it comes to intellectual property issues, so when he muses aloud about "revisiting" the DMCA, people listen. Unfortunately, Berman wants to reform the DMCA because it doesn't go far enough, and his ideas sound like they're ripped right from the pages of the Big Content playbook.
Berman chairs the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, and this morning oversaw a hearing on the PRO-IP Act, a bill that could boost statutory damages for copyright infringement and create a special IP enforcement office in the executive branch as well as a new IP division at the Department of Justice. Before witness testimony got underway, Berman mused aloud about things the bill did not contain but which he would like to revisit in the future.
Berman believes that the DMCA, in particular, needs reforming, but not in the ways that consumers have clamored for. Instead, the congressman wants to look again at the issue of "safe harbor" provisions currently extended to ISPs for infringing content flowing across their networks. He wants to examine the "effectiveness of takedown notices" under the DMCA, and he'd like to take another look at whether filtering technology has advanced to the point where Congress ought to mandate it in certain situations.
The ideas could not be more pleasing to companies like Viacom, which is currently suing YouTube over the issue of takedown notices, claiming that simply adhering to the DMCA takedown notice system is not good enough. The MPAA, which has been pushing for ISPs to adopt video filtering on their networks, should also be thrilled.
Big Content has been touting fingerprinting and filtering technologies as the solution to the problem of having their copyrighted content posted online. In October, Viacom and a handful of other companies issued a set of principles governing how user-generated video content should be handled. Signatories to the manifesto would be forced to beyond the boundaries of the DMCA—in the same direction Rep. Berman wants the DMCA to go, in fact.
Gutting the Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA, as Berman appears to be advocating, would also provide a massive boost to the rights-holders. Conversely, it would have a chilling effect, not only on the likes of YouTube, but on any site that hosts any sort of user-generated content. The Safe Harbor is arguably one of the very few worthwhile provisions of the DMCA. Rewriting it to favor the interests of Big Content would be a gigantic mistake.
Thanks for the notice Shadow.
Will Berman never stop?
I just wrote my congresscritter about the PRO-IP act that Berman is pushing, now I’m going to have to write him again about this.
Boycott Hollywood this weekend. Starve the beast. They lobby us with their receipts and live off the back catalog that’ll never lapse into the public domain.
What chutzpah! This is like claiming that al Qaeda isn’t mean and nasty enough.
Talk about misplaced priorities. But hey, money talks.
“This would be funny if it weren’t so serious”?
or, rather,
I could get some serious schadenfreude if this were happening to someone else.
A sensible alternative to this mess is to reform Copyright (and Patent) Law to be like, of all things, classical US 19th Century Mining Law.
The purpose of Copyright and Patent Law is to stimulate business, and this is what this change would be designed to do.
Mining Law was straightforward. If you wanted to stake a claim on unclaimed land, you could. But you had to improve that mine or generate ore to the tune of $500 per year, or you would lose your claim.
Now imagine this for Copyright and Patent Law.
Disney Corporation has copyrighted Mickey Mouse, and it is worth a huge fortune to them, because they retail the heck out of it around the world every year. So they should be able to continue to sell Mickey Mouse with a legal government monopoly and make a profit as long as they want to.
It is good for business, and it is good for innovation.
However, Disney Corporation *also* owns the copyright to the movie “Song of the South”, and they *refuse* to retail it.
And this is *bad* for business.
Disney Corporation should be forced to *either* retail “Song of the South”, or it should lose its government monopoly protection for that product, and *anyone* should be able to sell it. Disney’s choice. Use it or lose it.
But Disney should no longer be able to *not* sell something and still keep its legal copyright protection for that product.
Throughout America are huge libraries of copyrighted and patented content and product. The MAJORITY of these libraries sit idle, neither being sold nor permitted to be sold by anyone else.
And this is BAD for business and it stifles innovation and entrepreneurship.
The companies and individuals that own these libraries should be given the simple choice: use it or lose it. If they can market it and make a profit, then they should do so. But if they refuse, then they should have no right at all to a government monopoly.
There are corporations right now that produce *NOTHING*. They just buy Copyrights and Patents and demand royalties from others for their use. Such corporations are parasites on the business community, and accomplish just the opposite of what Copyright and Patent Law were intended to do.
A Copyright or a Patent should *only* be retained if market value, one way or another, is coming out of it. That is the very *purpose* of both Copyright and Patent Law.
To stimulate business, foster innovation, and encourage entrepreneurship.
You have some good points, but the above is incorrect. Its stated purpose is to promote the progress of the arts and sciences. Allowing a business around copyrights is only a means to that end.
What in the world are you talking about?
That's a ridiculous analogy.
That’s fine and maybe he is wrong but to compare copyright holders to terrorists is obviously absurd. The other poster claiming this means Kruschev was right indicates that some of you have lost focus and perspective of these comparatively trivial issues. What is the supposed damage to you? You can’t rip and distribute music files to others legally?
John Doe lawsuits. Plundering of your kids' bank accounts by Hollywood shysters. Fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars for single song downloads. Scientific research projects derailed because the investigators aren't sure whether they are trampling on someone's intellectual property. Scientific publications that have changed from centers of free inquiry into overpriced proprietary gatekeepers. The list goes on and on.
And who benefits? Article 1, Section 8 mandated an IP system set up to promote "...Science and the useful Arts..." But in a world where artists' rights generally end up owned by studios and record labels, and where all tech workers are required to sign away their rights to their inventions when they walk in the company door, I reiterate that what we actually have is a terrorist scheme for strangling the economy.
People being punished for stealing in no way equates to people being killed by terrorists, whether you somehow believe it does or not.
Let's start with the first tactic: John Doe suits. They file a suit then use subpoena power to get the name of the suspected person from the ISP, then drop the lawsuit instead of pursuing it. This is a dishonest abuse of our judicial system.
Then standard tactic is to send letters demanding around $3,000, or they go to court and ruin the defendant. At this point they have admitted they don't care if the person is innocent. Yes, they have, even admitted they themselves thought the person was innocent, but it doesn't matter because to drop the persecution would encourage others to stand up for their innocence, and they don't want that kind of thing to spread.
To wrap it up in a nice package:
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