WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An effort to scale back a controversial copyright law gained momentum Wednesday when a powerful committee chairman said consumers should be allowed to break the digital locks that prevent them from copying DVDs and other materials for personal use.
Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton, who took command of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in February, said current law should be scaled back to allow consumers to make personal copies and exercise other long-established “fair use” rights, now prohibited under a 1998 digital-copyright law.
“The balance between consumers’ rights and producers’ rights over copyright material needs to be restored,” Barton said at a hearing on the issue.
Barton plans to schedule a vote on a bill that would scale back the 1998 law, a spokeswoman said. The bill, sponsored by Virginia Democratic Rep. Rick Boucher, has drawn only 15 co-sponsors since it was introduced early last year, but several other committee members voiced their support at the hearing.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has won praise from software companies and other content creators, who maintain that hacking around their digital locks should be outlawed in an age when perfect digital copies of their works can spread instantly across the globe through the Internet.
The law has been invoked to block software that would allow consumers to copy DVDs and electronic books. It has also been used by makers of printer ink-jet cartridges and garage-door openers to shut down rivals and at least one programmer has been jailed under the law.
Critics say the law assumes all consumers who want to copy a DVD onto their laptops will sell that copy on the black market, even though the vast majority have no intention of doing so.
“I am, like other consumers, a profit center for these businesses and it is about time they treated us with a little respect,” said Allan Swift, a former congressman who said he has been making mix tapes for friends for 50 years.
The movie industry’s top lobbyist warned that loosened copyright laws could devastate the industry as he brandished a bootleg copy of the film “Runaway Jury.”
“The honest people will do right, but dishonest people will not do right and, in the digital age, that is a devastation I just don’t want to comprehend,” said Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America.
Boucher’s bill would allow consumers to break digital locks for personal use and allow academics to crack them for research purposes. It would also require content creators to label copy-protected works accordingly.
A Barton spokeswoman said she did not know when the committee would vote on the measure.
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