[Infowarrior] - Walt Mossberg on Copyright Laws

[Richard Forno]

Congress Must Make Clear Copyright Laws to Protect Consumers

>From Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2007
By Walter S. Mossberg
http://www.freepress.net/news/21882

Here comes another in the long line of lawsuits between media companies and
Internet companies over who gets to distribute content. This time it¹s
Viacom, the enormously rich owner of properties like Paramount Pictures and
Comedy Central, suing Google, the enormously rich owner of YouTube.

The issue: Viacom wants to get paid more than Google wants to pay it for all
of those fuzzy, two-minute clips from programs like ³The Daily Show² that
users post to YouTube. The companies tried to negotiate a deal, but the
talks failed, so Viacom is suing for $1 billion.

I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea how this lawsuit will wind up. I
suspect it is mainly a bargaining tactic by Viacom. But I know one thing:
This fight isn¹t primarily about consumers and their rights, and its outcome
won¹t necessarily make things better for Internet users.

Consumers won¹t be a party to this case any more than they were in the room
when the latest major copyright law was passed by Congress. That law, the
1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was enacted at the behest of record
labels and movie studios. Their purpose was to stop people from using
computers and the Internet to distribute digital copies of material to which
they didn¹t hold either the copyright or a distribution license.

That idea makes sense. Unlike some Internet zealots, I believe that
intellectual property is real and that some form of copyright is appropriate
to protect it. I am against the unlicensed copying of DVDs for sale on
street corners, or the mass uploading of songs to so-called sharing sites.

The Internet and technology companies managed to insert a clause in the DMCA
sparing them from penalties for carrying copyright content on grounds they
were just innocent conduits. That will be a big issue in the Viacom case.
But consumers got no such get-out-of-jail-free card.

In fact, the DMCA, and other recent laws and regulations passed under
pressure from media companies, are pretty hostile when it comes to
consumers. They turn essentially innocent actions into unlawful behavior,
because they define copyright infringement too broadly. They have given rise
to a technology called Digital Rights Management that causes too many
hassles for honest people and discriminates against the new digital forms of
distribution.

Even Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who created a DRM system for music that actually
has worked, recently called for an end to copy protection of legally sold
music, mainly because the record labels apply that protection only to online
sales, not to physical compact discs.

Most honest people wouldn¹t consider it piracy to buy a CD, copy it to a
computer and email one of the song files to a spouse or friend. But the
record industry, backed by the laws it essentially wrote, does. Most honest
people wouldn¹t think that uploading to YouTube a two-minute TV clip, which
they paid their cable company to receive, is piracy. But Viacom, backed by
the laws its industry essentially wrote, is demanding that Google remove all
such clips.

To be fair, Viacom, unlike the misguided record labels, isn¹t suing the
actual consumers who posted these clips. It¹s suing Google because it claims
Google is making money from them and refusing to pay for that privilege.

Google isn¹t blameless here, either. It does make money, at least
indirectly, from other companies¹ copyright material, for which it didn¹t
pay, even though it has negotiated some paid deals and says it is willing to
negotiate others. And while Google says it diligently removes all copyright
clips for which it hasn¹t secured paid rights, every YouTube visitor knows
that this system is, at best, imperfect.

As a nonlawyer, I think these clips seem like ³fair use,² an old copyright
concept that seems to have weakened under the advent of the new laws. Under
fair use, as most nonlawyers have understood it, you could quote this
sentence in another publication without permission, though you¹d need the
permission of the newspaper to reprint the entire column or a large part of
it. A two-minute portion of a 30-minute TV show seems like the same thing to
me.

But why should I have to guess about that? What consumers need is real
clarity on the whole issue of what is or isn¹t permissible use of the
digital content they have legally obtained. And that can come only from
Congress. Congress is the real villain here, for having failed to pass a
modern copyright law that protects average consumers, not just big content
companies.

We need a new digital copyright law that would draw a line between modest
sharing of a few songs or video clips and the real piracy of mass
distribution. We need a new law that would define fair use for the digital
era and lay out clearly the rights of consumers who pay for digital content,
as well as the rights and responsibilities of Internet companies.

If you don¹t like all of the restrictions on the use of digital content, the
solution isn¹t to steal the stuff. A better course is to pressure Congress
to pass a new copyright law, one that protects the little guy and the
Internet itself.

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