Pubdate: Sun, 06 Aug 2000
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 2000 The Denver Post
Contact:  1560 Broadway, Denver, CO 80202
Fax: (303) 820.1502
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Forum: http://www.denverpost.com/voice/voice.htm
Author: Ed Quillen, Denver Post Columnist

LET'S GET SERIOUS ABOUT COPYRIGHT INFRINGERS

August 6, 2000 - As the creator and distributor of some "intellectual
property," (I agree that sounds pretentious, but if it works for Metallica,
it can work for me), I've been following the Napster case quite closely.

My technological literacy gets more antiquated with each passing day, but as
I understand it, you can take a normal music CD, stick it in your computer,
and indulge in a process called "ripping." That converts the CD's music
tracks into "MP3" files, which don't take up nearly as much disk space, and
can thus be more easily transmitted via the Internet.

Napster set up a central exchange for people to swap MP3 files. Many of
these files represented copyrighted musical material, and so even if Napster
itself wasn't violating copyright laws, it was making it easier for other
people to do so.

That's what the recording industry argued in its suit against Napster, and a
judge agreed, though the court order to shut the site down right away was
stayed.

Meanwhile, there are similar services on the Internet, like Gnutella, whose
principal difference is that Gnutella is dispersed - there isn't one central
exchange site. Indeed, many of these sites might be overseas and thus beyond
the jurisdiction of American courts.

And now some clever people have found ways to break the anti-copying
encryption on DVDs and compress their content, so that copying a full-length
movie is not out of the question if one has a fast Internet connection.

The "intellectual content industry" has fought this sort of thing before, as
with the lawsuits in the 1980s where expensive lawyers argued with a
straight face that the television industry would suffer irreparable harm if
you were allowed to use your VCR to tape a show while you were at work so
you could watch it later.

They also persuaded the federal government to require piracy-protection
hardware for a device called a DAT (Digital Audio Tape), and as a result,
computer users were deprived of what could have been an excellent
mass-market back-up storage system.

So there's no question that the industry has some clout in Washington, and I
have an idea what we might expect, no matter whether it wins or loses the
Napster case.

First, they'll need to pay Congress to make copyright infringement a
criminal, rather than a civil, matter. As it is, if somebody starts
circulating one of my columns without my permission, I've got to find him,
and engage a lawyer to sue him, and persuade a court that I've been damaged,
and if I succeed, try to collect a judgment. As you might suspect, that's so
much trouble that I wouldn't bother.

But once it's a federal crime, rather than a civil tort, then the
intellectual property owner can just report the crime to the feds, which
should be able to take it from there with a couple of new agencies, like the
Videos.

Finding all the violators might be a problem, but the feds already have a
device called Carnivore, which it can attach to the computers used by your
Internet Service Provider. Carnivore scans everything that goes through the
computers, and so it could certainly tell whether you were transferring or
sale of such material.

Armed with this almost irrefutable evidence, federal agents from the CEA or
BATV could then come to your home or office and seize your computer, and
maybe your house, too, since it might have been purchased with the proceeds
of copyright infringement, and it was certainly the premises where crime was
allowed to flourish.

To reduce this crime, it wouldn't hurt to register all hard-disk drives, CD
burners, VCRs, xerographic copy machines, scanners and the like -
law-abiding citizens would have nothing to fear, of course.

chance? A mandatory minimum of at least five years of hard time would send
the message that America is serious about fighting crime, and it would
continue the current prison-construction binge that so helps our economy.

And for those overseas criminal sites that might otherwise escape, we can
negotiate military-assistance pacts with their host nations, and send in
bombers and helicopters to eliminate this scourge from the face of the
earth.

As we all know, these strategies have worked well to eliminate guns and
drugs, and as the owner of some intellectual property, I can barely contain
my excitement at the prospect of a serious crackdown on the scofflaws who
infringe on copyrights.

Ed Quillen of Salida is a former newspaper editor whose column appears
Tuesdays and Sundays.
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