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Umm, either I am completely mistaken, or this is a bunch of FUD. I did google searches on each of these bills, and this is what I found:

HR 4239 To revise the banking and bankruptcy insolvency
laws with respect to the termination and netting of financial contracts

HR 4551 : To repeal the 1993 increase in tax on Social Security benefits and to develop and apply a Consumer Price Index that accurately reflects the cost-of-living for older Americans who receive Social Security benefits under title II of the Social Security Act.

HR 4608To designate the United States courthouse located at 220 West Depot Street in Greeneville, Tennessee, as the "James H. Quillen United States Courthouse".To designate the United States courthouse located at 220 West Depot Street in Greeneville, Tennessee, as the "James H. Quillen United States Courthouse".

HR 4277: the "Quality Health-care Coalition Act of 1998"

Like I say, I may be mistaken, maybe they don't use unique ID's for the bill numbers, but my skeptic alert went off when I read this post that contained zero links to any reputable site.

• Anyone from the UK here? You guys are saps for government intrusion. You don't even live in a democracy, but you think you do

I'll bite. I (the poster you're responding to) am a UK citizen. Now, let's see. We can be sued for contributory copyright infringement for bypassing DRM, but we didn't make it criminal offence. We don't already habitually hand over book purchase records to law enforcement. We don't have banned book lists. We have exactly the same fucked up first-past-the post electoral system as the US, but we have five parties that regularly win seats in parliament, and we don't return 90% of incumbents, nor did we choose to re-invent the idea of a near-absolute head of state appointed not by democratic process, but by a council of picked power brokers (if you know your history, the 2000 Presidential election was fascinatingly similar to the Anglo Saxon selection of a monarch by the witan, a council of aethelings and eoldermen appointed, influenced by and loyal to various factions in contention for the throne).

There never has been a country, state or city run as a democracy. Athens came close - if you were a free man of property (the premise that both US and UK systems were also based on) - but they got sick of governing themselves and executing advocates of free speech and more or less acquiesed in their own transformation to a dictatorship. The US system is heavily influenced by Athens, and even more so by Rome and it's wacky dagger-in-the-back machinations. Hurrah!

Given your .sig, I'll infer that your primary argument is that in the US, you're allowed to own guns. I'm using that wording advisedly. You are allowed to own guns. As long as you haven't been convicted of a crime, and you don't want a concealed weapon, or a fully automatic weapon, or a handgun with a clip in excess of ten rounds, or live in New York and aren't (de facto) employed in government or the legal system, or in any way want arms (not guns specifically) that could actually be used for the explicitely intended purpose, which is "A well regulated Militia". You've already lost the gun argument, they're just being taken away (from honest men and women) one shell at a time by men and women with heavily armed bodyguards, until only criminals will have guns.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that the UK is much better than the US. The UK is a nasty, mean little country, but in practical terms, i.e. in practicing what we preach - we are still a little better, although I freely concede that we get worse every day under the auspices of Mr President-Elect Tony Blair.

New Zealand knocks us both into a cocked hat, of course. But let's not go there, it's always embarrasing when you think you're on the high ground only to find someone dropping moral rocks on your swollen head.

State your precedent for implying copyright law adheres to what you have claimed in the above.

I suggest that you read the Library of Congress Works Made for Hire under the 1976 Copyright Act.

If you still don't believe me, then you suck and I am right because I said so.

Many content holders do this...for instance, you ever wondr why there are always TVs in bars, but they NEVER have the sound on?

Actually, it's OK to turn the TV's audio on in a small restaurant. A rider to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act amended 17 USC 110 to specifically permit public performance of a nondramatic musical work on a small screen in a restaurant or bar of less than 3750 sq ft or any other establishment of less than 2000 sq ft.

The DMCA is not the solution here.

The DMCA is not the "DMCA".

There are two laws both called the DMCA. One DMCA consists of 17 USC chapter 12, which prohibits cracking 8-bit XOR encryption used as an access control device. The other DMCA consists of a takedown procedure (17 USC 512) that ISPs can follow to maintain a safe harbor. There are also several riders on the DMCA that reverse MAI v. Peak, protect vessel hulls, and affect some operations of the U.S. Copyright Office. See this PDF for more information.

It is simply copyright infringment. Plain, old fashioned copyright infringment. Its illegal, period.

I agree 100%.

DMA contacts (such as webmaster@the-dma.org)
Your local congresspeople/parliment officers/etc (such as John_McCain@McCain.senate.gov )
Those fine doubleclick people(such as publicrelations@doubleclick.net)

Don't be greedy, share the love with those who want to help companies share their fine product information with us!

Several years ago, I made a typo in my email address when I was updating the contact info for a domain name.

Good thing this law hadn't passed yet, or you might be in jail!

Well, opinions on that can differ

I vow that if all other stores have discount cards which track your purchases, I will personally open a store which doesn't. So for my lifetime at least, those opinions are wrong.

As a person who reads the fine print on all the "Terms and Conditions" junk sent to me by organizations with which I do business, I really can't agree.

Credit card companies have an oligopoly with much fewer members than "stores".

I think we are about 5 years from having every transaction tracked.

Guess I'll be dead in 5 years. Killed by the government so that they can track people?

And cash won't be an out (in the USofA), since the "USA Patriot Act" has greatly ratcheted down the threshhold for tracking and reporting cash transactions to the government.

What's it down to now? I thought it was still at $10,000.

And this is without the national ID card which I suspect is coming fairly soon.

We already have this national ID card. It's called the license. I once had a Wisconsin sherriff track me down (with help from the FBI) from my domain name, which listed an old address, from which I did not have mail forwarding, to my NJ driver's license, linked that to my NY drivers license, and got my unlisted phone number in NY. All this so he could ask me the name of someone who had a website on my system, and he suspected was sending threatening letters through the USPS.

As an aside, check out this proposal. Congress wants to make it a crime with a 5 year sentence for lying to your registrar when you register your domain name.

I want a brand new stage for a bill going to Congress.

Here's the current first stage:

Any Member, the Resident Commissioner from Puerto Rico, or the Delegates in the House of Representatives may introduce a bill at any time while the House is in session by simply placing it in the "hopper," a wooden box provided for that purpose located on the side of the rostrum in the House Chamber. Permission is not required to introduce the measure.

(from) HOW OUR LAWS ARE MADE

I want the bill to go before the United States general population before it enters the bill process. All bills to be considered by Congress get posted on a government web site and sit there for a week before they proceed through Congress. Right now there's no requirement for them to tell us a single thing about the bill before it's passed and published. I want to see it in mint form, and I want it to sit there for a week so we can get some input in on the damn thing.

With U.S. bills, thomas.loc.gov is your friend.

Type 'HR 4645' into the search box. I'd give a direct link, but it seems that the links are dynamically generated.

Wrong. Fair use is not protected in any laws. It originated as a judicial precedent in rulings on copyright. That precedent was used to justify the Audio Home Recording Act (which legalized mix tapes, basically), but there is still no one law that protects (or even defines) fair use.

`(c) OTHER RIGHTS, ETC., NOT AFFECTED- (1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.

(See full text of DMCA here.)
2600 argued from this point in their defense, as I recall.

I did a brief google search and I did not find any evidence that the movie ratings are reinforced by laws. Can anyone show me that the policy of not letting minors into R rated movies is anything but a self inforced policy? I certainly can't and would rally like some clarification on this.

Additionally, since my subission of this was rejected, let me say that the ramifications of this videogames aren't free speech has already spread to the national level.

Looks like everybody on the thread is using the proper definition of indentured except you.

With H1B the agreement is with the government, not with the employer. The employer is more like a homeroom monitor.

There is no criminal or civil penalty for breaking this contract, other than returning to your nation of origin.

However, the real issue is whether this is involuntary servitude. Whomever mentioned Ammendment XIII as outlawing indenture is incorrect. Involuntary servitude is what is prohibited by the US Constitution.

So, are you trying to tell us all that these workers were captured by rival tribes, sold to American slave traders and brought to the USA to work as slaves or are you saying there is some moral component to this that you keep skipping over? Pleas wait until you are breathing normally before answering.

Nete, the DMCA Slashdot incident, Microsoft Asks Slashdot To Remove Readers' Posts, was exactly one of the DMCA incidents in mind as a factor when I made my Slashdot article code proposal in order to get some support for publishing anti-censorware code. Too bad nothing came of it (I don't say Slashdot had to help me out, I'm just pointing out the connections). But the DMCA chilling effect on me for anticensorware work is very real, and well-ground in DMCA court cases. `

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

"can I call you pigfucker? Thanks."

Certainly. Well, as long as I can call you a grotesquely twisted & deformed mockery of a deranged aberattion of one of the less successful offshoots of the the cro-magnon race, with apologies to the other members of the aforementioned race, since you really don't do them justice. And you might want to consider culling your insults from something with a tad more sophistication than South Park.

Of course, that might require you to read. I gather that reading is not your strong point, since your opinion of the DMCA seems to be fed by Slashdot trolls more than reality.

"The DMCA is *related* to copyright... It is not copyright by itself."

No. The bill (summary) was passed into law. You will notice that it amends U.S. Code Title 17, which is listed as "Copyrights". So you aren't strictly wrong when you say it's "related" to copyright law; it's just as related as any other copyright law.

Now, if you'd like to continue your incoherent obstinante raving diatribes - which do nothing to weaken the initial perception of a deranged monomanical fanatic come unhinged in a frenzy of delerious bavardage, unrelated notions flowing arbitrarily from the shattered remnants of his subconcious mind - feel free. But try to be a little less senseless. Basing your statements on facts would probably be a good place to start, you witless fucking numbskull.

Instead of wasting time with lawyers, why don't they just come up with a complicated procedure for making links like the government does over at thomas.loc.gov? They could even leave out the instruction manual, making it technically difficult to the point where most people simply wouldn't bother and would instead link to a more user-friendly site...

I thought even the revised version had been killed in comittee as reported here - Copyright [CBDTPA] Bill Universally Rejected [slashdot.org]

The CBDTPA is NOT (legally) dead. It is still alive in congress -- we still need to keep our eyes open. The title of the news article that prompted the /. discussion was misleading: "Copyright bill universally rejected"

see lib. of congress bill status

Precisely.
And that's not the half of it.
There are a whole lot of things
which they thought no sane man would
allow happen, and so didn't feel the need
to write in.

Like "use common sense" :)

For instance, go to Thomas
and read the federalist papers.

That's what they were thinking.
They were, for instance, not in favor
of the idea of a PARTY SYSTEM. INCOME TAXES.

Both of which we've got now.
The govt is dead. All hail the govt.

This may be a reality sooner than you think. The FCC (on direction from Congress) has mandated that the Cable Industry have an Open Cable Standard (suprisingly enough called OpenCable) that would allow you to purchase a cable box at BestBuy and bring it home (Amended Telecom Act of 1934, Section 624a, c.2.c). Your local cable provider would provide a POD (PCMCIA card) that would decode the signal and provide it back to the box to show on your TV.

The whole purpose of this is when you move to a different cable provider, you can use the same box and just get a different POD to decode the signal

According to the FCC, the Cable Industry had to have a working example by 2001, and they did (well, close enough to count). Hopefully we'll start seeing this make it to the consumer before the mandated 2005 date...

I'm not sure how many of you have actually read the DMCA and know exactly what it does and doesn't allow. It seems a lot of people are confused and misunderstand what the DMCA does allow for projects like "The BNETD Project". The DMCA allows you to circumvent the copy protection of software and hardware in order to develop an inter-operable device or program. Also the DMCA specifically says that leaving out the copy protection of a device for inter-operability is *NOT* a violation of the DMCA. Nor is defeating/removing the copy protection in order to figure out how to make something inter-operable. Also note that the key sections of the DMCA require that either the primary purpose of the device be illegal and/or that it defeats the copy protection for profit. Neither of these statements are true of "The BNETD Project". Please note the 2 quotes below or read the entire law yourself at:

http://www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/circ92.html#c hapter12

DMCA Section 1201-bc3
"Nothing in this section shall require that the design of, or design and selection of parts and components for, a consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing product provide for a response to any particular technological measure, so long as such part or component, or the product in which such part or component is integrated, does not otherwise fall within the prohibitions of subsection (a)(2) or (b)(1)."

DMCA Section 1201-f
" Reverse Engineering.-(1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title."

Or how about Howard Coble (R-NC)...from what I can tell, he's the one who introduced the DMCA

Protocols to mention besides OpenLDAP and OAI are Whois++ and Z39.50. OAI actually is transported over HTTP. You could do the same with EAD or others.

Projects which implemented Z39.50 for the purposes of interoperability are ONE and ONE-2, EUROPAGATE, Desire and Desire II, DECOMATE and DECOMATE II, and Renardus just to touch the surface. Don't forget OHIOLINK...

Another other older, but interesting, metadata activity have been SGML MARC, and the corresponding XML MARC.

The BYTE article was exciting to see again and could have benefited further from pointing out the relative ease of use of Dublic Core. OAI uses unqualified Dublic Core, SAFARI uses qualified Dublin Core to create an up to date index over academic research in Sweden. Shoot, since it already uses some META tags, you could even tweak htdig to use Dublic Core on your own site for those high precision searches.

With the interest in structured data (XML?) maybe well see some sites serving up not just HTML with Dublic Core, but maybe even Docbook or even TEI / TEI Lite. There are great tools for converting from Docbook to HTML, PDF, RTF, etc. and AbiWord and Kword already have partial support for docbook. If there were more, then we could see some real changes on searching the web. Coding for SGML is more difficult, so the obvious choice would be to start from Docbook XML.

Protocols to mention besides OpenLDAP and OAI are Whois++ and Z39.50. OAI actually is transported over HTTP. You could do the same with EAD or others.

Projects which implemented Z39.50 for the purposes of interoperability are ONE and ONE-2, EUROPAGATE, Desire and Desire II, DECOMATE and DECOMATE II, and Renardus just to touch the surface. Don't forget OHIOLINK...

Another other older, but interesting, metadata activity have been SGML MARC, and the corresponding XML MARC.

The BYTE article was exciting to see again and could have benefited further from pointing out the relative ease of use of Dublic Core. OAI uses unqualified Dublic Core, SAFARI uses qualified Dublin Core to create an up to date index over academic research in Sweden. Shoot, since it already uses some META tags, you could even tweak htdig to use Dublic Core on your own site for those high precision searches.

With the interest in structured data (XML?) maybe well see some sites serving up not just HTML with Dublic Core, but maybe even Docbook or even TEI / TEI Lite. There are great tools for converting from Docbook to HTML, PDF, RTF, etc. and AbiWord and Kword already have partial support for docbook. If there were more, then we could see some real changes on searching the web. Coding for SGML is more difficult, so the obvious choice would be to start from Docbook XML.

Tell that to Disney. Or do you mean that they can only buy them?

Here is an older version of a similar bill which was sponsored by Hollings in 2000.

Well, IANAL, but I play one on TV, so I decided to chase down some links, and it seems . . . ambiguous.
According to Title 17 Chapter 1, section 105,

Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

But then it links to some footnotes that seem to suggest that while the US Government can own copyrights, the copyrighted material must be freely distributed to the public. So, that would still be something like open source.

I appreciate the notion that simply because a work is derivative --in this case of federal information, people's identities-- that quality of being derivative doesn't mean the work cannot still qualify for copyright protection itself. An analogy could be made to a song made up of samples. However as the samples are goverment information, I think the Freedom of Information Act would make it very difficult to keep the project as closed source.

The author of the CNN article must not have read the bill yet.

It also includes a requirement that the National Institute for Standards & Technology (NIST) develop a "mark" that would be somehow affixed to the subject line of all sexually explicit advertising e-mail. Failure to use this mark would result in a prison term -- a longer one if the recipient of the e-mail was a minor.

No one seems to have the bill up online yet. Are they all out at CFP? Eventually the text of the bill should be available on Thomas. The bill number will be S. 2137, I'm told.

As always always always, my opinions are my own.

Liza

and I hate to ask ... but who is to enforce these laws?

Currently, I would say that the **AA's of the world are trying to play both lawmaker (DMCA) and police (RIAA extortion)

If you just want to import citations, the Z39.50 search and retrieval protocol is the way to import from yor library catalog and many online databases. Indexdata has number of multiplatform tools that you can use, such as YAZ (a z39.50 client) and PHPYAZ. Three commercial packages import from Z39.50 sources nicely (Bookwhere, Procite and Endnote) both Procite and Endnot work well at managing your footnotes during workprocessing, taking care of numbering and layout (e.g. APA or Chicago Manual of Style, etc.).

If you want something under GPL and more oriented to managing web sites and other Internet resources, then you may want to try hypatia. You'll have to ask special for it, but it's available. Here are the parts I've seen so far:

• Web-based interface, both end users and maintainers.
• Fully multi-lingual, including both interface and content. (It is very easy to add another language to the interfaces. Right now English and Spanish are complete, Norwegian and Finnish are being translated.) Support for Unicode (Which means you're free to add interfaces in or ).
• Useable on many different platforms, including Linux, Unix, and Windows.
• Individual installations can exchange records, allowing federated content and service providers to work together seamlessly. (Haven't tried it yet.)
• Compatible with relevant standards, including MARC, Dublin Core, and the Networked Reference standard currently under development by NISO.
• Special features for digital collections, such as automatic URL checking.
• Authority control over names (e.g. People and Organizations).
• Uses perl/MySQL/javascript

The Senate passed it 99-0.

The House held a voice vote, near as I can tell. My search ("digital millennium copyright" in the Word/Phrase search field) returned:

1. H.R.2281 : To amend title 17, United States Code, to implement the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty and Performances and Phonograms Treaty.
Sponsor: Rep Coble, Howard- Latest Major Action: 10/28/1998 Became Public Law No: 105-304.
Committees: House Judiciary; House Energy and Commerce; House Ways and Means

The Senate passed it 99-0.

The House held a voice vote, near as I can tell. My search ("digital millennium copyright" in the Word/Phrase search field) returned:

1. H.R.2281 : To amend title 17, United States Code, to implement the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty and Performances and Phonograms Treaty.
Sponsor: Rep Coble, Howard- Latest Major Action: 10/28/1998 Became Public Law No: 105-304.
Committees: House Judiciary; House Energy and Commerce; House Ways and Means

Here ya go...

105th Congress, H.R. 2281

Click on "Bill Summary & Status File"... then "All Bill Summary & Status Info"

8/4/1998 2:26pm:
On motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill, as amended Agreed to by voice vote.

Actually, a voice vote is the "normal method". The voices are cast, the chair takes an opinion (Of course, this opinion need not be based on the voices in the house he hears, though usually the chairperson will.) If there is any objection, an electronic vote is taken (roll call vote).

Watch C-SPAN. It can be interesting. For about 5 minutes. ;-)

I'm no expert on the House/Senate rules, but I believe you still get a record by voice vote. At least one is listed for the senate on S.2037 (105th Congress) .

In the House, however (HR.2281), it appears that it was put up for unanimous consent, and there is no record, but basically that means that you can assume that everyone voted for it.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:S.2048. IS:

The one given above is a temporary search link. This one will always work.

The complete text of the bill: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/C?c107:./temp/ ~c107KG2pN3

Sure. From a letter by Thomas Jefferson:

Art. 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature & their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding ... years but for no longer term & no other purpose.

(There are more references in his letters and writings but I don't have it all at my fingertips.) A further point: since property rights were so essential to the founders, why did they have to have a separate clause for Copyright and Patent, if it were just another case of property? More evidence that the founders didn't consider Copyright and Patent to be property is the matter of the time limitation. Now, I'm assuming that you are familiar with the history of Western law concerning property. Let me ask you: what kind of property can only be owned for a limited period of time (the founders used a period of 14 years) before becoming public property? Would our founders have decided that, after 14 years, all farms would be taken from their owners and made public property? I think not. And this is the primary practical difference between property and monopoly rights: property is exclusively yours (and your heirs') FOREVER, a monopoly (in this case, an artificial one) is only yours for a short time. Why do you think that we have all these ridiculous extensions of Copyright term? It's because people have started to consider Copyright to be a property right (and property belongs to you FOREVER).

On a less practical and more logical note (but a much more meaningful one also) ideas cannot be owned. It simply doesn't make sense because the whole concept of ownership is wrapped up in the scarcity of resources. If someone takes my car, I'm deprived of its usage. If someone uses my idea, I'm NOT deprived of its usage--we can BOTH use the idea! And if that person tells someone else, they can use it too! It's great! (BTW, Jefferson also spoke about this somewhere--sorry can't track down the reference right now.)

In short, a good summary of Copyright and Patent would be: we're going to let you corner your market for a FEW (!) years but then you have to get the hell out of the way and give other people a chance.

• Tauzin-Dingell (H.R. 1542): If you don't like your providers new TOS, good luck finding a new one.
  
• The FCC classifies cable internet service as information service, rather than a telecommunications service. The upshot is no regulation of service, no protection from abusive monopolies.
  
  Perhaps you were thinking of laws that act in the public interest? Well, you get what you vote for, I guess.
  
  

That's not so hard to believe, is it?

The library of congress obtained their 100 millionth item back in 1992, according to their website.

A number of correspondents have said 'Why should libraries provide access to pr0n over the Internet when they don't stock it on their shelves?' This is an interesting question. The answer is simple -- large libraries do stock pr0n on their shelves.

Check out the entries for Playboy at the LOC or Playboy at the Cambridge U library. It would appear that the LOC has a better collection going back to the 50s, while Cambridge only goes back to 89 (and then not all issues).

The only difference between keeping back issues of Playboy on the shelf and permitting access to www.playboy.com is that you probably need to ask to find the paper copy, but on the upside, you can study the articles in a corner of the stacks somewhere!

"The US Founding Fathers knew the value of a free people freely communicating. They established the post office to ensure that people could easily communicate over great distances, without regard to their economic status or resources.

Interesting way of looking at things, seeing as how we ignore the large bulk of what the founding fathers believed in. "

I am with you about the US system diverging greatly from the path that the Founding Fathers cut for us.

However, Article 1 Section 8 does make the creation of lines of communication an enumerated power with the "post offices and postal roads" clause.

I am against the government being the ISP too. But I can see a good arguement for government laying in the fiber and allowing competing ISPs to use it.

In the case of the article, I have to side with the cable companies, just as I was on the side of FedEx when the USPS went after them for delivering first class mail in packages they had no idea contained first class mail. That case was finally resolved when the head of the USPS stopped his inspectors from interfearing with the competition. The rare occurance of a responsive "civil servant."

If this idea were modified just a bit, e.g., the government lays the fiber and the ISPs pay reasonable rates for it's use (also allowing individuals anyplace on the network the same rate) then I could go along with it. Just like places that pay for roads through fuel taxes, people that do not use fuel do not pay taxes to maintain *most* roads.

rant
The downside (like here in No. VA), the fuel taxes are used to subsidize ALL forms of transportation infrastructure, including those busses and trains that some of us rarely use.
/ran

Sounds good, but other posters keep using the highway analogy, which is lacking. The "lines of communication analogy" is more to the point.

Government does, under the US Constitution, have the power "To establish post offices and post roads" (Article 1 Section 8) and it IS an enumerated power.
Since Post Roads were the typical lines of communication of the day, this new internet scheme woulld fall into that category (communications) that government DOES have the power to mess with.

(Note, the "interstate highway system" is really the National Defense Interstate Highway System, covered under the common defense powers if the federal government)

That being said, I would still rather see several firms given equal access to the same easements, so we don't have to wait for city hall to replace the single loop of copper they decide is "what the community needs to take us to the 22nd century.

Posted by Michael Fraase, 3/23/02 at 9:54:46 PM.

When elephants dance, its best to get out of the way. Thats exactly whats happening now as the entertainment industrythe recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainlyattempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isnt it?

Target number 1 is the average customer: anyone who purchases software, an audio CD, an electronic book, or a movie on DVD. The entertainment industry sees customers as pirates, plain and simple. In their collective minds eye, we all have a wooden leg, eye patch, and a filthy talking parrot on our shoulder. While the Constitution grants customers certain rights with regard to copyrighted material, the entertainment industry very much wants to separate us from those rights.

Target number 2 in the sights of the entertainment industry are technology behemoths like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Apple. These companies, in the perverse worldview of the entertainment industry, make the toolscomputers mostlythat allow customers to practice their piracy.

Let me point out that I am a copyright owner, as is everyone else who has ever created a work in tangible form. Thats all authors, for short. Authors are almost never members of the entertainment industry club. The entertainment industry hates authors almost as much as they hate customers. Sometimes, especially when authors get uppity, the entertainment industry hates authors much more than customers. Until recently, authors have always been seen to be at least a marginal threat while customers were seen as merely necessary annoyances.

To complicate matters by at least an order of magnitude, the consumer electronics manufacturersthe companies that make stereos, VCRs, and DVD playershave aligned with the entertainment industry. At least some of them, and at least to some extent.

Unfortunately for usboth authors and customerswere likely to get squished as these elephants dance. The intent of the entertainment industry, believe it or not, is to outlaw personal computers. As security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier explains it to Mike Godwin: If you think about it, the entertainment industry does not want people to have computers; theyre too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc.

Copy-protected CDs

The recording industry is selling shiny plastic discs that contain music that cant be copied to or even played on some customers equipment. Philips, the owner of the CD format says these discs cannot be called CDs because they do not meet the standard of what a CD is. Sony, one of those weird hybrid companies that, as a member in good standing of both the technology and entertainment industries, finds itself on both sides of this issue says it cant guarantee the audio quality of these discs. The technology used to protect these discs sometimes prevents the discs from playing on computer CD-ROM drives, DVD players, and other devices specifically designed to play standard audio CDs.

Sales of recorded music are down 10% in the United States over the last year. The recording industry blames this downturn not on the economic recession, not on the crappy music that theyve released in the past few years, but on Internet piracy.

And its only going to get worse. Hilary B. Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) told Congress on 28 February 2001 that the practice of copy-protecting audio CDs would expand in the United States. If technology can be used to pirate copyrighted content, Rosen wrote in her response to a Congressional query, shouldnt technology likewise be used to protect copyrighted content? Surely, no one can expect copyright owners to ignore what is happening in the marketplace and fail to protect their creative works because some people engage in copying just for their personal use. Her pal, Michael Eisner, head of Disney, said he was tired of being finessed by the technology industry, whatever that means.

Unfortunately for Eisner, Rosen, Disney, and the RIAA, personal useand more importantly the rights associated with that use of copyrighted materialis exactly why copying of copyrighted material is not just allowed, but mandated by the Constitution. That some individuals illegally sell copied CDs or distribute copies of the music on the Internet is immaterial. In fact, fairly casual observation indicates that if customers are treated like criminals they will indeed begin to behave like criminals.

It has become common practice for music-loving computer owners to legally transfer audio CDs they purchase to .mp3 format files on their computers. The copy protection technology employed by the recording industry prevents such transfers by adding distortions to the music of the recordings. The industry insists that these distortions are inaudible when the disc is played on a standard CD player but result in pops when the music is transferred to a computer. In any case, its usually impossible to tell whether or not a disc includes the copy protection technology; in general, the copy-protected discs are not labeled.

Ironically, or probably not, .mp3 player manufacturers could easily defeat the copy protection technology, but they fear doing so would risk prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which prohibits the bypassing of copy protection systems. In 1999, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that .mp3 players did not violate copyright law because customers have the right to space shift music they have purchased.

Moral rights

Interestingly, the act of using the copy protection technology is much more prevalent in Europe. Most European countries, unlike the United States, recognize an artists moral rights in the work they create.

Moral rights are a package of intellectual property rights granted to the original creator of a work, and include:

• The right of integrity;
• The right of attribution;
• The right of disclosure;
• The right to withdraw or retract; and
• The right to reply to criticism.

These moral rights are separate from the economic copyright that these days generally transfers from an author to a publisher and they can survive the author. The idea originated with the French, who believe that any creative work, by definition, includes the personality and character of the author. Where copyright is a property right that can be transferred, moral rights are part of the authors personality and character and non-transferable.

The first two moral rightsthe right of integrity and the right of attributionare especially important because they are codified as international law in the Berne Convention. The United States claims its intellectual property law complies with the Berne Convention, but this is just two instances where it doesnt.

The most important of these rights is the first, the right of integrity. Basically it prohibits an authors work from being distorted in any way that would harm the authors reputation and dates to the 1957 French law of droit au respect de l'oeuvre. Its a safe bet that a cross-reference over which the author had no control would be seen as a distortion of the work.

Seemingly, in Europe at least, an artist could make an argument against the production of a copy-protected version of her work on the sole basis of moral rights. Especially in the case of an audio CD to which distortion is intentionally added by the publisher.

In the United States, Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) appears to be taking the point position in questioning the behavior of the entertainment industry. He believes that instead of using copyright to obtain fair compensation for the works theyve licensed, the copyright owner industryincluding the recording industryis attempting to exercise complete dominance and total control of the copyrighted work.

And just how much money does an artist receive in the form of royalties? Use Moses Avalons royalty calculator to figure it out.

A DMCA rewrite?

Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) plans to introduce legislation that would regulateand maybe outright bancopy-protected compact discs. Boucher reportedly has concerns about customers buying copy-protected discs without knowing it and the compatibility problems inherent with the copy protection mechanism. In an interview with Wired News, Boucher said, The big problem initially is that consumers have no information that is complete and reliable about the disabilities which attend copy-protected CDs. These CDs will not play in DVD players, not play on personal computers (and) not even play on all CD players.

Boucher isnt talking about what kind of legislation he might introduce to accomplish his goal of protecting audio CD customers, and the possibilities are intriguing. At the simplest level, legislation may require copy-protected CDs to carry a warning label. At a more interesting level, Boucher may try to rewrite the DMCA. In fact, Boucher announced that he would introduce such legislation last July and reiterated his commitment to that approach in early March of this year.

Internet radio

Under the U.S. Copyright Offices interpretation of the DMCA, Internet radio may be a thing of the past. KFJC, KPIG, and RadioParadise may all be goners. Why is this tragic? Because any of these stations are orders of magnitude better than the sorry excuse for radio available on the traditional dial.

Internet radio is routing around an obsolete and unaccountable industrys safely padded environs and making a difference. Corporate radio sounds exactly the same from coast to coast because it is exactly the same. Sit and watch that website for a few minutes; if it doesnt nauseate you, itll damn sure hypnotize you.

Adding to the arsenal of tools deployed by big media is the Copyright Arbitration and Royalty Panel (CARP). CARP met secretly for the past several months and issued the CARP Report in late February. The keystone of this report is steep licensing fees for webcast music. Lets be clear: compulsory licensing is a good idea, consistent with the intent of copyright law. Usury licensing fees for small webcasters is not.

KPIG responded almost immediately with a plea to save the Pig from the digital slaughterhouse:

Independent webcasters such as KPIG are facing a grave threat to our existence. It may be an evil conspiracy on the part of the big record companies and corporate webcasters, ormore likelyits just a dumb mistake. In either case, KPIG could soon be liable for huge music usage fees ($5,000 - $10,000 per month) that would make it impossible for us to stay online. For background on the issue, see The Death of Web Radio? below and the SaveInternetRadio.org website.

Doc Searls, in his article Bizarre vs. Bazaar, eloquently sums up the combination of DMCA and CARP as the destruction of the Net as a commons and its replacement with a plumbing system for the distribution of content (a word hardly used in a shipping context before Big Media got all drooly over The Promise of The Net).

A brief history of copyright

Copyright, until this recent entertainment industry power-grab, has always been a delicatemaybe even precariousbalance between the rights of the author to benefit from his or her work for a short period of time and the rights of the rest of us to innovate and benefit from those works when they fall into the public domain.

The Constitution granted Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Originally, the Copyright Act of 1790 established the limited times of copyright protection of 14 years with an option for the author to renew the copyright for an additional 14 years if he or she were still alive. That copyright term was good enough for the first 100 years of intellectual property in the United States. During the next 100 years, Congress extended the copyright term 11 times.

Certain uses of a protected work that would ordinarily be seen as infringing are specifically allowed for education, criticism, etc. These uses are allowed under the fair use provision. The core concept of fair use is that, in general, any use that does not exploit the commercial value of the original is permissible.

The fair use statute recognizes four criteria by which a use can be determined to be fair or unfair:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted wok as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

William S. Strong, in The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide , provides an interpretation for working writers:

As a general rule a critic or reporter should not quote at any one point more than two or three paragraphs of a book or journal article, a stanza of a poem, or a solitary chart or graph from a technical treatise.

The Net allows ordinary citizens to exercise their fair use rights in ways never imagined by the entertainment industry. Subsequently, the reaction is to pressure innovation by extending the copyright term for any given work. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that will likely determine the legitimacy of the most recent copyright term extension, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This law extends the copyright term to the life of the author plus 70 years. In the case of works made for hire in which a corporation owns the copyright, the copyright term is now 95 years.

While one side of the entertainment industry was pushing, an activity that eventually became the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the other side was pulling. That activity eventually resulted in the DMCA. Designed specifically to control the uses that can be made of published works, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copyright-protection technology. The result: the entertainment industry controls not only what you see and hear but the methods and devices with which you see and hear it. Even if the copy-protection is circumvented to enable the fair use of a published work, it is prohibited and deemed to be a criminal act.

Digital TV

According to Mike Godwin, digital television is the tipping point in the war between the entertainment and technology industries. Never mind that every time the entertainment industry shoots itself in the foot, the technology industry comes to its rescue. Remember in the 1970s when the movie industry was in a deep funk and that vampire Jack Valenti said that VCRs would kill it for good? As it turns out, the VCR revived the film industry. The film industry was failing not because of customer VCR usage but because they were putting out epically craptacular films. Just like the recording industry todaywhen in doubt blame those dang customers.

Anyway, Godwin says digital television is the flashpoint because its quality (technical, not artistic) is way too good and unlike DVDs, its unencrypted and has to stay unencrypted to be useful. Oh, and the pesky FCC regulations say that broadcast television signals must be sent unencrypted.

The purveyors of digital television think they have the answer: digital watermarks. They think thats the answer for the online distribution of music, and any other digital content as well. Unfortunately for them, in order for a watermark to be used to restrict copying of digital content, consumer devices used to play the content will have to have technology included thats capable of receiving those watermarks. That would require the cooperation of the technology industry, and that cooperation has not been forthcoming.

Godwin cites the theory of Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, holding that any sort of tagging system that is undetectable by the user will likely be easy to remove.

Digital rights management

Perhaps the weirdest part of all of this is that the technology industry is just as enamored of protecting intellectual property. Theyre just going about it in a minimally different way. Digital rights management (DRM) is the battle cry of the techheads. And where they differ from their entertainment industry brethren is the question of government mandates. The technology industry wants to lock up published content just as badly as the entertainment industry; they just dont want the government (or anyone else) telling them that they have to. Remember that the entertainment and technology industries both lobbied heavily in favor of the DMCA.

And then there are the schizoids, the companieslike AOL Time Warner and Sonythat are so large that they find themselves on both sides of the fence depending which way the wind blows.

SSSCA > CBDTPA

The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), kept on a leash but regularly trotted out by Senator Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, can best be thought of as a sort of appendix to the DCMA. It is clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates.

According to the draft language of the bill, it would be illegal to create or distribute any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies approved by the Commerce Department. Even though MIT professor and RSA Data Security co-founder Ron Rivest has referred to the proposed legislation as the Digital Rectal Thermometer Security Act its really just mandatory corporate welfare for media conglomerates subsidized by the actual creators and consumers of intellectual property.

Felony penalties for distributing copyrighted material without the certified security technologies fully enabled or using a computer that circumvents those technologies are up to five years in prison and fines up to US$500,000.

Even worse, the proposed legislation calls for manufacturers of digital devices and the media conglomerates to collaboratively develop a copy protection system. If, after two years, they cant come up with a mechanism both industries can live with, the federal government will specify a standard. Hollings bill fails to include the actual creators or users of content in any of the machinations.

Should we be surprised that four of Hollings top campaign donors are media conglomerates?

Predictably, the politicians split along party lines over the SSSCA. Or, more accurately, the split is along the lines of entertainment industry campaign contributions. Democrats, who received US$24.2 million in contributions from the entertainment industry tend to support the idea of legislating the protection of copyrighted material in digital form. Republicans, who received a relatively paltry US$13.3 million in entertainment industry contributions usually oppose the SSSCA, claiming it is too interventionist.

In mid-March 2002, the other shoe dropped. Senator Hollings, better known as the Senator from Disney, transformed the SSSCA into the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) and ceased his tip-toeing around. The CBDTPA is real legislation, and enjoys the support of five other co-authors: Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisiana), Bill Nelson (D-Florida) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California). Just think, one more author and they could have been the seven dwarves. The CBDTPA would require all digital deviceseverything from fax machines to MP3 players and computers (as well as the software that runs on them)to be equipped with embedded copy protection schemes, approved by the federal government.

Whats most disturbing about this is relatively paltry sum it took to buy this legislation. During the 2002 election cycle, only two of the dirty half-dozen were in the top 20 recipients of soft money from the entertainment industry. So far in the 2002 election cycle, Hollings has received only US$19,000 and Stevens has taken only US$39,621. To get the real story, we have to look back several election cycles:

Senator

2002

2000

1998

1996

Total

Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina)

$19,000

$32,750

$215,284

$43,300

$310,334

Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)

$39,621

$69,900

$109,521

Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii)

$49,852

$49,852

John Breaux (D-Louisiana)

$120,920

$120,920

Bill Nelson (D-Florida)

$47,550

N/A

N/A

$47,550

Dianne Feinstein (D-California)

$211,638

$211,638

$849,815

Theres no question why Fritz Hollings carried the water for this puppy, is there? But check those senatorial links in the table carefully because they tell the even bigger story of who the top contributing industries were for each politician. In every case, the entertainment industry scored big in the top 20 contributors for every Senator. And remember the 2002 campaign cycle isnt over yet. Not hardly.

So, how much does it cost to get your bill through the Senate? Looks to me like itll come in right around US$1 million.

Enter DigitalConsumer.org

The technology industry was quick to respond to the CBDTPA threat by launching DigitalConsumer.org and its attendant Consumer Technology Bill of Rights. Launched by two of the co-founders of Excite, DigitalConsumer.org is basically trying to protect the fair use rights of customers in digital media. The groups principles, outlined in the Bill of Rights are deceptively simple:

1. Users have the right to time-shift content that they have legally acquired.
2. Users have the right to space-shift content that they have legally acquired.
3. Users have the right to make backup copies of their content.
4. Users have the right to use legally acquired content on the platform of their choice.
5. Users have the right to translate legally acquired content into comparable formats.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.

The depth and breadth of support this lobbying group will receive remains to be seen. Some of the precepts are in direct conflict with the interests of some of the largest technology industry members. Microsoft, for example, almost certainly wants to be the digital rights management company of record and is none too keen on, say, items 2, 3, 4, and 5.

A solution

The solution is actually quite simple and requires only three steps:

1. Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
2. Recognize moral rights in the works authors create, like every other civilized country on the planet. Make it immediate and retroactive to all existing works.
3. Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; theyre consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I dont know about you, but Im not much pleased any more.

The basis of the problem is found in a single court ruling: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In this 1886 dispute, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a private corporation was a natural person under the Constitution and enjoyed the same protections as a citizen under the Bill of Rights. Corporations from that point forward were granted all of the rights and freedoms of a private citizen, yet none of the responsibilities. We made a mistake; hey, shit happens. Its not too late to fix it.

Posted by Michael Fraase, 3/23/02 at 9:54:46 PM.

When elephants dance, its best to get out of the way. Thats exactly whats happening now as the entertainment industrythe recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainlyattempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isnt it?

Target number 1 is the average customer: anyone who purchases software, an audio CD, an electronic book, or a movie on DVD. The entertainment industry sees customers as pirates, plain and simple. In their collective minds eye, we all have a wooden leg, eye patch, and a filthy talking parrot on our shoulder. While the Constitution grants customers certain rights with regard to copyrighted material, the entertainment industry very much wants to separate us from those rights.

Target number 2 in the sights of the entertainment industry are technology behemoths like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Apple. These companies, in the perverse worldview of the entertainment industry, make the toolscomputers mostlythat allow customers to practice their piracy.

Let me point out that I am a copyright owner, as is everyone else who has ever created a work in tangible form. Thats all authors, for short. Authors are almost never members of the entertainment industry club. The entertainment industry hates authors almost as much as they hate customers. Sometimes, especially when authors get uppity, the entertainment industry hates authors much more than customers. Until recently, authors have always been seen to be at least a marginal threat while customers were seen as merely necessary annoyances.

To complicate matters by at least an order of magnitude, the consumer electronics manufacturersthe companies that make stereos, VCRs, and DVD playershave aligned with the entertainment industry. At least some of them, and at least to some extent.

Unfortunately for usboth authors and customerswere likely to get squished as these elephants dance. The intent of the entertainment industry, believe it or not, is to outlaw personal computers. As security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier explains it to Mike Godwin: If you think about it, the entertainment industry does not want people to have computers; theyre too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc.

Copy-protected CDs

The recording industry is selling shiny plastic discs that contain music that cant be copied to or even played on some customers equipment. Philips, the owner of the CD format says these discs cannot be called CDs because they do not meet the standard of what a CD is. Sony, one of those weird hybrid companies that, as a member in good standing of both the technology and entertainment industries, finds itself on both sides of this issue says it cant guarantee the audio quality of these discs. The technology used to protect these discs sometimes prevents the discs from playing on computer CD-ROM drives, DVD players, and other devices specifically designed to play standard audio CDs.

Sales of recorded music are down 10% in the United States over the last year. The recording industry blames this downturn not on the economic recession, not on the crappy music that theyve released in the past few years, but on Internet piracy.

And its only going to get worse. Hilary B. Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) told Congress on 28 February 2001 that the practice of copy-protecting audio CDs would expand in the United States. If technology can be used to pirate copyrighted content, Rosen wrote in her response to a Congressional query, shouldnt technology likewise be used to protect copyrighted content? Surely, no one can expect copyright owners to ignore what is happening in the marketplace and fail to protect their creative works because some people engage in copying just for their personal use. Her pal, Michael Eisner, head of Disney, said he was tired of being finessed by the technology industry, whatever that means.

Unfortunately for Eisner, Rosen, Disney, and the RIAA, personal useand more importantly the rights associated with that use of copyrighted materialis exactly why copying of copyrighted material is not just allowed, but mandated by the Constitution. That some individuals illegally sell copied CDs or distribute copies of the music on the Internet is immaterial. In fact, fairly casual observation indicates that if customers are treated like criminals they will indeed begin to behave like criminals.

It has become common practice for music-loving computer owners to legally transfer audio CDs they purchase to .mp3 format files on their computers. The copy protection technology employed by the recording industry prevents such transfers by adding distortions to the music of the recordings. The industry insists that these distortions are inaudible when the disc is played on a standard CD player but result in pops when the music is transferred to a computer. In any case, its usually impossible to tell whether or not a disc includes the copy protection technology; in general, the copy-protected discs are not labeled.

Ironically, or probably not, .mp3 player manufacturers could easily defeat the copy protection technology, but they fear doing so would risk prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which prohibits the bypassing of copy protection systems. In 1999, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that .mp3 players did not violate copyright law because customers have the right to space shift music they have purchased.

Moral rights

Interestingly, the act of using the copy protection technology is much more prevalent in Europe. Most European countries, unlike the United States, recognize an artists moral rights in the work they create.

Moral rights are a package of intellectual property rights granted to the original creator of a work, and include:

• The right of integrity;
• The right of attribution;
• The right of disclosure;
• The right to withdraw or retract; and
• The right to reply to criticism.

These moral rights are separate from the economic copyright that these days generally transfers from an author to a publisher and they can survive the author. The idea originated with the French, who believe that any creative work, by definition, includes the personality and character of the author. Where copyright is a property right that can be transferred, moral rights are part of the authors personality and character and non-transferable.

The first two moral rightsthe right of integrity and the right of attributionare especially important because they are codified as international law in the Berne Convention. The United States claims its intellectual property law complies with the Berne Convention, but this is just two instances where it doesnt.

The most important of these rights is the first, the right of integrity. Basically it prohibits an authors work from being distorted in any way that would harm the authors reputation and dates to the 1957 French law of droit au respect de l'oeuvre. Its a safe bet that a cross-reference over which the author had no control would be seen as a distortion of the work.

Seemingly, in Europe at least, an artist could make an argument against the production of a copy-protected version of her work on the sole basis of moral rights. Especially in the case of an audio CD to which distortion is intentionally added by the publisher.

In the United States, Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) appears to be taking the point position in questioning the behavior of the entertainment industry. He believes that instead of using copyright to obtain fair compensation for the works theyve licensed, the copyright owner industryincluding the recording industryis attempting to exercise complete dominance and total control of the copyrighted work.

And just how much money does an artist receive in the form of royalties? Use Moses Avalons royalty calculator to figure it out.

A DMCA rewrite?

Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) plans to introduce legislation that would regulateand maybe outright bancopy-protected compact discs. Boucher reportedly has concerns about customers buying copy-protected discs without knowing it and the compatibility problems inherent with the copy protection mechanism. In an interview with Wired News, Boucher said, The big problem initially is that consumers have no information that is complete and reliable about the disabilities which attend copy-protected CDs. These CDs will not play in DVD players, not play on personal computers (and) not even play on all CD players.

Boucher isnt talking about what kind of legislation he might introduce to accomplish his goal of protecting audio CD customers, and the possibilities are intriguing. At the simplest level, legislation may require copy-protected CDs to carry a warning label. At a more interesting level, Boucher may try to rewrite the DMCA. In fact, Boucher announced that he would introduce such legislation last July and reiterated his commitment to that approach in early March of this year.

Internet radio

Under the U.S. Copyright Offices interpretation of the DMCA, Internet radio may be a thing of the past. KFJC, KPIG, and RadioParadise may all be goners. Why is this tragic? Because any of these stations are orders of magnitude better than the sorry excuse for radio available on the traditional dial.

Internet radio is routing around an obsolete and unaccountable industrys safely padded environs and making a difference. Corporate radio sounds exactly the same from coast to coast because it is exactly the same. Sit and watch that website for a few minutes; if it doesnt nauseate you, itll damn sure hypnotize you.

Adding to the arsenal of tools deployed by big media is the Copyright Arbitration and Royalty Panel (CARP). CARP met secretly for the past several months and issued the CARP Report in late February. The keystone of this report is steep licensing fees for webcast music. Lets be clear: compulsory licensing is a good idea, consistent with the intent of copyright law. Usury licensing fees for small webcasters is not.

KPIG responded almost immediately with a plea to save the Pig from the digital slaughterhouse:

Independent webcasters such as KPIG are facing a grave threat to our existence. It may be an evil conspiracy on the part of the big record companies and corporate webcasters, ormore likelyits just a dumb mistake. In either case, KPIG could soon be liable for huge music usage fees ($5,000 - $10,000 per month) that would make it impossible for us to stay online. For background on the issue, see The Death of Web Radio? below and the SaveInternetRadio.org website.

Doc Searls, in his article Bizarre vs. Bazaar, eloquently sums up the combination of DMCA and CARP as the destruction of the Net as a commons and its replacement with a plumbing system for the distribution of content (a word hardly used in a shipping context before Big Media got all drooly over The Promise of The Net).

A brief history of copyright

Copyright, until this recent entertainment industry power-grab, has always been a delicatemaybe even precariousbalance between the rights of the author to benefit from his or her work for a short period of time and the rights of the rest of us to innovate and benefit from those works when they fall into the public domain.

The Constitution granted Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Originally, the Copyright Act of 1790 established the limited times of copyright protection of 14 years with an option for the author to renew the copyright for an additional 14 years if he or she were still alive. That copyright term was good enough for the first 100 years of intellectual property in the United States. During the next 100 years, Congress extended the copyright term 11 times.

Certain uses of a protected work that would ordinarily be seen as infringing are specifically allowed for education, criticism, etc. These uses are allowed under the fair use provision. The core concept of fair use is that, in general, any use that does not exploit the commercial value of the original is permissible.

The fair use statute recognizes four criteria by which a use can be determined to be fair or unfair:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted wok as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

William S. Strong, in The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide , provides an interpretation for working writers:

As a general rule a critic or reporter should not quote at any one point more than two or three paragraphs of a book or journal article, a stanza of a poem, or a solitary chart or graph from a technical treatise.

The Net allows ordinary citizens to exercise their fair use rights in ways never imagined by the entertainment industry. Subsequently, the reaction is to pressure innovation by extending the copyright term for any given work. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that will likely determine the legitimacy of the most recent copyright term extension, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This law extends the copyright term to the life of the author plus 70 years. In the case of works made for hire in which a corporation owns the copyright, the copyright term is now 95 years.

While one side of the entertainment industry was pushing, an activity that eventually became the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the other side was pulling. That activity eventually resulted in the DMCA. Designed specifically to control the uses that can be made of published works, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copyright-protection technology. The result: the entertainment industry controls not only what you see and hear but the methods and devices with which you see and hear it. Even if the copy-protection is circumvented to enable the fair use of a published work, it is prohibited and deemed to be a criminal act.

Digital TV

According to Mike Godwin, digital television is the tipping point in the war between the entertainment and technology industries. Never mind that every time the entertainment industry shoots itself in the foot, the technology industry comes to its rescue. Remember in the 1970s when the movie industry was in a deep funk and that vampire Jack Valenti said that VCRs would kill it for good? As it turns out, the VCR revived the film industry. The film industry was failing not because of customer VCR usage but because they were putting out epically craptacular films. Just like the recording industry todaywhen in doubt blame those dang customers.

Anyway, Godwin says digital television is the flashpoint because its quality (technical, not artistic) is way too good and unlike DVDs, its unencrypted and has to stay unencrypted to be useful. Oh, and the pesky FCC regulations say that broadcast television signals must be sent unencrypted.

The purveyors of digital television think they have the answer: digital watermarks. They think thats the answer for the online distribution of music, and any other digital content as well. Unfortunately for them, in order for a watermark to be used to restrict copying of digital content, consumer devices used to play the content will have to have technology included thats capable of receiving those watermarks. That would require the cooperation of the technology industry, and that cooperation has not been forthcoming.

Godwin cites the theory of Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, holding that any sort of tagging system that is undetectable by the user will likely be easy to remove.

Digital rights management

Perhaps the weirdest part of all of this is that the technology industry is just as enamored of protecting intellectual property. Theyre just going about it in a minimally different way. Digital rights management (DRM) is the battle cry of the techheads. And where they differ from their entertainment industry brethren is the question of government mandates. The technology industry wants to lock up published content just as badly as the entertainment industry; they just dont want the government (or anyone else) telling them that they have to. Remember that the entertainment and technology industries both lobbied heavily in favor of the DMCA.

And then there are the schizoids, the companieslike AOL Time Warner and Sonythat are so large that they find themselves on both sides of the fence depending which way the wind blows.

SSSCA > CBDTPA

The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), kept on a leash but regularly trotted out by Senator Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, can best be thought of as a sort of appendix to the DCMA. It is clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates.

According to the draft language of the bill, it would be illegal to create or distribute any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies approved by the Commerce Department. Even though MIT professor and RSA Data Security co-founder Ron Rivest has referred to the proposed legislation as the Digital Rectal Thermometer Security Act its really just mandatory corporate welfare for media conglomerates subsidized by the actual creators and consumers of intellectual property.

Felony penalties for distributing copyrighted material without the certified security technologies fully enabled or using a computer that circumvents those technologies are up to five years in prison and fines up to US$500,000.

Even worse, the proposed legislation calls for manufacturers of digital devices and the media conglomerates to collaboratively develop a copy protection system. If, after two years, they cant come up with a mechanism both industries can live with, the federal government will specify a standard. Hollings bill fails to include the actual creators or users of content in any of the machinations.

Should we be surprised that four of Hollings top campaign donors are media conglomerates?

Predictably, the politicians split along party lines over the SSSCA. Or, more accurately, the split is along the lines of entertainment industry campaign contributions. Democrats, who received US$24.2 million in contributions from the entertainment industry tend to support the idea of legislating the protection of copyrighted material in digital form. Republicans, who received a relatively paltry US$13.3 million in entertainment industry contributions usually oppose the SSSCA, claiming it is too interventionist.

In mid-March 2002, the other shoe dropped. Senator Hollings, better known as the Senator from Disney, transformed the SSSCA into the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) and ceased his tip-toeing around. The CBDTPA is real legislation, and enjoys the support of five other co-authors: Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisiana), Bill Nelson (D-Florida) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California). Just think, one more author and they could have been the seven dwarves. The CBDTPA would require all digital deviceseverything from fax machines to MP3 players and computers (as well as the software that runs on them)to be equipped with embedded copy protection schemes, approved by the federal government.

Whats most disturbing about this is relatively paltry sum it took to buy this legislation. During the 2002 election cycle, only two of the dirty half-dozen were in the top 20 recipients of soft money from the entertainment industry. So far in the 2002 election cycle, Hollings has received only US$19,000 and Stevens has taken only US$39,621. To get the real story, we have to look back several election cycles:

Senator

2002

2000

1998

1996

Total

Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina)

$19,000

$32,750

$215,284

$43,300

$310,334

Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)

$39,621

$69,900

$109,521

Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii)

$49,852

$49,852

John Breaux (D-Louisiana)

$120,920

$120,920

Bill Nelson (D-Florida)

$47,550

N/A

N/A

$47,550

Dianne Feinstein (D-California)

$211,638

$211,638

$849,815

Theres no question why Fritz Hollings carried the water for this puppy, is there? But check those senatorial links in the table carefully because they tell the even bigger story of who the top contributing industries were for each politician. In every case, the entertainment industry scored big in the top 20 contributors for every Senator. And remember the 2002 campaign cycle isnt over yet. Not hardly.

So, how much does it cost to get your bill through the Senate? Looks to me like itll come in right around US$1 million.

Enter DigitalConsumer.org

The technology industry was quick to respond to the CBDTPA threat by launching DigitalConsumer.org and its attendant Consumer Technology Bill of Rights. Launched by two of the co-founders of Excite, DigitalConsumer.org is basically trying to protect the fair use rights of customers in digital media. The groups principles, outlined in the Bill of Rights are deceptively simple:

1. Users have the right to time-shift content that they have legally acquired.
2. Users have the right to space-shift content that they have legally acquired.
3. Users have the right to make backup copies of their content.
4. Users have the right to use legally acquired content on the platform of their choice.
5. Users have the right to translate legally acquired content into comparable formats.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.

The depth and breadth of support this lobbying group will receive remains to be seen. Some of the precepts are in direct conflict with the interests of some of the largest technology industry members. Microsoft, for example, almost certainly wants to be the digital rights management company of record and is none too keen on, say, items 2, 3, 4, and 5.

A solution

The solution is actually quite simple and requires only three steps:

1. Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
2. Recognize moral rights in the works authors create, like every other civilized country on the planet. Make it immediate and retroactive to all existing works.
3. Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; theyre consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I dont know about you, but Im not much pleased any more.

The basis of the problem is found in a single court ruling: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In this 1886 dispute, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a private corporation was a natural person under the Constitution and enjoyed the same protections as a citizen under the Bill of Rights. Corporations from that point forward were granted all of the rights and freedoms of a private citizen, yet none of the responsibilities. We made a mistake; hey, shit happens. Its not too late to fix it.

It was read into the record, then referred to committee. See Bill Summary & Status.

There were 25 other bills and two resolutions introduced that same day, see the Daily Digest. All were referred to the appropriate committees (Page S2260) except for one resolution, S. Res 231, which was considered and agreed to (Page S2261). You can get to those from the Daily Digest link, then go to Pages S2260-S2261, which then has some of those "temp" URLs, but once you're there you can use "next document" and "previous document" to get less ephemeral links (although the temp links I get are the same as yours, so they are at least somewhat persistent).

It was read into the record, then referred to committee. See Bill Summary & Status.

There were 25 other bills and two resolutions introduced that same day, see the Daily Digest. All were referred to the appropriate committees (Page S2260) except for one resolution, S. Res 231, which was considered and agreed to (Page S2261). You can get to those from the Daily Digest link, then go to Pages S2260-S2261, which then has some of those "temp" URLs, but once you're there you can use "next document" and "previous document" to get less ephemeral links (although the temp links I get are the same as yours, so they are at least somewhat persistent).

It was read into the record, then referred to committee. See Bill Summary & Status.

There were 25 other bills and two resolutions introduced that same day, see the Daily Digest. All were referred to the appropriate committees (Page S2260) except for one resolution, S. Res 231, which was considered and agreed to (Page S2261). You can get to those from the Daily Digest link, then go to Pages S2260-S2261, which then has some of those "temp" URLs, but once you're there you can use "next document" and "previous document" to get less ephemeral links (although the temp links I get are the same as yours, so they are at least somewhat persistent).

It was read into the record, then referred to committee. See Bill Summary & Status.

There were 25 other bills and two resolutions introduced that same day, see the Daily Digest. All were referred to the appropriate committees (Page S2260) except for one resolution, S. Res 231, which was considered and agreed to (Page S2261). You can get to those from the Daily Digest link, then go to Pages S2260-S2261, which then has some of those "temp" URLs, but once you're there you can use "next document" and "previous document" to get less ephemeral links (although the temp links I get are the same as yours, so they are at least somewhat persistent).

It was read into the record, then referred to committee. See Bill Summary & Status.

There were 25 other bills and two resolutions introduced that same day, see the Daily Digest. All were referred to the appropriate committees (Page S2260) except for one resolution, S. Res 231, which was considered and agreed to (Page S2261). You can get to those from the Daily Digest link, then go to Pages S2260-S2261, which then has some of those "temp" URLs, but once you're there you can use "next document" and "previous document" to get less ephemeral links (although the temp links I get are the same as yours, so they are at least somewhat persistent).

Of course one could argue that P2P software and networks are a similar struggle - of freedom to compute versus the tyrannical licensing of megacorps. But it's only true if the individual user is using P2P to trade in OSS or freeware. It doesn't hold water if you're using it to fill up your 120GB drive with mp3s you don't have albums for or to grab an image of the corporate edition of Windows XP Professional.

Now if you're serving up ISOs of Mandrake 8.2, distributing your band's songs, grabbing artist-released films, or sharing your amateur pr0n photo shoot, more power to you.

The court hit the nail on the head there. I can hear the MPAA and MIAA screaming all the way from the Netherlands.