Facing a public backlash
against the music industry (and Hollywood's) latest attempt to force
lawmakers to intervene on their behalf, the RIAA has come out attacking
existing laws for being "wrongly interpreted", and says that the newly
proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) won't "kill the Internet" as
critics have warned.
First up, at the New York Entertainment and Technology Law
Conference, RIAA senior VP of litigation Jennifer Pariser attacked the
current DMCA legislation as good legislation being "interpreted wrongly"
by courts.
Specifically referring to the "Safe Harbor" provision, which gives
protection to ISPs and websites such as YouTube against the actions made
by its users, Pariser says that too much protection has been given to
Internet service providers, and that service providers, and websites,
have not acted independently enough to remove infringing content, so
called "red flags", and the courts have been complicit in allowing the
situation to get out of hand.
Service providers are typically resistant to independently act on
possible cases of copyright infringement, as these private companies
don't feel they have the legal standing to judge the legal and illegal
status of content, especially without the copyright holders providing
clues as to just what content belongs to them. In the Viacom vs YouTube
trial, YouTube showed examples where Viacom employees uploaded
copyrighted content anonymously to promote Viacom content, and Google,
YouTube's parent company, argued that without rights holders pointing
out acts of infringement, they would have trouble identifying just what
should be allowed and what rights holders may allow for promotional
purposes (for example, Susan Boyle's original Britain's Got Talent
audition video, which may have been uploaded without authorisation, but
has ended up benefiting the rights holder tremendously).
But consumer rights critics would argue exactly the opposite, with
several high profile cases where the DMCA has been abused to silence
opposition and dissenting opinions, to the point where Google at one
point revealed that a third of all DMCA complaints sent to the company
were invalid, and more than half were cases of companies targeting their
competitors.
In a separate op-ed piece on CNET.com,
the RIAA's chief Cary Sherman also defended recent efforts by the
copyright lobby to enact even harsher copyright laws, specifically SOPA.
SOPA has been criticized for being over-reaching, and being a
corporate backed Internet censorship program, whereby the government
will be given the rights to seize domain names and websites of any
website deemed to be engaged in acts of piracy. Rights holders would be
allowed to force financial providers, such as PayPal or ad networks, to
cease support for websites that it merely alleges is engaged in
infringement activity, even if there is only a single link that may be
linking to infringing content on the entire website, or even if the only
"evidence" is just a suspicion (the legislation states that if the
website is seen as doing things to "avoid confirming a high probability"
of piracy, that is if, without real evidence of infringement, a website
can still get into trouble if it's acting suspiciously).
Rights holders can also issue infringement notices to financial
service providers to, in effect, kill off a website without the need to
present court tested proof of infringement, and by bypassing the courts,
the "defendants" are not afforded their due process rights. This
effectively kills the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA, solving the
one problem the RIAA has been at pains to point out.
But the RIAA's argue Sherman says that all of these are necessary,
and critics have been using too much "hyperbole" to get their point
across. Responding to concerns regarding the focus on a single
infringing link, Sherman says that this is deliberate, and that by
focussing on a single link or page, as opposed to the entire website, it
allows for the "Cutting off funding or access to only the illegal part
of the site while leaving the rest of the site intact promotes
legitimate expression."
And as for charges that the bill will kill off tech innovation,
Sherman concludes by saying that "aspiring songwriters" also need to be
protected, just as tech innovators are by "litigious defenders" of
patents such as Apple. But the RIAA, the board of which is mainly
represented the four major labels, has also been accused of ripping off
the very artists that they say they're defending with bills like SOPA,
with pitiful royalty rates for real artists, while the labels keep most for themselves.
Source is
http://www.digital-digest.com/news-63187-Music-Industry-Copyright-Laws-Dont-Go-Far-Enough.html
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