RIAA condemns US fair rights proposals

 

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By Simon Aughton

Posted on 1 Mar 2007 at 11:41

An attempt by two US congressman to introduce fair use rights for digital copying has been condemned by the major record companies, who claim that it would 'legalise hacking'.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents the interests of the major labels, said that the bill would allow companies to encourage people to break the law. It would enable exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that would permit DRM systems to be cracked in order to enable private copying.

The RIAA believes that it would be impossible to distinguish between legal and illegal DRM circumvention.

'The difference between hacking done for non-infringing purposes and hacking done to steal is impossible to determine and enforce,' it said in a statement.

The Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing US Entrepreneurship (Fair Use) bill was introduced this week and would permit the circumvention of DRM in six specific areas, provided the copyright holder's business is not affected. One of its sponsors, Representative Rick Boucher, said that the bill is a response to an unprecedented threat to fair usage.

'Historically, the nation's copyright laws have reflected a carefully calibrated balanced between the rights of copyright owners and the rights of the users of copyrighted material,'he said. 'The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the public's right to fair use.'

Boucher's previous attempt to enshrine fair use rights in US law failed. Consequently the provisions in the new bill go nowhere as far as before, when Boucher attempted to introduce fair rights regardless of any anti-circumvention laws such as the DMCA.

'In an effort to address the concerns expressed by content owners, the Fair Use Act does not contain provisions which would have established a fair use defence to the act of circumvention,' Boucher said.

As a result, the bill is fairly toothless, according to one critic.

'A cursory investigation suggests that the bill won't make much of a dent in the DMCA,' Ars Technicaobserved Ars Technica's Ken Fisher. 'There is no allowance for consumers to make backups of DVDs, to strip encryption from music purchased online so that it can be played anywhere, or to generally do any of the things that the DMCA made illegal in one fell swoop.'

In the UK, fair rights look certain to be included in planned changes to intellectual property laws, following recommendations by the Government-sponsored Gowers review. The BPI, the UK music industry's main umbrella organisation, has said that it would not object to a tightly worded change to the law.