New Warez Laws (as if they stopped us before...)



Posted by Prescient on March 03, 1998 at 20:53:16:

I thought you all might be interest in this, this article appeared in the
curerent scientific american issue:

Downloading as a Crime

On December 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton signed into law the No
Electronic Theft (NET) Act This cheerful piece of legislation makes it a
federal crime to distribute or possess unauthorized electronic copies of
copyrighted material valued over $1,000, even when no profit is involved.
The bill defines three levels of violations, depending on the value of the
work and the number of past offenses. Possession of 10 or more illegal
electronic copies worth more than $2,500 could land you six years in prison
and a $250,000 fine. "You'd be better off going out and shooting somebody,"
quips David J. Farber, professor of telecommunications at the University of
Pennsylvania. "The penalty is less."

Farber was also a leading signatory to a letter from the Association of
Computing Machinery sent to President Clinton, asking him to veto the bill.
The ACM's objections had to do with the potential for damaging free
communication among scientists, because the bill does not contain
traditional fair-use exemptions, such as those allowing photocopying by
libraries and academic institutions or quotation for purposes of review or
criticism, or first sale, which allows you to loan or sell a secondhand
book.

Arguments over the correct balance between rewarding authors and publishers
via copyright and the public's right of access to information are nothing
new In 1841, for example, in a House of Commons debate over the extension of
copyright from 28 to 60 years, Thomas Babington Macaulay called copyright "a
private tax on the innocent pleasure of reading" and "a tax on readers for
the purpose of giving a bounty to writers" that should not be allowed to
last a day longer than necessary for remunerating authors enough to keep
them in business

But since the arrival of the digital age, these arguments have taken a nasty
turn, partly because it is so easy to copy and distribute digital material
and partly because the technology is developing that would allow every use
to be monitored and charged. For example, Mark J. Stefik of the Xerox Palo
Alto Research Center is working on "trusted systems" that would make it 
possible to dividerights finely, so you could buy, say, reading rights for an
article on the Internet but not downloading and printing rights. Your printer
might be able to mark printouts undetectably, charging you for the job and
sending out an electronic payment. Already digital watermarking--using a 
cryptographic technique called steganography to hide ownership and copyright
information in a picture or text fileÑis being deployed to make it easier to 
identify infringers. All these technologies will make possible an unbundling of
rights that up until now have been taken for granted. The habit of mind that
finds this approach desirable has been called copyright maximalism by
MacArthur award recipient

Pamela Samuelson, professor of information management and of law at the
University of California at Berkeley.

In fact, the NET Act is only the first of several pieces of legislation
before Congress, some seeking to place greater restrictions on the use and
copying of digital information than exist in traditional media. One, the
Digital Era Copyright Enhancement Act of 1997Ñintroduced into the House on
November 13,1997, by Representatives Rick Boucher of Virginia and Tom
Campbell of CaliforniaÑ includes fair-use provisions; the other, introduced
on July 29,1997, on behalf of the Clinton administration by Representative
Howard Coble of North Carolina and others, does not. In addition, the Coble
et al. bill contains provisions making it illegal to provide or own
technology that can defeat copyright-protection technology. The bills are
intended as legislation that ratify the treaties passed by the diplomatic
conference of the World Intellectual Property Organization in December 1996.

The NET Act had a different genesis; it was inspired by the dismissal of
charges against Massachusetts Institute of Technology student David M. LaMacchia
in 1994. He was charged with allowing the piracy of more than $1 million in
business and entertainment software from an electronic bulletin board he ran
on M.I.T.'s system. His attorneys successfully argued that LaMacchia did not
profit from the site and that he himself did not upload, download or use the
software available. The programs were supplied and retrieved by others over
whom he had no control, and existing U S law did not cover this situation

Now with the NET Act, it does "It's an unfortunate piece of legislation,"
says Peter Jaszi of American University Although the law will most likely
not be misused in the way the ACM foresees, "the chilling effect that the
risk of liability will generate is probably going to be significant and
real," insists Jaszi, who is also co-founder of the Digital Future
Coalition, a group of 39 public and private organizations that is backing
the Boucher-Campbell bill and arguing for the extension of fair use into the
digital environment.

In part, what it comes down to is that the Internet scares people,
particularly copyright owners whose wealth is tied up in intellectual
property. All over the Internet (and off it), large companies are attacking
any use of their trademarked names they don't like, of fen apparently
irrationally: Mattel is going after anyone who uses the name "Barbie"; movie
studios threaten fan club sites that publish pictures, sounds and new
fiction using their established characters; and, as 60 Minutes reported in
December 1997, McDonald's seems to think it is the sole owner of a name that
is common to a large chunk of Scotland.

No one is arguing that the Internet doesn't pose a challenge to the
traditional control that copyright owners had over their work. But even
content providers themselves will be ill served by a regime under which they
have to pay for each piece of information used in the production of new
work. Ultimately, freedom of speech and of the press will mean nothing if
everywhere information flows there are toll roads.

ÑWendy M. Grossman in London

WENDYM. GROSSMAN is the author of net.wars, published by New York University
Press (1998).

Side Bar:
The NET Act does not
contain traditional fair-use
exemptions, such as those
allowing photocopying by
libraries or quotation
for purposes of review
or criticism.

    
Also refer to the author's website http://www.pelicancrossing.net	      
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Follow Ups:

   * THATS GAY (in a bad sense) blah 22:22:46 3/03/98 (1)
        o Bend over everybody, here it comes! F**king Congress..... Shoebi
          00:40:31 3/04/98 (0)

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