Raising the volume on cyber theft
COMMENT
CAMBRIDGE • John Palfrey is the soft-spoken executive director at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Housed in a Victorian mansion, the Center is one of many cyber-champions that have been raising the volume on the debate about the future of the Internet and intellectual property rights.
At stake is the system of gigantic corporations and individuals — who own rights to everything from music to software or movies — against computerized hordes of “ geeks” and young people who get hold of these products without paying any fees, rents or royalties.
Besides the issue of piracy, there are also the legal concerns about lobbying by the intellectual property corporate interests to get Congress to continue extending their patent and copyright protection. To critics, it’s a multitrilliongrab beyond what, many believe, inventors should be allowed to recoup in royalties for their inventions.
“There have been 17 extensions by Congress,” said Mr. Palfrey in a recent interview. “ Initially, protection lasted only 14 years. Creators should be paid for their work. They need to make a living. But the monetizing of intellectual property has made this a serious business, and legal, matter.”
(Intellectual Property is a term less than 100 years old. Copyright laws first appeared in Britain in the 18th century, but were enshrined in the U. S. Constitution. Patent and trademark legislation was created 50 years ago.)
The Berkman Center does research about technology and its effects, but also gets involved in litigation.
Its lawyers were involved, with others, in an attempt to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to knock down Congressional approval a few years ago to extend patent and copyright protection by another 20 years, Mr. Palfrey said.
They lost. The U. S. Supreme Court ruled seven to two in favour of more protection. Now corporations enjoy 95 years worth of patent protection and inventors, their lifetime plus 70 years after their deaths.
The Center has also waded into the issue of piracy or Internet exchanges of music, movies and software.
The first public skirmish was in 2000 and involved Napster versus the music industry, plagued by people sharing digitized music without paying royalties to artists or their masters.
“Hollywood is embattled and sees the writing on the wall. They have watched the music industry be clobbered. The only difference between movies and the music business is that the files are bigger, which means they take longer to download and can be more easily caught,” he said.
Individuals are prosecuted every day in the U. S. for this infringement and are caught by “police” hired by Internet Service.
“ They [the police] can also restrict the bandwidth so movies take five hours to download instead of one hour. This is called bandwidth shaping,” he said.
Berkman enjoined the most recent lawsuit about this issue, which was launched by movie studio MGM against Grokster and others who run what are euphemistically called “peer-topeer sharing services.” To movie studios, these peers are simply pirates.
The Berkman Center sided with Grokster, which based its argument against MGM on a 1984 case involving Sony Corp., inventor of the VCR. Back then, the television and movie industries felt threatened by the VCR’s ability to tape content for free and sued Sony. But they lost.
The U.S. Supreme Court voted five to four in favour of Sony on the basis that the VCR could be used to illegally tape content but it could also be used legally for people’s own personal use.
The Court went further arguing that if Sony lost its case, then the photocopy machine industry would also be guilty of widespread copyright infringement, Mr. Palfrey said.
“Grokster won in lower courts based on Sony’s defence,” he said. “But the change occurred because the industry is threatened. All content companies are.”
Grokster’s other problem was its aggressive marketing, which encouraged people to grab content from elsewhere without paying for it.
“ The second line of reasoning by MGM was that if marketing of the product induced violation of copyright then the copier was guilty,” he said. “ Apple with its iPod used to advertise ‘ rip, mix and burn’, but after pressure backed off that right away.”
The Center is also committed to helping keep the Internet as open as possible in order to encourage innovation, education and democratization.
“ The Open Net Initiative tries to stop China’s efforts to block or slow surveillance of Internet communications. The Internet has a democratizing effect. We are also interested in enhancing that.”