BERKELEY POLICY MAVEN FIGHTS HOLLINGS ON MANY FRONTS
U. of Cal. prof. who finances tech policy centers is taking her battle against federally enforced content control technologies to grass-roots as well as to ivory tower. Pamela Samuelson, who teaches information management, urged audience of computer scientists on Berkeley campus last week to lobby Congress against mandatory controls as proposed by Sen. Hollings (D-S.C.) that she said would ban general-purpose computers as well as open-source players. She urged them specifically to target Sen. Feinstein (D-Cal.), co-sponsor of Hollings’ Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (S-2048).
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Samuelson said that although Hollings bill was unlikely to pass, Hollywood would be back year after year, with good chance of winning similar protections technology by technology, until eventually it had prevailed across board. She said countervailing intervention by consumer groups could win day, however, and she was arousing interest among those organizations.
Meanwhile, she also is trying to influence judiciary and other policy shapers. She co-authored article for next issue of Yale Law Journal promoting recognition of First Amendment right to reverse-engineer technology, which she regards as valuable research pursuit endangered by Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). “But I have to admit it’s going to be pretty difficult” to make persuasive argument, she said. She also argued for judicial doctrine that would disallow anticircumvention actions where they were used for anticompetitive purposes -- www.sims.berkeley.edu/pam/papers/l&e%20reveng5.pdf.
Courts are interpreting DMCA very broadly and exceptions are narrow, Samuelson warned programmers. Ban on removing digital watermarks is absolute and will “catch some poor encryption researcher,” she predicted. Sony, which has been very active in filing DMCA complaints, backed down after publicity when it sent Aibohack.com cease-and-desist demand involving software altering behaviors of Sony’s robotic dog -- but company’s “legal claim is relatively plausible,” she said. And U.S. Dist. Court ruling in 2000 in Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes, known as 2600 magazine DeCSS case, has terrible implications for scientific publishers insofar as dicta indicate they have no standing to raise statutory defenses because they don’t engage in programming activities Congress protected, said Samuelson, who helped draft ACLU brief in case. Samuelson and her husband, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Robert Glushko, donated millions of dollars to law schools at U.C. and American U. to establish technology policy centers.