[Boing Boing Blog] Hollywood asks Congress for Letters of Marque

R. A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Sun Jun 30 16:17:04 EDT 2002


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To: boingboing-mailblog at yahoogroups.com
From: "Cory Doctorow" <doctorow at craphound.com>
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Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2002 09:33:54 -0700
Subject: [Boing Boing Blog] Hollywood asks Congress for Letters of Marque
Reply-To: boingboing-mailblog-owner at yahoogroups.com


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Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif has called for a bill that would create a "safe
harbor" for rights-holders who want to attack P2P networks to "protect"
their works. A safe harbor is a checklist of qualifications that will
guarantee you immunity from prosecution. An ISP that does x, y and z can't
be prosecuted for secondary infringement under the DMCA's safe harbor.

Berman is asking Congress for a safe harbor for RIAA and MPAA attacks on
P2P systems. At first, this actually seemed slightly reasonable to me.
Berman says that his bill won't allow rights-holders to damage individual
or ISP computers, and he says the kind of thing they're planning is
flooding the network with bad rips, spoofy meta-data (mislabelling tracks)
and so on. Hey, that's already a problem in the wild in P2P networks, so
what's the big deal, right?

There's something fishy here. Bad meta-data and bad rips are not criminal
acts. There's no need for a safe harbor to protect the labels if they want
to put up Gnutella hosts with 20,000,000 bad tracks (there're already
Christian groups that put up inspirational/chiding images with names that
suggest that the files contain porn, and so put their material directly
into sinners' hands).

Why does Big Content need a safe harbor for something that's not a criminal
act? Safe harbors only exist to protect people who are engaged in an
activity that would otherwise be illegal. When Hollywood seeks a safe
harbor for its attacks on the Internet, you know that what it's really
asking for are
<http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Garden/5213/marque.htm>Letters of Marque --
a license to engage in criminal vigilantism.

So either Berman's blowing smoke or he's not telling the whole story. You
don't need a safe harbor to protect yourself from bad metadata. Watch out
for the text of the bill when it gets introduced -- 90 percent of its
social harm is lurking below the surface.
<http://news.com.com/2100-1023-939333.html?tag=fd_top>Link
<http://www.quicktopic.com/boing/H/cNMPqqC7cKG4>Discuss

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Posted by Cory Doctorow to <http://boingboing.net/>Boing Boing Blog at
6/30/2002 9:32:36 AM

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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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