 | |
| |
TechnologyDaily Mobile
Digital Technology Bill Draws Battle Lines
by Drew Clark
The introduction last week of S. 2048, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ernest "Fritz" Hollings' bill mandating digital rights management technologies, has drawn battle lines between Hollywood, the tech industry and others.
Co-sponsored by four Democrats and one Republican, the bill was presented as a measure to spur the adoption of high-speed Internet access and digital television. It would require that all digital media devices -- defined to include all computer hardware and software -- include a government-certified copyright protection technology.
The groups that oppose the bill include: the Association for Competitive Technology, the Business Software Alliance, the Consumer Electronics Association, the Information Technology Industry Council, the Digital Media Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Digitalconsumer.org, a new group of technology entrepreneurs promoting consumers' "fair use rights."
Also criticizing the bill late Friday was the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which said it "knows of no reason to abandon voluntary, consensus-based process with respect to digital-rights management" in favor of a "broad, unfocused federal mandate," in a letter to Hollings and Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., by Franklin Vargo, vice president for international economic policy at NAM.
"Above all, the NAM is concerned that the insertion of a bureaucratic, regulatory process into information technology product-design work would slow innovation, divert investment capital, and cost time in the global race for global technological leadership," Vargo said. "These are costs that the U.S. economy cannot afford to pay."
Tension In Tinseltown?
Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti issued a statement of support shortly after S. 2048's introduction last Thursday in which he said that it "will serve the long-term interests of consumers by calling upon the information technology, consumer electronics and copyright industries to negotiate in good faith to find solutions to digital piracy."
In a potential olive branch to the technology industries, he said, "We also embrace the calls by Senators [Patrick] Leahy and [Orrin] Hatch [R-Utah] for regular reports to the Congress on the progress of the private sector negotiations." Such progress might "narrow the scope of any legislation or regulation" necessary, he said.
Yet, as Hollywood prepared to honor its Academy Award winners over the weekend, some who have followed Tinseltown's clash with Silicon Valley noted the relatively quiet support from the Recording Industry Association of America, which has been a long-time ally of the MPAA in a quest for stronger copyright laws.
"We appreciate that Senators Hollings, [Ted] Stevens [R-Alaska], [Daniel] Inouye [D-Hawaii], [John] Breaux [D-La.], [Bill] Nelson [D-Fla.] and [Dianne] Feinstein [D-Calif.] have sent a wake-up call to the information technology and consumer electronics industries that the time has come to achieve a voluntary marketplace solution to the growing threat of online piracy," RIAA President Hilary Rosen said in a statement. "We have been, and continue to be, eager to work out a voluntary solution, for that is in the best interests of everyone involved, especially the American consumer."
Her stress on voluntary negotiations struck several technology officials as an endorsement of their attitude, which is that they are prepared to meet all of what they consider Hollywood's reasonable requests in private negotiations.
But Mitch Glazier, senior vice president of government relations for RIAA, denied that the association has taken a lower-profile stance on the issue because of its own concerns about H.R. 2724, digital music legislation introduced by Reps. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, and Rick Boucher, D-Va.
"We are for legislation addressing the problem of piracy, and we think that the Hollings bill is a great first step," said Glazier. He distinguished between S. 2048's attempt to clamp down on piracy versus RIAA's opposition to H.R. 2724 because of its view that the legitimate music marketplace is working and needs no legislative tinkering.
The Intel-AOL Time Warner Rapprochement
Even before Hollings introduced his bill, Intel and AOL Time Warner released a joint statement outlining both previous agreements and their willingness to work cooperatively to resolving at least two of the three issues that Valenti that identified as motion picture industry demands.
Hollywood and the technology industry have been collaborating in the Copyright Protection Technical Working Group (CPTWG) on digital rights management technologies beginning with the creation of the DVD encryption scheme in 1996. Also emerging from that effort has been a proposal by a consortium of five equipment manufacturers -- Hitachi, Intel, Matsushita, Sony and Toshiba -- to provide technologies that impede unauthorized access to and copying of cable and satellite broadcasts of digital content.
Sony Pictures Entertainment and AOL Time Warner's Warner Brothers have signed on to the consortium's technology -- dubbed "5C" because it was first proffered by five consumer electronics manufacturers, although it is now accepted by many others -- while the others held off because of a desire to also include protections for over-the-air broadcasts via digital television.
Almost all observers acknowledge that unauthorized copying on cable and satellite systems can be limited by voluntary agreements because of a chain of licensing agreements that require distributors, equipment manufacturers and consumers to abide by such limitations. But such agreements are unable to provide content protection when television programs and movies are broadcast over-the-air and "in the clear," i.e. without encryption. (To broadcast digital content in an encrypted format would mean that hundreds of millions of analog television set viewers would be unable to view them.)
And television and movie producers perceive danger in making such unencrypted digital broadcasts available because digital copies are easily reproduced and do not degrade. For them, the only alternative is simply not broadcasting digitally.
This problem could be solved by means of a "broadcast flag" to signal the electronic device receiving the digital broadcast that content may not be redistributed in another form, such as over the Internet. Technology industry officials in a broadcast unit of the CPTWG said that they were set to finalize the technical standards for such a flag by the end of March 2002. The Intel-AOL statement says that on this issue, "Some narrowly focused government regulation will be necessary," presumably from the FCC.
Tough Demands to Fill
But solving this "broadcast flag" program was only the first of three demands that Valenti set in his February testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee.
The second calls for plugging what he called the "analog hole," or the analog output device on the back of television equipment. Even when video content is delivered in an encrypted digital format, it must be converted into an unprotected analog format to be viewed on existing analog televisions, and viewers may then convert it back to a digital form through which it could be transmitted to a Napster-like file sharing service. Technology officials say that implementing a proposal to digitally "watermark" copyrighted content -- such that it will be garbled whenever copied to another device -- is not as straightforward as the motion picture industry believes.
And technology officials are nearly apoplectic over the third demand, which appears to drive the sweeping nature of Hollings' S. 2048: that the technology industry do something to develop unspecific technical solutions that would counter the ability of someone to use computers, software or electronic equipment to make an authorized copy available through a file-sharing service.
NEW FEATURE
-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-
