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[DMCA-Activists] One attendee's report on DMCA 1201 hearings
From: |
Seth Finkelstein |
Subject: |
[DMCA-Activists] One attendee's report on DMCA 1201 hearings |
Date: |
Tue, 15 Apr 2003 14:19:19 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.4i |
[The following is written by J.T. Stanton of the Penguinal Ebullience blog,
not by me - though it fits very well with my own memory and perceptions ]
[ http://penguinal.net/archives/2003_04_index.html#000641 ]
April 11, 2003
DMCA Sec.1201 Exemption Hearing #1
Note : I am not a robot. Some quotes may be ever-so-slightly paraphrased
The first of several hearings for exemptions under section 1201 of the
DMCA took place at the Library of Congress today. Fortunate enough to
have a cool boss, I was able to attend 'on detail'. This set of
hearings will cover the exemptions granted from Oct. 28, 2003 - Oct.
27, 2006. The first panel convened at 10:00 : half an hour late
following a suicide attempt on the subway. It consisted of Seth
Finkelstein (who has spent much of his own spare time and money over
the past years cracking censorware databases ; he was fresh off the
plane on his own dollar) and Jonathan Band (representing a number of
library associations) supporting exemption for the decryption and
compilation of the databases used by various censorware programs, and
David Burt of N2H2 (which recently pulled off a victory against the
ACLU in a censorware case) opposing the exemption.
Seth and Band operated largely as a single coherent unit during the
proceedings. Seth did most of the talking, with Mr. Band occasionally
translating Seth's insightful, sometimes gleefully blunt arguments
into legalese. Seth did a good thing by trouncing early on the
semantics game of 'filtering' versus 'censoring' : "Filtering is when
you block something you don't want to see. Censorship is when someone
blocks something they don't want you to see." This helped immensely,
and the panel seemed very receptive of what he had to say : that the
public has an inherent right to know what is being blocked from public
schools and libraries, that censorware manufacturers are not receptive
to complaints of malfunctioning software, and that a decryption of any
given program's list of censored sites does not constitute a
compromise of the ability of that program to function.
The panel drilled Seth quite a bit on the exact technical methods he
used to crack the encryption of N2H2's BESS database, but needless to
say, he didn't indulge them on that count, despite their lengthy and
repeated queries. Eventually, they let it go after Seth 'took the
fifth'.
The arguments presented by N2H2's David Burt, however, did not fare so
well under the panel's scrutiny (or so it would seem to this lay
observer). First off, Mr. Burt had little to no legal training . . .
he was a PR lackey. He stated repeatedly during the proceedings that
he was "not familiar with the topic at hand" and therefore "not fit to
comment on the matter". So what do you do when you've got Seth
Finkelstein sitting next to you and the general council of the Library
of Congress in front of you ? That's right, muddle the issues !
Mr. Burt brought us a number of quotable quotes such as "We don't want
to become the world's largest provider of porn to children" in his
responses to the panel's questions of how the cracking of BESS's
database would do any demonstratable harm . . . a question which he
never answered in person, though N2H2's filings, as read by Seth, say
that no demonstratable harm stands to be done by people reading filter
lists. This is apparently not what our PR chum thought, as he not only
warned of "the risks of this material being distributed on P2P
networks" (which struck me as silly, because P2P nets have oodles of
porn on them), but continued to try and draw blood from the stone of
"If this exemption is passed, little children everywhere will stand to
be assailed by pornography !"
It was at this point in his floundering that Seth came forward with
"One thing I'd like to point out is that your list of porn sites isn't
even very good." This was met, needless to say, with riotous laughter
from everyone in the room.
Another big issue Mr. Burt couldn't put down was the fact that any
site's censored status could be checked via database.n2h2.com. This,
he said, totally negated the need for public dissemination of the
complete database. This led into "if the database can be read by
anyone, our competitors can use it". The panel didn't seem to buy that
: three of its five members asked at length how the database would
suddenly fail to be protected by traditional copyright following an
exemption from the DMCA. This, in turn, led to a rather amusing bit
(during which general council member David Carson could be seen
stifling a laugh) about *where would it end ?* If N2H2's databases
could be opened for inspection, couldn't those of, say, Lexis-Nexis or
Oracle (?) ? "Once you go down this road, where do you stop ?"
Sampling via N2H2's website, his logic went, should be enough for
anyone.
"But wonder if [Seth] wants to claim fair use over the publication of,
say, ten sites from some of the millions of entries in the database ?"
"He could put those ten sites through the validator."
Brief pause.
"Not if he doesn't know what they are !"
My money's on the exemption being renewed.
After a recess for lunch, the second panel (copy-restricted red book
audio CDs) convened at 1:30. This panel was much less lively - it was
Thomas Leavens of Full Audio Corporation and Seth Greenstein of the
Digital Media Association arguing for exemption against Steve Englund,
the RIAA rep who looked for all the world like William H. Macy. The
entire panel was approached very much from a webcasters' view (Mr.
Leavens and Mr. Greenstein both have tight ties to the commercial
webcasting industry - Mr. Leavens spoke of his 'partnerships' with
Microsoft and Clear Channel) and went for about twenty-five minutes
before becoming a nearly indecipherable verbal quagmire, with the
panel and the three speakers splitting and resplitting hairs over what
congress meant by 'limited' and 'reasonable', where the line was drawn
between access controls and copy controls, and how much power the
Office of Copyright has to revise what congress wrote. The basic
arguments of FAC/DMA were that the RIAA needs to give webcasters
unprotected copies of CDs, as copy-protected CDs cannot be ripped into
PCs as ephemeral copies. RIAA (Mr. Englund) maintained that webcasters
need to write for permission every time they want an unprotected CD,
or they can just audio-out the CD to a computer. He also said that if
webcasters could play the CD in a regular CD player, they could be
legally be said to have 'access' to it - never mind that it is
completely impractical to jerry-rig a hardware CD player to a computer
to webcast (see Jack Valenti's "Just make a VHS copy of the DVD and
and fair-use that !"). His opponents retorted that if they could not
be given access to the red book audio of new releases (not WMA files
or 'second-session' compressed CDs or whatever oddness the RIAA
distributes to them now), then the 8.8% royalties they are paying are
for nothing.
Quote from RIAA : "The copy-protection of these CDs is easy to
circumvent and will probably remain easy to circumvent."
Ultimately, the panel seemed split on this one : the DMCA does not
allow exempting specific uses for a class of work, but the webcasters
are paying 8.8% royalties to RIAA and friends. I left before the
second panel was over, as did about half the other people there. The
remaining DC hearings will be on May 1st, 2nd, and 9th.
Posted by J.T. at 05:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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Seth Finkelstein Consulting Programmer address@hidden http://sethf.com
Anticensorware Investigations - http://sethf.com/anticensorware/
Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/
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