BSA wants copyright act change
p2pnet.net News:- The many and various components of the entertainment industry are able to exert tremendous political pressure to guard and further their interests. So it’s no surprise to find the National Journal Technology Daily reporting in its January 6 Anti-Piracy Strategies Prove Complicated For Tech Industry:
“When the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee introduced legislation last June to make file-sharing companies liable for the piracy happening on their networks, he thanked the Business Software Alliance (BSA) for its help in crafting the legislation. The trade group, in turn, was one of the first lobbying outfits to praise the introduction of the legislation.”
The “chairman” was entertainment industry stalwart senator Orrin Hatch, and the “legislation” was the infamous INDUCE Act, spearheaded by Hatch and ultimately scuppered by the RIAA.
Money is speech, as Cherry Lane Digital ceo Jim Griffin said recently.
However, it didn’t take long for the BSA to retrench. Soon after, it also called for measures to ensure that “weak, harassing or frivolous suits are not heard by the courts” and in statement, warned:
“U.S. Senate legislation introduced to stem the growth of online piracy [INDUCE] should be clarified to ensure that it is properly balanced to curtail harmful practices while avoiding adverse unintended consequences for legitimate technology companies”.
Piracy a ‘major problem’
The BSA’s ‘World Wide’ members include: Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Avid, Bentley Systems, Borland, Internet Security Systems, Macromedia, NC Software/Mastercam, Microsoft, Network Associates, SolidWorks, Sybase, Symantec, UGS PLM Solutions, VERITAS Software. ‘Policy’ members are Cisco Systems, Entrust, HP, IBM, Intel, Intuit, RSA Security.
However, in a report outlining the BSA’s lobbying agenda, it, “emphasized that piracy on peer-to-peer computer networks still poses a major problem for the software industry,” says the National Journal Technology Daily.
“It’s a complex issue,” it quotes Adobe president and ceo Bruce Chizen as saying. “I think the Induce Act was an example of that. On the surface, it probably made a lot of sense, but when you start looking at some of the details behind it, you end up potentially hurting good business practices and good technology.”
In 2005 the BSA will be pushing for more cooperation from ISPs and, “What we’re encouraging [legislators] to do is to work with us and to work with the ISPs to get ISP cooperation because right now it’s not as aggressive as we need it to be,” Chizen said.
By that, he means corporate interests can’t just walk into an ISP’s office and demand the confidential client information behind IP addresses. Instead, they have to go through due process – like everyone else.
And to cap it off, the members of the record label cartel can’t force ISPs to identify users, a US court has just ruled in another major North American defeat for the music industry and its RIAA.
The RIAA and, more recently, the studios’ MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) are currently suing anyone they can find who’s sharing music and/or movies online. The MPAA is also on a campaign to close down BitTorrent sites.
Failing miserably
It would behoove the entertainment industry to start working with the online file sharing community and companies with experience in commercial uses of p2p technologies, instead of trying to sue them into its seriously outmoded ways of looking at things.
However, their efforts are failing miserably and file sharing is increasing – hence the BSA’s involvement.
“Although members of the Business Software Alliance … have not suffered losses from illegal file sharing as great as the entertainment industry’s, they believe the problem will only worsen as technology improves and more people get high-speed Internet access,” says Jonathan Krim in the Washington Post.
Suing people has done little more than to further alienate an already hostile ‘consumer’ base so the BSA is trying to pull the RIAA and MPAA chestnuts out of the fire by bludgeoning the US Congress into getting ISP cooperation by amending the infamous DMCA (1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act).
“They say changes are necessary because the original statute was enacted before services took root allowing computer users to swap songs, software and other digital material on a massive scale,” says Krimm.
And the, “BSA now believes that getting ISPs to disclose customer identities would be more effective than groups like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filing lawsuits against individuals,” says the National Journal Technology Daily.
In a back-hand to Big Music, “We think that if we worked with Congress as the software industry, and get the ISPs engaged, and Congress encourages the ISPs to become engaged, we think we can come up with better mechanisms than mass lawsuits,” Chizen is quoted as saying.
“It’s still not clear whether [the RIAA] accomplished what they wanted to accomplish.”
Sarah B. Deutsch, Verizon associate general counsel. Verizon challenged the RIAA’s bid to force the company to divulge the names of people said to have been sharing music online – even when no lawsuits had been filed.
Deutsch said Internet providers willingly cooperate with content owners within the bounds of the law, the Washington Post states. “Now, she said, ‘BSA wants its own shortcut, at the expense of consumer privacy and the ISPs’.”
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See:-
scuppered – RIAA collapses INDUCE talks, p2pnet, October 8, 2004
speech – File sharing: cesspool or honeypot?, p2pnet, December 6, 2004
harmful practices - INDUCE sparks corporate fears, p2pnet. July 29, 2004
cap it off – RIAA loses Charter ISP case, p2pnet, January 5, 2005
only worsen – Tech Firms Aim to Change Copyright Act, Washington Post, January 6, 2005
no lawsuits – RIAA loses Verizon case, p2pnet, December 19, 2003
