text: Flow Of Info - tribunedigital-chicagotribune
  Copyright Protection Proposals Could Profoundly Crimp Viewing And Reading Habits
  September 18, 1998|By Robert Samuelson, Washington Post Writers Group.
  WASHINGTON — This is not about Monica. It's about copyright legislation, The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. The point of discussing it is that it's not in the news and may turn out to be profoundly important. In this, it resembles much legislation now before Congress: say, revisions in personal bankruptcy law and proposals to minimize the year-2000 computer problem. Something besides scandal is occurring in Washington, and when the scandal has passed, the humdrum legislation may affect ordinary Americans more than anything that happens to Bill Clinton.
  Copyright revision is a case in point. It would set ground rules for traffic in information over the Internet--a business that, someday, could total hundreds of billions of dollars and control how Americans receive much of their news and entertainment. Huge interests and fierce controversy surround the copyright proposals. On one side are movie studios, record companies, the software industry and book publishers: a commercial complex that claims value added of nearly $300 billion. On the other are 40,000 libraries, many colleges and universities, some consumer groups and academic experts.
  To its proponents--the studios and their allies--copyright legislation would unleash digital commerce by toughening prohibitions against pirating movies and other data from the Internet. Critics don't object to that but claim that the proposed anti-piracy rules are so tight that they would restrict the free flow of information. They would (say critics) create a "pay-for-use" world in which publishers, studios and others could lock up more and more information in computer memory--which could be used only by dropping coins into a cyber meter.
  There is a legitimate debate here. Copyright has long been a balancing of interests: protection for creators, so that they have an economic incentive to create; and reasonable access to information for the public to aid scientific progress, popular enlightenment and pleasure.
  Under today's copyright law, "works for hire"--including movies, software programs and most records--generally have copyright protection for 75 years. Anyone who wants to use them must typically pay a royalty to the copyright owners. Book authors have copyright protection for their lives, and their heirs receive another 50 years. Nathaniel Hawthorne's books can be freely reproduced; Norman Mailer's cannot.
  But copyright protection is not absolute; it is modified by a doctrine called "fair use." If you want to copy a few pages of a book for a research paper, you don't have to get permission or pay a royalty. Sending the same pages to 5,000 people would be infringement. In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that copying a TV program on a VCR for personal viewing was "fair use." All this sounds vague because it is. In practice, courts decide what's "fair use" and what's infringement.
  The Internet complicates this balancing. Consider movies. In 1997, Hollywood received almost half its picture revenues from home-video rentals. In the future, the video business could move to data networks. Instead of browsing at Blockbuster, viewers could have a film zapped to their home screen.
  Piracy threatens such cyber commerce. If people make copies of movies--and trade or sell them over the Internet--then studios face big losses. Similar problems afflict software, music and text sold over the Internet. There are technical ways to deter piracy. Digital transmissions can carry codes or passwords; but these can be broken. To fight piracy, major nations signed a global copyright treaty in 1996 to outlaw distribution of illegal copies over the Internet. And countries committed themselves to protect the security systems used to guard copyrighted material by combating efforts--through software or electronic boxes--to defeat the codes and passwords.
  Here is where the balancing gets tough. If data can be protected by code--and it's illegal to break the code--then "fair use" for anything that arrives digitally may vanish. It could become illegal to record a TV program. Libraries fear that as more information goes online (especially reference works), people will be able to read only for a price. Freely copying a few pages may become much harder.
  What are we doing to ourselves? It's hard to tell. Almost no one is watching. Congress is considering various proposals that would modify U.S. laws to comply with the treaty. The treaty does permit countries to modify their anti-piracy strictures to preserve "fair use." The House bill allows the Commerce Department to carve out exceptions to the anti-piracy provisions; the Senate bill does not. What will the final legislation do? Will there be final legislation? If not, the world copyright treaty will probably founder and piracy will flourish.
  Even in normal times, such unglamorous issues would receive only modest attention. But now, they are overwhelmed by the obsession with scandal. After the scandal, we may discover what has been done--good and bad--for us or to us.