It's my content, so you should protect it for me

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 16 May 2007 15:39

Your IT - Home IT

There's an unpleasant trend among music and TV companies seeking to enforce their copyrights: they seem to think that other people should actively apply technology to stop third parties from making unauthorised copies of the content.

It always seemed to me that the verdict in the so-called Betamax case was about right. Highly paraphrased, it stated that if someone makes a product (or by implication offers a service) that has substantial noninfringing uses, they can't be held responsible if another party uses that product or service infringe copyright.

Subsequent legislation in various countries makes it an offence to bypass a technological measure intended to prevent unauthorised copying (technological protection measures, or TPMs), but copyright owners seem to be seeking court backing for their desire that manufacturers and service providers build in TPMs.

It's one thing for a company or consortium to develop a specification that includes TPMs and then require the inclusion of those TPMs as a condition of the licence (think DVD or Blu-ray, for instance), but it's quite another to insist that the designers of other systems include TPMs just in case someone should try to use them with unauthorised copies.

If YouTube expects a quid pro quo in the form of a licensing deal from copyright holders who benefit when it blocks the uploading of unauthorised copies, what's wrong with that? But the English Premier League and Viacom seem to think YouTube should actively police their copyrights for them without compensation, even though only a minority of YouTube clips are reportedly infringing.

Last week saw what seemed a ridiculous ambit claim by Media Rights Technologies (MRT) in the form of 'cease and desist' letters to Apple, Microsoft, Real and Adobe, claiming that the mere fact that those companies had not incorporated MRT's anti stream ripping technology into their media player products was contrary to the DMCA.

And now we have Warner Music suing social networking site Imeem because some of its users have posted unauthorised copies of copyrighted material, contrary to a prohibition prominently displayed in Imeem's terms of service and when users upload content, and echoed in postings in Imeem's blog.

Warner's claim that Imeem invites its "millions of users to flock to its website to copy, adapt, distribute and perform unlicensed sound recordings and music videos" seem unfounded, as it only invites users to upload material to which they own the rights.

It's interesting that the suit follows a deal between Imeem and Snocap to use the latter's technology to identify music belonging to participating content owners, stream it only if permitted, and then pay the owner a share of advertising revenue associated with the stream. Snocap claims over 2300 record labels have signed up, and that there is no charge for a Snocap account set up to merely block the streaming of content.

How much more can the record companies, TV companies and movie studios reasonably ask for? Maybe 'reasonably' doesn't even come into it - US law seems to be changed each time Disney's Mickey Mouse copyright is about to expire.