[Infowarrior] - Separating fact from fiction on digital copyrights

Mon Aug 27 13:09:44 UTC 2007

Separating fact from fiction on digital copyrights

By Maura Corbett
http://news.com.com/Separating+fact+from+fiction+on+digital+copyrights/2010-
1030_3-6204450.html

Story last modified Mon Aug 27 04:00:02 PDT 2007

I'll bet you can recite most of the copyright warnings that appear on your
screen when you pop in a DVD, or at the end of football game, can't you?

At the very least, we all know that when the warning signs appear, what
follows are a few very-important-sounding sentences noting the dire
consequences of unauthorized use of what we're about to see. We don't
necessarily understand it, but we know it's bad. And if we were to believe
what they tell us, discussing Barry Bonds' homeruns around the water cooler
would put us all in jail.

Did it ever occur to you that, in many cases, these serious, ubiquitous
warnings may not actually be accurate?

Perhaps they've just been around so long that they've been accepted as fact,
but in many cases, as very recently pointed out by the Computer and
Communications Industry Association, they are at best misleading and, at
worst, flat-out wrong.

The group filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission earlier
this month against some of the worst offenders--among them, NBC Universal,
Major League Baseball and the National Football League--alleging that the
statements used by these corporations often include gross misrepresentations
of federal law and characterize as unlawful acts that are explicitly
permitted by law. NBC Universal immediately characterized the complaint as
"frivolous," which pretty much sums up how the company feels about the
rights of its consumers.

Consumer rights in the digital age are not frivolous. We have them, we
should protect them, and U.S. copyright law guarantees them. Consumers may
copy, distribute, perform and transmit portions of a publication or work
provided that such use constitutes "fair use," which is a legal way of
saying that we can enjoy limited and nonlicensed use of copyrighted material
without requiring permission from the rights holder.

Fair use is not merely a nice concept--it is a federal law based on free
speech rights under the First Amendment and is a cornerstone of the
creativity and innovation that is a hallmark of this country.

However, with the advent of the digital age, fair use has gone missing.
Warnings attached to movies, sports broadcasts and other media often provide
wildly misleading information about consumer rights under copyright law. For
example, warnings on many Universal DVDs state, in part, that "any
unauthorized exhibition, distribution or copying of this film or any part
thereof (including soundtrack) is an infringement of the relevant copyright
and will subject the infringer to severe civil and criminal penalties."
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This statement is simply untrue--the federal copyright statutes specifically
allow unauthorized reproduction for criticism, commentary and other
purposes. Just recently, the NFL threatened the media by withholding press
credentials for any organization that showed more than 45 seconds of a game.

This is not the way forward. We should not permit rights holders to use
copyright law to create new powers for themselves. Even as we urge consumers
to respect the law--and we should--large copyright owners have the same
obligation.

Scaring their customers is not educating them. Misleading and threatening
them, at the end of the day, hurts everyone, including the copyright holders
themselves. Copyright law was never intended to serve as a big stick for the
rights holder to wield against the freedom of information and ideas. We hope
the FTC agrees.