NET RESULTS: Several issues in the entertainment world bring home just how poorly thought-through the ramifications of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) are.
The DMCA is the legal framework for copyright brought in a few years ago in the US. Rightly, law-makers saw that the internet would change everything.
With the Net and computers, sound, image and text could be easily digitised into tiny pieces of electronic information and then passed around, copied and altered.
Moreover, as electronic devices began to converge it was clear that information could move around in ways quite outside the format that once contained it. For example, music, having already migrated from vinyl and tape to digital form on a CD, could now jump onto a computer hard drive, and thence to the transmission channel of the internet.
Television programmes, once contained within the goggle box, can now be received via cable into a computer where, with the astronomical growth of hard drive space, they can be saved. Films, too, now held digitally on DVDs rather than reels of tape, can be sent out across the Net. Small clips of music can be transmitted to a mobile phone. Once 3G networks are in place, much larger chunks of video, images, text and music will all be easily passed around by mobile.
Obviously, it was time to re-examine what copyright means and how it can and should be protected. Unfortunately, the approach of law-makers was to listen to one side - that of the corporate copyright holders. Over the past 50 years, neatly mirroring the arrival of the big corporate entertainment companies and networks, US law has bent the notion of copyright into shapes never envisioned by the original framers of copyright law.
The original framers saw copyright as a limited protection on original ideas that should eventually become part of a body of human work that could be expanded and built upon. The original protection period was 14 years. That notion lasted and worked well, through all the fabulous inventiveness and creativity of the 18th and 19th centuries, and much of the 20th.
But in the 20th century, entertainment companies such as Disney lobbied the US government hard to extend copyright periods to protect their right to royalties off fantastically lucrative creations such as Mickey Mouse. Now, copyright extends to 70 years after a creator's death. The implications? Well, you won't be seeing any new, inexpensive Penguin classics anytime soon for many 20th century titans of literature.
Worse, it is often now the norm for creators to sign over their rights to the company that publishes and distributes their work. This has happened for decades in the music business, for example, as anyone knows who has followed the long struggles by musicians to regain the rights to their music, owned by record labels. The implication? Many works of music, literature, and film simply won't be preserved at all because the corporate copyright holder won't deem it worthy of preservation, or, as companies merge, are sold, or go out of business, work will be lost.
The flip side of this ridiculous situation - which is largely mirrored in the European Union's clumsy adaptation of the DMCA, the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) - is that the corporations also want to control how you enjoy such works. What this means for you is twofold: first, that you are severely limited in how and where and how many times you can enjoy a song, a book, or a television show. And second, your usage of all types of digitally delivered entertainment will be watched by the companies that sold it to you.
The big entertainment corporations are eager to use forms of built-in digital copyright protection to limit the ways in which you can use your music or e-book or video. Right now, that means they are building walls around products so that you cannot play a music CD on a computer any more, or make a copy of an e-book you have purchased to read again, or loan to a friend; this, just as computers are becoming entertainment centres. New versions of operating systems from both Microsoft and Apple are designed to help computer owners manage multimedia files, such as CDs and individual songs, from their PCs.
The big entertainment corporations also want to monitor what you do - track your use of a song, for example, to make sure you don't send it to anyone over the Net. And, believe it or not, they want to track exactly what you do when watching a digitally-broadcast programme or film to make sure you only watch it once, don't save it to rewatch or send to anyone else, and don't fast-forward over the advertisements.
Sound ridiculous? Well, if you have been following recent arguments in the US House Congress and Senate, you will know the Hollywood's entertainment mafia wants computer and electronics manufacturers to build in copyright-protection hardware to enable creative works to be monitored in these ways.
Last week, they persuaded US courts to require a digital broadcast firm, Sonicblue, to monitor their subscribers in just such ways.
An excellent article in Yale Law School's online LawMeme journal picks apart the stupidity of this. Entitled Top Ten New Copyright Crimes, it's at http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/. The writer quotes some shocking - and utterly laughable -- statements from Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting, who argues that viewers have a "contract" with networks that requires them to watch, not skip ads. He'd even like to limit when you can take a bathroom break.
Another ridiculous interpretation of the DMCA may see the young internet radio sector virtually wiped out within weeks. The US Copyright Office is likely to accept a report that says internet radio stations should have to pay broadcast royalties in addition to the composer royalties.
Conveniently, existing radio stations that also broadcast over the Net are exempt from this second wave of payments, so it's broadcast as usual for them. Sound like an attempt to throttle the potential competition before it becomes a threat? Got it in one. At the moment, this interpretation doesn't apply to the EUCD, so Europe might well become a haven for net radio broadcasts. Interested in learning more? Then visit www.saveinternetradio.org.
Entertainment companies want to have it all ways. First, they want to continue to apply existing interpretations of copyright law - which really only have a short history - to a new medium. They also want to milk the new medium for its new distribution and control possibilities, without accepting that the new medium itself requires a monumental rethink of what copyright is and should be.
In the process they are happy to take away the elements of existing copyright law that benefit consumers, allowing multiple use of an entertainment product - a CD can be taped, for example; a book loaned or resold. And the rights of the actual creators - the musicians, the artists, the filmmakers, the writers - hardly get mentioned at all. That about says it all.
