wessman
June 9th, 2003, 06:19 PM
Copyright controls 'out of tune'
Published: 2003/06/06 09:12:11 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/2968216.stm
Copyright holders like record labels have too much power over what people do with songs, argues technology analyst Bill Thompson.
After failing to persuade an appeals court of its case, US ISP Verizon is handing over the names of four of its customers to the lawyers at the Recording Industry Association of America.
The disclosure marks a significant shift in the way that customer privacy is dealt with in US law and will, as with many aspects of the regulation of the internet, have an impact on net users around the world.
The Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) first contacted Verizon last year after finding files being shared through the Kazaa peer-to-peer network from computers with IP addresses on Verizon's network.
They had no way to find who the users behind those computers were, so used a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to issue a court-authorised subpoena to the ISP, asking for the subscriber names.
Verizon refused, arguing that they were just a communications channel and had nothing to do with the potentially copyright-infringing behaviour of their customers.
They also said that because the DMCA subpoenas were issued by a court clerk and not by a judge they were unconstitutional.
Powerful labels
Now a court has ordered them to hand over the names, although the legal arguments will continue for a bit longer as the appeal has not been finally decided.
But it seems pretty clear that under existing law Verizon have little chance of winning.
The DMCA was written to give massive power to copyright owners, and it is working.
There is also little chance of any changes to the law getting through a US political system where many elected representatives rely on campaign funding from the entertainment industry.
So we can assume that from now on any time the record or music industry wants to know whose computer is hosting a pirate version of Spiderman, a few ripped MP3s of some old songs or the odd installation of a piece of unpaid for software, they will be able to find out - at least in the US.
This does not mean all of those people will be prosecuted.
One of the aspects of the law raised by this case is that the RIAA can ask for people's names before they start proceedings - they just have to turn up, say "we think these people are abusing our copyright" and they can get the subpoena.
But it may result in even more nasty and threatening letters going out from the RIAA, and have a chilling effect on the free sharing of music over the net and the growth of the file sharing networks.
Political fight
Over here we do not have the DMCA, although our very own European Union Copyright Directive does lots of the same stuff.
However this does not mean we should be relaxed about privacy, especially after recent Home Office proposals for storage of and access to data about e-mails sent and web pages visited.
But UK practice does at least involve the police and the courts: a record company cannot just walk into an office, ask an official for a stamp on a form and send it off to an ISP.
US net users should be very worried about the implications of the Verizon case. The techno-optimists say that the next generation of file-sharing services will make it impossible to pin down which computer is hosting a file and so the law will be helpless.
This may work for a while, but just as in the ongoing battle between virus writers and anti-virus tools, each side has clever programmers and an incentive to develop new ways to get what it wants.
The real fight here is political. The record industry wants complete control over what people do with the songs it publishes; the people want some freedom to decide for themselves.
Until we can resolve this difference we will continue to see more court cases, threatening letters, and new releases of file-sharing tools.
We need to rethink what copyright means in a digital world, rather than wasting so much time, effort and money on this conflict.
Bill Thompson is a regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Go Digital.
© BBC MMIII
Published: 2003/06/06 09:12:11 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/2968216.stm
Copyright holders like record labels have too much power over what people do with songs, argues technology analyst Bill Thompson.
After failing to persuade an appeals court of its case, US ISP Verizon is handing over the names of four of its customers to the lawyers at the Recording Industry Association of America.
The disclosure marks a significant shift in the way that customer privacy is dealt with in US law and will, as with many aspects of the regulation of the internet, have an impact on net users around the world.
The Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) first contacted Verizon last year after finding files being shared through the Kazaa peer-to-peer network from computers with IP addresses on Verizon's network.
They had no way to find who the users behind those computers were, so used a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to issue a court-authorised subpoena to the ISP, asking for the subscriber names.
Verizon refused, arguing that they were just a communications channel and had nothing to do with the potentially copyright-infringing behaviour of their customers.
They also said that because the DMCA subpoenas were issued by a court clerk and not by a judge they were unconstitutional.
Powerful labels
Now a court has ordered them to hand over the names, although the legal arguments will continue for a bit longer as the appeal has not been finally decided.
But it seems pretty clear that under existing law Verizon have little chance of winning.
The DMCA was written to give massive power to copyright owners, and it is working.
There is also little chance of any changes to the law getting through a US political system where many elected representatives rely on campaign funding from the entertainment industry.
So we can assume that from now on any time the record or music industry wants to know whose computer is hosting a pirate version of Spiderman, a few ripped MP3s of some old songs or the odd installation of a piece of unpaid for software, they will be able to find out - at least in the US.
This does not mean all of those people will be prosecuted.
One of the aspects of the law raised by this case is that the RIAA can ask for people's names before they start proceedings - they just have to turn up, say "we think these people are abusing our copyright" and they can get the subpoena.
But it may result in even more nasty and threatening letters going out from the RIAA, and have a chilling effect on the free sharing of music over the net and the growth of the file sharing networks.
Political fight
Over here we do not have the DMCA, although our very own European Union Copyright Directive does lots of the same stuff.
However this does not mean we should be relaxed about privacy, especially after recent Home Office proposals for storage of and access to data about e-mails sent and web pages visited.
But UK practice does at least involve the police and the courts: a record company cannot just walk into an office, ask an official for a stamp on a form and send it off to an ISP.
US net users should be very worried about the implications of the Verizon case. The techno-optimists say that the next generation of file-sharing services will make it impossible to pin down which computer is hosting a file and so the law will be helpless.
This may work for a while, but just as in the ongoing battle between virus writers and anti-virus tools, each side has clever programmers and an incentive to develop new ways to get what it wants.
The real fight here is political. The record industry wants complete control over what people do with the songs it publishes; the people want some freedom to decide for themselves.
Until we can resolve this difference we will continue to see more court cases, threatening letters, and new releases of file-sharing tools.
We need to rethink what copyright means in a digital world, rather than wasting so much time, effort and money on this conflict.
Bill Thompson is a regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Go Digital.
© BBC MMIII