<<Congressman Hollywood: It's time to revisit the DMCA
By Nate Anderson | Published: December 13, 2007 - 11:04AM CT
Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), also known as Congressman Hollywood, is one of the most powerful members of the House when it comes to intellectual property issues, so when he muses aloud about "revisiting" the DMCA, people listen. Unfortunately, Berman wants to reform the DMCA because it doesn't go far enough, and his ideas sound like they're ripped right from the pages of the Big Content playbook.
Berman chairs the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, and this morning oversaw a hearing on the PRO-IP Act, a bill that could boost statutory damages for copyright infringement and create a special IP enforcement office in the executive branch as well as a new IP division at the Department of Justice. Before witness testimony got underway, Berman mused aloud about things the bill did not contain but which he would like to revisit in the future.
Berman believes that the DMCA, in particular, needs reforming, but not in the ways that consumers have clamored for. Instead, the congressman wants to look again at the issue of "safe harbor" provisions currently extended to ISPs for infringing content flowing across their networks. He wants to examine the "effectiveness of takedown notices" under the DMCA, and he'd like to take another look at whether filtering technology has advanced to the point where Congress ought to mandate it in certain situations.
The ideas could not be more pleasing to companies like Viacom, which is currently suing YouTube over the issue of takedown notices, claiming that simply adhering to the DMCA takedown notice system is not good enough. The MPAA, which has been pushing for ISPs to adopt video filtering on their networks, should also be thrilled.
Big Content has been touting fingerprinting and filtering technologies as the solution to the problem of having their copyrighted content posted online. In October, Viacom and a handful of other companies issued a set of principles governing how user-generated video content should be handled. Signatories to the manifesto would be forced to beyond the boundaries of the DMCA?in the same direction Rep. Berman wants the DMCA to go, in fact.
Gutting the Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA, as Berman appears to be advocating, would also provide a massive boost to the rights-holders. Conversely, it would have a chilling effect, not only on the likes of YouTube, but on any site that hosts any sort of user-generated content. The Safe Harbor is arguably one of the very few worthwhile provisions of the DMCA. Rewriting it to favor the interests of Big Content would be a gigantic mistake.
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