DRM FOES SPURN HOLLYWOOD'S PEACE GESTURES AT DEBATE

Ronald Wheeler, senior vp-content protection, Fox Entertainment Group, said his central message was: “Can’t we all just get along?” He and Mitch Glazier, RIAA legislative counsel, insisted that ease of massive, perfect copying of digital content required more govt. protection to make possible investments necessary to keep entertainment pipeline flowing. “You don’t get the [free TV] programming and the right to do whatever you want with it,” Wheeler said: “The free lunch does not exist in copyright any more than anywhere else.” But Wheeler said only “narrow” additional legislation, comparable to Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was necessary in conjunction with private self- help such as encryption. He said recent proposal by Rep. Berman (D-Cal.) went in right direction but bill might need some changes he didn’t identify. Glazier said interindustry negotiation was preferable to govt. mandates, particularly involving technology standards.

However, CEO Wade Randlett of San Francisco Web firm Dashboard Technology, said friendly expressions entertainment executives put on for appearance’s sake bore no resemblance to their belligerent lobbying faces. “When I go to Capitol Hill, there is a war on, full time, every day, to deprive consumers of their rights,” he said. “The same words you hear today are not being used in Washington.” Content owners’ sole goal is “as much money as possibly can be extracted as many times as possible without regard to your fair-use rights,” Randlett said. He, some audience members and CEA Pres. Gary Shapiro mocked entertainment giants for efforts to bar commercial-skipping and, in their view, erase copyright law’s fair-use doctrine. Shapiro tried to shift entire vocabulary of debate. In place of Hollywood’s “nefarious” sounding terminology of “stealing,” “piracy” and “overcopying,” he proposed “more neutral-sounding” terms “sharing or replicating.”

Opponents of new controls gained support from introductory comments by Rep. Lofgren (D.-Cal.), whose district is centered on San Jose. She referred to “the Mouse” -- Walt Disney Co. -- “attacking the Valley” and to Sen. Hollings’ (D-S.C.) S-2048, proposed Consumer Broadband & Digital Television Act, essentially seeking to “lock down current business models on the Internet” at behest of entertainment companies. Even without legislation, Lofgren said, “if we allow cartels of content owners” to set technology standards “we may end up with the same problem.” She said companies had no one to blame but themselves, and their failure so far to create effective online distribution strategies, if otherwise honest consumers flock to file-sharing sites for free copies of music, movies and books. “If the only place you get content is from pirate sites, people will go to pirate sites… The default for a whole [young] generation is doing something very damaging economically.”

Some had policy-position regrets. Lofgren said she had 2nd thoughts about having supported copyright term extension that gave content owner additional years of control on existing IP. She also said courts had upheld much broader application of DMCA than legislative proponents had expected. CEA’s Shapiro confessed his group had been “asleep” on copyright extension. Although act was passed quietly and without fanfare during Clinton Administration, fair-use and public-domain proponents had raised alarms that received media coverage. Plea to rescind law will be considered by U.S. Supreme Court.

“I don’t want to treat you as an enemy,” Fox’s Wheeler told audience questioner who admitted to using file-sharing. Wheeler said his objective was merely “keeping piracy to an acceptably low level… We can’t be in constant competition with ‘free.'”