Intel, Gateway and Sun Microsystems have joined a list of companies
and organistions representing the IT industry, consumers and
libraries supporting the latest digital rights management (DRM)
bill introduced in the US Congress.
Representatives of Intel and Gateway were on hand to speak in
favour of the Digital Media Consumer Rights Act of 2002, which was
formally announced at a news conference by Congress Representatives
Rick Boucher, a Democrat from Virginia, and John Doolittle, a
Republican from California.
The principal goal of the bill is to reaffirm the "fair use"
doctrine of US copyright law to cover digital material, including
music, books and other content that typically is copyrighted,
Boucher said. The bill would also require proper labelling of
"copy-protected" compact discs so that consumers know when they buy
a CD what device it can be played in.
Supporters of the bill say protecting the fair use doctrine, which
permits limited personal use of legally obtained copyrighted
material, is extremely important for consumers and manufacturers of
devices as digital content becomes more readily available for use
on a growing number of gadgets.
"Fair use is a pressure valve on what would otherwise be total
monopoly control by the copyright owner over the use of the
copyrighted material," Boucher said.
The bill aims to change a section of the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) that Boucher said dramatically tilted
the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection. The
DMCA enables the copyright owner to place technical protection
measures on his or her material and says anyone who circumvents the
protection measure could face legal consequences.
Doug Comer, Intel's director of legal affairs and technology
policy, said Intel has worked for years to develop technical
protection methods to protect against copyright infringement and
will continue to do so. However, the company believes such
protective measures should accommodate fair use of the
content.
"There has been a disturbing trend over the past two years of
content owners using the DMCA copyright laws to target fair use of
the content and threaten action against individual users," said
Comer. "This legislation is needed to correct the balance. The
focus should be on true offenders who distribute works without
approval of copyright owners and not on individuals exercising
traditional legal rights."
Boucher said that, given the limited time remaining on the
congressional calendar, he is not seeking enactment of the Digital
Media Consumers' Rights Act before the current session of Congress
adjourns. Rather, he is looking for a chance to lay out arguments
in favour of the bill in preparation for debate and discussion in
the next session, which will begin next year.
"I'm absolutely confident that this measure, or something that's
very close to it, is going to be enacted into law, and when that
happens we will have a substantial and very helpful rebalance in
the copyright law," Boucher said.
Specific language in the bill addresses the circumvention of
technical protections placed on digital material, Boucher said,
using the famous example of a Linux user who wanted to play a DVD
on his home computer, but first had to write a program to bypass
the technical protection on the DVD.
"Even for this limited purpose, he is liable under the DMCA,"
Boucher said.
The scope of the bill, however, does not address peer-to-peer
file-sharing technologies, which Boucher said only fall within the
fair use doctrine if the users are distributing uncopyrighted
materials or material that the copyright owner wants to be
distributed across a peer-to-peer network.
"This legislation is designed to address circumvention devices, and
it really is drafted in such a way as is limited to circumvention
devices, and peer-to-peer file sharing [networks] really are not
circumvention devices," Boucher said. Although he said the
legitimate peer-to-peer networks are "a very helpful expansion of
the Internet architecture," they do not constitute fair use if they
are distributing copyrighted songs without the copyright owner's
consent.
Another important provision of the bill deals with encryption. The
provision expands the existing exemption from the prohibition on
circumvention devices that accommodates encryption research.
"We expand that to research on technical protection measures,
because there are some technical protection measures that are not,
strictly speaking, encryption," Boucher said, citing watermarks as
an example. "In order to test these other kinds of technical
protection measures, this research exemption needs to be expanded.
The scientific community is very interested in this, and that's why
it's in the bill."
In addition to Intel, Gateway and Sun, Verizon Communications and
Philips Electronics have publicly expressed their support for the
bill. The organisations that lined up behind the bill include the
Consumer Electronics Association, the Computer & Communications
Industry Association of America, the Digital Future Coalition, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation and five nationwide library
associations.
Boucher said the bill would be referred to the House Energy and
Commerce Committee, of which he is a member.