Govt. should stay out of mandating digital rights standards but m...
Govt. should stay out of mandating digital rights standards but make clear that incidental temporary copies of digital music aren’t subject to copyright liability., Assn. for Competitive Technology (ACT) said. ACT’s comments came in response to request by House…
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Judiciary Committee Chmn. Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and other lawmakers for suggestions on how to amend Copyright Act for Digital Age. Content owners, device makers and information technology companies agree that successful digital rights management (DRM) standards must have certain features, ACT said: (1) They should be so easy to use they're almost invisible to consumer. (2) Users should be able to recombine and share any of their own digital content. (3) DRM solutions should be interoperable among devices and distribution channels. (4) Technology should be flexible enough to adapt to different business models. (5) DRM technology and devices should be capable of online updates with new protection software. (6) Content providers must have DRM databases and systems to define and manage rights to their content. (7) Corporations and educational institutions should have DRM systems to manage content and group rights. Two machine-to-machine standards have emerged, ACT said, and market will allow others to develop without need for revamping the Copyright Act. However, Congress should clarify that RAM buffer copies don’t implicate copyright owner’s reproduction right. ACT expressed support for Music Online Protection Act’s (MOCA) provisions on incidental and archival copying and ephemeral recordings but it criticized what it said was proposal’s “nondiscriminatory licensing” provision, saying it merely protected “middlemen and their deep-rooted business models.” Govt. shouldn’t mandate DRM technology standards, ACT said, because it would: (1) Put govt. in role of picking winners and losers. (2) Freeze technology by requiring govt. approval of design changes. (3) Make it easy for hackers to circumvent standards published on govt. Web sites. (4) Prevent inventors from winning govt. certification if their DRM technology isn’t reasonably priced. (5) Raise specter of having standards-setting bodies captured by large companies.