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House clears copyright bill
By Courtney Macavinta
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
October 12, 1998, 4:55 p.m. PT
The House today passed legislation to impose new safeguards for software,
music, and written works on the Net, and to outlaw technologies that can
crack copyright protection devices.
The Senate cleared the bill on Wednesday, and President Clinton is now
expected to sign it into law.
Once the Digital Millennium Copyright Act becomes law, it will be a crime
to create or sell any technology that could be used to break copyright
protection devices or to commit an act of circumvention. The provisions
will take effect 18 months and two years after the bill is signed,
respectively. Violators could be charged up to $2,500 per act of
circumvention.
The copyright legislation was introduced shortly after treaties signed at
the World Intellectual Property Organization's Geneva conference on
digital information and copyrights in December 1996. Technically, the
Senate still has to ratify the international agreements, but it will
likely wait to do so until after U.S. law is in compliance with the
treaties.
However, because the U.S. bills go much farther than the treaties, passage
has been hard won. On one side are the powerful movie, record, and
software industries arguing that the Net--and other computer
networks--make it easier for people to illegally copy and distribute their
products. That, in turn, stifles their desire to broaden e-commerce
investments, companies say.
And Congress's action will likely be mimicked when other nations ratify
the treaties signed in 1996.
"We are urging the president to sign this bill promptly because right now
there are thousands of software pirate sites, bootleg serial number sites,
and sites with piracy tools, and this bill gives us a certain remedy
against all those people," said Mark Traphagen, vice president of the
Software Publishers Association.
"We want the Senate to then ratify the treaties before it adjourns," he
added. "That will have international significance because there is a whole
world that is waiting for U.S. leadership on ratifying the WIPO treaties
and making sure their laws measure up to the treaties."
But academia, computer researchers, and libraries lobbied for changes in
the bill because they said it would let companies build a digital toll
gate around their content, hindering current "fair use" rights that let
citizens and educators copy and share material with certain limitations.
"Libraries agree this was about balancing the interest between copyright
proprietors in having their material protected and the larger public
interest in having continued access to information in the digital age,"
Adam Eisgrau, legislative counsel to the American Library Association,
said today.
Although concessions were made to address fair use concerns, the bill
still favors intellectual property owners and their right to protect their
capital.
For example, a provision was included to require Webcasters--such as the
budding group of Net radio stations--to pay licensing fees to record
companies, which could take a large chunk out of their gross revenues. The
provision was created jointly by the Recording Industry Association of
America, the Digital Media Association, and members of Congress.
The research community and general public did win some battles. As
reported, a joint-house conference committee scrapped a section that would
have given database owners broad powers to prevent others from using their
valuable public data collections to launch competing businesses.
Still, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is taking the lead to bring up the
database bill as separate legislation next year.
Moreover, the bill has exceptions to the so-called black box provision.
The legislation passed by Congress today does permit cracking copyright
protection devices to conduct encryption research, for the purpose of
product interoperability, and to test computer security systems.
The librarian of Congress will set the rules for who exactly gets the
exemptions and will work with the Commerce Department to study whether
these technological barriers stifle fair-use access to copyrighted
materials after the bill is passed.
The bill also carries a handful of safe harbors that limit Net access
providers' liability for copyright infringements made by their customers.
-o-
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Received on Tue Oct 13 09:01:37 1998
