From:	 Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>
To:	 ip <ip-sub-1@majordomo.pobox.com>
Subject: IP: more on  intel backs consumers in copyright war
Date:	 Thu, 28 Feb 2002 18:10:17 -0500


------ Forwarded Message
From: Mike Godwin <mnemonic@well.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 17:11:32 -0500
To: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>
Cc: mnemonic@well.com
Subject: Re: IP: intel backs consumers in copyright war


Hi, Dave.

I was in the hearing room, and I thought Vadasz's testimony made
important points. But the senators were not terribly receptive to his
arguments, and in fact came close to (effectively) ordering the IT
industry simply to comply with Hollywood's demands (or else they'd be
forced to by legislation). It was clear to me and to other
technically knowledgeable people in the room that neither the
senators nor most of the copyright-company witnesses grasped the
scope of what Disney's Eisner and others were asking for.

The IT community has a formidable task ahead of it when it comes to
educating policymakers about the problems and costs of proposals like
the one Senator Hollings floated prior to this hearing. Because a
central goal of Hollywood's lobbying effort this time is to prevent
unencrypted and unwatermarked content from being circulated on the
Net, and the only kinds of measures that could do this require
top-to-bottom rearchitecting of every aspect of the digital world.
This rearchitecting would, among other things, require first the
labelling of all coprighted content and secondly a redesign of all
digital tools (from PCs to OSs to routers to everything else) to look
for the labels and permit or deny copying accordingly. But few
speakers at the hearing seemed to be aware of this.

Consumer and civil-liberties groups were not represented on the
witness list, but they were in the room, as were representatives of
many companies that would be affected by schemes like the one that
might be mandated by Senator Hollings.  Most audience members were
visibly amused or distressed when Eisner confessed that the only
reason he could think of for Michael Dell not to build in ubiquitous
copyright-policing functions in his products was that Dell wants to
sell his products to infringers.

The central thing I took away from the hearing was that too many of
the players and decisionmakers in this area lack the basic technical
understanding necessary to make intelligent copyright-policy and
IT-policy decisions. It was disheartening.


--Mike


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