TN Copyright Bill Dialog

http://copy-shop.org/knoxville/archives/74

S. Taylor:

Just make sure you are all fully-educated about this issue. There are two sides to every issue and the content in this email is somewhat inaccurate and clearly biased. I encourage each of you to read the bill for yourself and consider the underlying public policy justification for such a bill.

I'm not saying whether the bill is right or wrong. I'm just saying educate yourself.

A. Beasley:

Dr Taylor,

Sorry for the many emails. After reading the bill, I still feel this is something thoroughly against progressive copyright reform that, as I'm sure you know, I highly support. I feel TN will be lumping themselves in with the many states and schools that are proactively cooperating with the RIAA in the prosecution of students. I realize, to many, this is a touchy subject. I am highly supportive of the Oregon Attorney General for his protection of Oregon's Universities against the questionable practices of the RIAA. See link:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071129-oregon-attorney-general-criticizes-riaas-conduct-in-p2p-cases.html

However, I do believe the post by Copyshop is inaccurate, especially relating to the expulsion of students for infringement. Once again, thanks for the interest, and the reminder to, "check it out for yourself."

N. Levay:

"Just make sure you are all fully-educated about this issue. There are two sides to every issue and the content in this email is somewhat inaccurate and clearly biased. I encourage each of you to read the bill for yourself and consider the underlying public policy justification for such a bill."

I would like to interject something into the dialog that I'm sure is taking place at MTSU in regard to this.. The nature of this public policy issue is larger than just this bill, so I'd like to single out an aspect of that, then bring it back around to this bill.

This is only one facet of a larger thrust to change the way that intellectual property enforcement is handled in the United States that is being driven by the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, and others. Last October I was present at a meeting in Los Angeles (not related to this issue) with a number of law enforcement officers and a team of AUSAs from the 9th district. One of the ancillary topics that came up shocked me.. Apparently, the industry organizations previously mentioned (the RIAA in particular) have been placing large amounts of pressure on the law enforcement community and the federal district attorneys' offices' to embrace the idea of shifting the prosecution of copyright infringement cases to criminal court system.

This would be a radical shift in the way intellectual property is handed in the United States. Currently, criminal prosecution of intellectual property related issues has been limited to manufacture and distribution of physical product in bulk, ie. the when the FBI busts CD duplication plans in places like NYC. Everything else has been handled in the civil courts.

The agenda of the industry organizations is simple. Rather than bulk litigation in the civil courts, as the RIAA and MPAA engage in now, they want to offload prosecution to the federal law enforcement community, the federal DA offices, and the federal criminal courts. Similar efforts are being targeted at the state level.

Think about that for a minute.. That should scare the hell out of everyone!

Furthermore, one of the reasons this is desired is so the evidence gathering capabilities of the law enforcement community can be allocated to the task of finding copyright offenders. At this point in time, these capabilities are limited to searching for child pornography distributors and various cybercrime activities. (Obviously, this excludes the capabilities within the IC used for tracking terrorists and attacks on IC/DoD/EO assets, which at the moment are not available to the LEOs..)

This is actually an attractive idea to a number federal DAs, because the amount of work/staff required to prosecute large numbers of copyright offenders is trivial as compared to the type of cases we'd like to see AUSAs allocated to.. At the current time, the the people in this space I've talked to are resisting this idea... But the landscape can change quickly.

There are multiple examples of the RIAA including discussions about criminal prosecution of illegal music downloading in the training materials provided to the NDAA. There was just an example in the form of a leaked RIAA training video last month. The bulk of these training resources are focused on the traditional mass manufacture and distribution of physical product, but the discussion about expanding criminal prosecution is quite frank and becoming more common.. Information about that leaked video can be found here: http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/02/riaa-training-v.html

I'm not privy to the minutia at the state level, aside from that California has actively pursued criminal prosecution of infringers using p2p.. Your staring directly at a different type of effort at the institutional level which aims to change the environment in which much of this takes place...

At the institutional level, the industry organizations want to place a burden on the network operators to police the usage of their networks. This is seriously dangerous. I don't even know exactly where to start explaining how dangerous this is. It's a lengthy discussion.. One of the things that has made the Internet so powerful is the fact that it does not operate under a whitelist mentality. All usage of the network is permitted by default. If we place the burden of prevention on network operators, the result will be the slow abandonment of the philosophy under which we currently run the Internet. Rather than the default policy being to permit usage, there will be a slow shift to only pre-approved types of services, protocols, and applications. "If we don't know how to monitor it, you can't use it.." It's hard for most people to wrap their heads around exactly what that really means, and what the long term results would be..

Legislation such as this is a round-about way of forcing that change in approach to happen; a change that only large long established content companies would benefit from. Bills such as these basically say: take the burden of prevention, or lose funding. What does that mean ten years down the line as that method of approaching the problem spreads? Is my favorite coffee house going to be somehow liable if I download content illegally using their free wireless? Would they still provide free open wireless if that was the case? That's my definition of a chilling effect. And it's not as left-field of a possibility as it was five years ago.

As it is right now, network operators are responsible for providing information on individuals if requested through legal means. That's fine. There is a good argument that there should be consequences if they can't provide information on individuals when subpoenaed. The rest is safe harbor... Let's keep it that way. It isn't stopping the RIAA/MPAA/etc from prosecuting anyone in civil court..

So, that's the larger picture.

"I'm not saying whether the bill is right or wrong. I'm just saying educate yourself."

I fully concur. It is of the upmost importance that these issues are evaluated in the absence of hyperbole. The history of the copyleft movement has tended to lean in that direction, and it's not helpful to the goal of a useful political dialog.

My personal bias on this issue is simple. I do not want to see intellectual property enforcement become a purely criminal affair, nor do want to see network operators liable for the network usage of individuals. I feel strongly that intellectual property is an extremely important element to the success of the modern marketplace; I am not in the camp that wants to see IP rights go away. However, I feel that if we move the wedge from intellectual property theft primarily being a civil matter, to being primarily a criminal matter, we will unleash a chain of unintended effects that will chill the marketplace it seeks to aid.

In a completely unrelated note.. One of the bands (The Black Clouds) in my circle of musical cohorts just released a new CD. As I recall, you were telling us at one point that your husband is really into 90's style alternative rock. He'd love this stuff. Jack Endino (who produced Nirvana's Bleach) did the mix on it. I think it sounds excellent, and it's the best example of a well done independent release I've seen in awhile. Shoot me an email with your office mailing address at MTSU, and I'll send a few (legit) copies of it your way. You can give em' out to anyone you desire.