[iwar] [fc:IP.conference:.copyright.law.has.gone.too.far]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-11-24 21:36:23
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Gore.Planned.to.Bug.America]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Officials:.Web.Security.Work.Needed]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Message-Id: <200111250536.fAP5aNa24495@red.all.net>
To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List)
Organization: I'm not allowed to say
From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com
Precedence: bulk
Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2001 21:36:23 -0800 (PST)
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [iwar] [fc:IP.conference:.copyright.law.has.gone.too.far]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

IP conference: copyright law has gone too far

By Grant Gross

Posted: 16/11/2001 at 08:17 GMT

The recording industry and the Business Software Alliance squared off
against the Electronic Frontier Foundation and US Rep. Rick Boucher
Wednesday in a debate over laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
aimed at protecting large copyright holders, with the hearts and minds of a
crowd of Washington, D.C., decision-makers as the prize.

John Perry Barlow, former Wyoming cattle rancher, Grateful Dead lyricist and
co-founder of the EFF, told a Washington suit-and-tie crowd of lobbyists and
congressional staffers that he can predict the history of this century after
the recent terrorists attacks on the US.

"I think I can safely say that history of the 21st Century is going to be
about the struggle between open systems and closed systems, which was what
you saw engaged on 11 September in a very pointed way," Barlow said. "This
is going to be an interesting and complex struggle, because it is in the
nature of open systems to breed closed systems, since for example, an open
system like a free-market economy tends to gravitate toward a natural
monopoly, which is a closed system."

In the day-long conference, entitled The Future of Intellectual Property in
the Information Age, at Libertarian think tank The Cato Institute, the
phrase "open source" only came up a handful of times - but the impact of
copyright protection schemes on Open Source, Free Software and ordinary
consumers of online music, movies and written materials was never far away
from the debate. 

The conference was put on by a Libertarian group that's internally divided
over whether government protection of copyrights and patents is a good
thing. Two of the three keynotes featured critics of expanded copyright
protections: Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, and Barlow, whose organization
has defended people who've run afoul of the DMCA's provision outlawing
technologies that circumvent copy controls.

Small group controls much information
Barlow noted that since the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996, the
concentration of media companies has caused the majority of copyrighted
entertainment to fall into the hands of a handful of companies. "I think
that what we are doing with acts like the DMCA is to give them an enormous
additional amount of control at a time when they don't need it," he said.
"We are putting tools in their hands that are far more powerful than have
been put in the hands of any kind of medium before, and they are in a
position to control information like it's never been controlled by anyone
but the Soviets. 

"If we're not going to regulate the media monsters, we at least need to be
thoughtful about putting these additional tools in their hands."

While Barlow talked about the philosophy of information freedom - how
information becomes more valuable when it's shared, unlike physical goods -
Boucher took the more pragmatic approach by talking about what's going on in
Washington and what changes he believes need to happen.

Boucher outlined two bills he's sponsoring, the Music Online Competition
Act, which would encourage competition for online music services beyond
services owned by the large music companies, and the Business Method Patent
Improvement Act, which would reform the way business method patents are
obtained. Both bills, he said, would help turn the tide back to consumers
and against the trend toward protecting the large industries that hold most
copyrights and patents.

Boucher told the crowd of a couple hundred D.C. insiders that laws such as
the DMCA aim to restrict consumers' fair use rights on copyrighted works, to
do such things as make their own personal copies or sample the works to
critique them. "[The DMCA] is, in my humble opinion, a broad overreach that
severely limits fair use rights," he said. "Free speech doesn't mean much if
you have to get prior permission of an intellectual property owner" to use
the work for your own purposes.

But the other side was well represented, with apologists for large patent
and copyright holders arguing that such protections are needed in order to
fuel the creation of new content and new ideas.

During one panel discussion, Greg Aharonian, editor of the Internet Patent
News Service, argued that Boucher was being insincere for focusing on the
ease of getting business method patents, such as the famed Amazon.com
one-click ordering patent and the Priceline "name your own price" patent,
because the quality of all patents has been a problem for decades.

RIAA vs. EFF 
During a panel on whether music and movie companies should be able to employ
their own digital rights management techniques, Mitch Glazier, legislative
counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America, and Robin Gross,
staff attorney for the EFF, sat next to each other as they argued over what
kind of locks should be put on digital content.

Glazier said consumers will ultimately be responsible for determining how
music is delivered on the Internet, although he didn't address why his
organization has felt it necessary to sue customers of services such as
Napster to get them to comply with the RIAA's way of doing business.

"There's only one huge question nobody knows: what the consumer wants, what
will succeed," Glazier said. "At the end of the day, I think consumers will
be pretty happy with the number of competing services out there." Gross
seemed to roll her eyes at that comment.

Gross and others argued that laws such as the DMCA destroy the delicate
balance between content owners' rights to be paid and consumers' rights to
circulate the ideas and copy and repackage that content as long as its for
personal use. She and others pointed to other examples of new technology
that copyright holders fought - such as the VCR - that later became a boon
to the industries originally fighting it.

The Internet is helping to create a world that's moving from information
scarcity to abundance, she said, and by walling off information behind
stringent copyright law, "we risk creating an artificial scarcity of ideas
where none needs to exist."

Break anti-copy code, go to jail
While the DMCA and its anti-circumvention provisions caught most of the
flak, several critics of copyright expansion warned of the proposed Security
Systems Standards and Certification Act, which would ultimately require
copy-protection controls on all kinds of digital devices and software.

In a panel called "Technology vs. Technology: Should Code Breakers Go to
Jail?" Emery Simon, special counsel for the large tech-company dominated
Business Software Alliance, said he was puzzled how the opponents of the
DMCA can frame it as an "evil" law that's unconstitutional and limits free
speech. Instead of good vs. evil, he said, the DMCA should be seen as part
of an ongoing adjustment of how copyrighted works will be distributed on the
Internet. 

But even Simon and a lobbyist for the generally conservative US Chamber of
Commerce acknowledged between panel discussions that the SSSCA would create
problems of compliance for their memberships. About the only person at the
conference who had anything good to say about the SSSCA was the RIAA's
Glazier, who said his organization doesn't have an official position on it,
but it might an interesting approach.

The "go to jail" panel addressed issues close to the hearts of many in the
Open Source community, including the DMCA-inspired lawsuits against
webmasters who posted the DeCSS code that allows Linux users to decode and
play DVDS, and the arrest in the United States of visiting Russian
programmer Dmitry Sklyarov for creating a program that strips copy controls
from e-books. 

Mike Godwin, a technology author and policy fellow at the Center for
Democracy and Technology, said a certain amount of authorized copying is
assumed in the old balance of copyright law. He said the DMCA outlaws
circumvention of copy controls, whether or not the circumvention is intended
for illegal uses. 

Godwin said the DMCA could be used to for "absurd results," such as to
prosecute author Stephen King for breaking the Windows-proprietary e-book
format to read one of his own e-books on his Mac laptop.

"When we say that it doesn't matter whether you're an infringer or not; it
doesn't matter whether you're a bad actor or not; if you engage in this
technology development at all, or if you distribute this technology
development at all, you're going be criminally or civilly liable - that has
unmoored the copyright enforcement framework from its original policy
foundation," he said.

Julie Cohen, a Georgetown University law professor, suggested that the DMCA
is especially problematic for Open Source developers because although it
allows some reverse engineering and encryption research, it requires those
developers to be "sufficiently credentialed," but that doesn't protect the
15-year-old developing Open Source software in his bedroom from a DMCA
prosecution or lawsuit.

"Even if you think the Open Source movement is only an interesting
experiment, that's something to be troubled about," she said.

Generational struggle
The EFF's Barlow suggested the current copyright struggle is a generational
dispute, with the old guard industrialists, who own the entertainment
copyrights, against young people who see nothing wrong with trading
information. The recording industry doesn't understand that a certain amount
of free distribution of its product helps create a buzz for it, he said. The
Grateful Dead learned this by allowing fans to tape their concerts and
witnessing the resulting growth in popularity of their music.

"[The RIAA is] so trapped in the industrial paradigm, they can't see it," he
said. "On the other hand, there is an entire younger generation of people
who do get it, all those people who find nothing morally repugnant about
lifting software from one another. There is no ethical dilemma for a
21-year-old college kid when they go get some piece of information or
entertainment. "If you're going to criminalize that activity to the extent
it has now been criminalized... you're creating a system that naturally
breeds contempt for the law. I don't think it's a great idea to have laws
that young people feel are wrong and systematically abuse, because it
actually damages the validity of all the other laws that have a good reason
for being there." 

The Cato Institute is planning a book based on the conference. �

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Universal Inkjet Refill Kit $29.95
Refill any ink cartridge for less!
Includes black and color ink.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/ltH6zA/MkNDAA/ySSFAA/kgFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

------------------
http://all.net/ 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Gore.Planned.to.Bug.America]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Officials:.Web.Security.Work.Needed]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-12-31 20:59:59 PST