INDUCE is dangerous, says HRRC
p2pnet.net News:- Senator Orrin Hatch’s INDUCE Act, “would put a foot on the throat of anyone coming to market with a new device, software product, or home networking system that handles copyrighted content,” declares Gary Shapiro, chairman of the Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC), calling for a full hearing into it.
Hatch’s Hollywood-friendly bill could be interpreted as giving copyright owners a veto over the introduction of almost any new technology for home and personal use, “and thus effectively eviscerate the fundamental public policies and essential safeguards for technology developers that formed the basis of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1984 Betamax ruling,” says the HRRC in a statement.
“Every time entrepreneurs launch a new hardware, software, or home network product, this bill would seem to subject them to a jury trial about what they had in mind,” says Shapiro.
“This would chill the introduction of new technology and new products across a wide range of media. It merits full and careful consideration of all of its potential consequences.”
HRRC points out that in 1976, the movie studios demanded an injunction against the marketing of the first consumer VCR and when the case reached the Supreme Court, it observed: “The request for an injunction … indicates that [the studios] seek, in effect, to declare VTR’s contraband”.
The Court refused to ban VCRs, stating: “It seems extraordinary to suggest that the Copyright Act confers upon all copyright owners collectively, much less the two [studios] in this case, the exclusive right to distribute VTR’s simply because they may be used to infringe copyrights. That, however, is the logical implication of their claim.”
The Court held that there was no basis for finding “contributory” infringement if an article of commerce, “is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses”.
INDUCE would add a new copyright cause of action for “intentionally inducing” copyright infringement, says HRRC, going on that by adding a new and separate copyright cause of action, INDUCE could change the outcome of cases such as the Betamax case itself.
“‘Inducement’ is already a part of the legal test for contributory infringement,” says Shapiro. “The main effect of adding a separate, broad provision based on ‘acts from which a reasonable person would find intent to induce infringement’ is to allow a different outcome on the same facts, even of the Betamax case itself. Hence, this bill would put a foot on the throat of anyone coming to market with a new device, software product, or home networking system that handles copyrighted content.”
By creating a new and separate doctrine of “induced” infringement, the bill effectively renders these doctrines, and their interpretation to date by the Supreme Court, irrelevant, and so could have a broad, dramatic and negative effect on the development and introduction of new products, and anyone creating and marketing them, says the HRRC, adding, “a public hearing, to explore all of the consequences for technological innovation, as well as for products that consumers now rely on, seems essential.”
