The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/technology/07sharing.html?oref=login&th
|
He is
also a byproduct of the long-roiling public relations battle between copyright
owners, who say they are threatened by digital piracy, and technology advocates
opposed to strict controls on the copying of digital media, and on the kinds of
software that make piracy so easy.
With the
Supreme Court scheduled next month to hear a pivotal case pitting copyright
holders (represented by MGM Studios) against the makers of file-sharing
software (Grokster and StreamCast Networks), some participants are putting
their message machines into high gear.
But
winning hearts and minds - of teenagers, consumers and lawmakers - has never
been a simple matter.
"It's
hard for two reasons," said Rick Weingarten, the director of the Office
for Information Technology Policy at the American Library Association, which
has been exploring ways to strike a balance in the copyright and antipiracy
messages being aimed at young people.
"Copyright
law is not the easiest thing to explain, and it's hard to put a bumper sticker
on it," Mr. Weingarten said. "But, you're also talking about the
future, and it's hard to explain to a consumer that there could one day be a
lot of restrictions on what you can do with new technology."
One side
must make people care about obscure technological innovations that they say
will be stifled by legislative action or an adverse Supreme Court ruling. The
other side battles the image of greedy corporate profiteers and the perception
that freely downloading copyrighted works is something other than theft.
"It
was easier before the computer," said Dan Glickman, the president and chief
executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, which has ramped up its
antipiracy efforts in recent weeks with a new round of lawsuits and a media
campaign warning would-be thieves to "think again." Two weeks ago,
the association also began offering a free, downloadable program that allows
parents to scan computers for file-sharing software and potentially pirated
media files.
"People
knew they couldn't steal a video tape out of Blockbuster," Mr. Glickman
said, "but the principles are still the same."
Not to be
outdone, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights advocacy group
that is representing StreamCast Networks in the Grokster case, unveiled its
Endangered Gizmos campaign to coincide with the filing of dozens of
MGM-friendly amicus briefs with the Supreme Court late last month.
The
campaign displays cheeky taxonomies of "extinct" or
"endangered" techno-species like the original file-sharing service
Napster, which was sued into submission, and the Streambox VCR, which allowed users
to record streaming media off the Internet and suffered a similar fate. The
foundation hopes to convince consumers and lawmakers that there are cultural
costs to giving copyright holders too much power.
"So
many of the issues that we deal with are really abstruse," said Wendy
Seltzer, an intellectual property attorney with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation and the principal creator of the Endangered Gizmos campaign.
"And yet they touch a whole segment of the public that we want to reach out
to."
Whether
any of these messages is getting through is an open question. Survey data from
the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit research group in
Washington, show that among those who actively download music, 58 percent still
say they do not care if the material is copyright protected.
Among the
general public, 57 percent say they are unfamiliar with concepts like
"fair use" - the kernel of copyright law that allows people to copy
protected materials under certain conditions, and which digital rights groups
contend has been inappropriately constricted by the recording and film
industries.
The fight
has given rise to grass-roots organizations like Downhill Battle, a nonprofit
group based in
In a
challenge to fair-use restrictions, the group made digitized, downloadable
copies of "Eyes on the Prize, Part I: Awakenings" - the first
installment of a 1987 documentary on the civil rights movement - and is
encouraging mass, noncommercial screenings of it tomorrow. The film has largely
been absent from television and video rental shelves while the production
company, Blackside Inc., of Boston, works to renew (and pay for) permissions on
the hundreds of copyrighted elements used in the film - from archival news
footage to songs like "Happy Birthday."
Blackside
was not pleased with the copying and distribution of its film, and persuaded
the group to remove it from its Web site last week. But fear and confusion over
the legal issues has led at least one county in
"The
school district didn't understand that they have fair-use rights," said
Tiffiniy Cheng, a director of Downhill Battle, which lists more than two dozen
venues that, it says, have committed to screening the film.
But the
nagging fear of legal action, even among right-minded users of digital
materials, has made it difficult for copyright holders to foster a positive
public image - even though they see lawsuits as critical to stamping out theft.
"It
would be ideal if our educational efforts got more attention," said Mitch
Bainwol, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America,
which has waged a well-publicized legal campaign against file sharers.
"But the lawsuits get more coverage because of the nature of the
controversy."
Those on
the digital rights side of the debate recognize the content industry's image
problem - and they are not above exploiting it. But they know that their own
image is troubled, too.
Indeed,
all but the most strident digital anarchists agree that illegal file sharing is
wrong. Yet those who argue for strong fair-use protections are often portrayed
by opponents as supporters of theft.
"They
can so easily be painted as favoring piracy," said Susan Crawford, a
professor of Internet law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School in New York and
a member of the advisory board for Public Knowledge, a Washington group that
has fought legislation that it argues would stifle new technological advances.
"They have to deal with a concept that's even harder to visualize -
innovation - and they have not found a sound bite or a picture that puts across
a message to people."
For
groups like Public Knowledge, antipiracy tactics like the entertainment
industry's case against Grokster and StreamCast or legislation like the Induce
Act, which stalled in Congress last year and which opponents argued would have
stifled technological innovation by making developers of file-sharing software
subject to lawsuits, present a morass of legal and technical nuance that is
hard to reduce to sound bites.
That is
why the Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken to turning the gizmos they see
threatened by the Grokster lawsuit into pandas and spotted owls. "That's
an image," Ms. Crawford said. "They can play on people's love for
gadgets," although she added that it's not quite the humanizing stroke one
might hope for.
"It's
an uphill battle to visualize innovation," she said.
The
Business Software Alliance, the powerful consortium of software manufacturers,
might well agree with that sentiment.
The group
clearly wants to stamp out the use of pirated software - a recent study by
International Data Corporation estimated that 36 percent of software installed
on computers worldwide was pirated. But it is also interested in fostering the
development of new technologies that, in addition to having perfectly legal
uses, could also be abused by pirates.
"It's
easy for one side to say well, let's just limit the functionality of
technology, because we only care about the pain it's causing our
business," said Emery Simon, the director for general policy at the
alliance. "On the flip side, you can say, well, technology is the
superceding and overarching good. Both are right, and both are wrong."
In
addressing those rights and wrongs, the alliance has mounted some of the more
ambitious public campaigns of any group - including the introduction of Garret
the Ferret into schools. The group has also relicensed its use of the cartoon
character Dilbert, which it has used to reach out to professional engineers,
via Web sites like BSAengineers.com
and through bulk mailings, to warn them against using pirated software.
"We
hope that the engineers that got the Dilbert flier will take the message
home," said Debbi Mayster, the alliance's communications manager.
It did
not work for everyone.
Bryan
Fields, a partner and chief engineer with Illiana.net, an Internet service provider to customers in
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