Rich Fiscus
25 Aug 2010 14:04
According to RIAA President Cary Sherman, the DMCA doesn't work for the content industry because it doesn't make service providers responsible for policing copyright infringement.
In statements made as part of a panel discussion at an event hosted by the Technology Policy Institute, Sherman said, "the DMCA isn't working for content people at all."
He went on to explain, "You basically cannot monitor all the infringements on the internet," later adding, "everybody has to do something about piracy."
This line of reasoning is nothing new for the RIAA, but it remains as flawed as ever. It requires that you accept a number of assumptions which simply don't hold up to any real scrutiny.
The most obvious is that there's any way to stop piracy. It's easy to say somebody has to do it, but there's no evidence anyone actually can.
According to the Sherman the solution is for everyone from ISPs on up to do get involved. But this creates some significant legal problems.
How does an ISP monitor the content of on their network without violating federal wiretapping law?
And that's without considering that figuring out whether fair use is involved requires human intervention, which would automatically disqualify the provider from DMCA safe harbor protection.
So if ISPs can't find infringement what about services like RapidShare? Sure they could use a filtering system like YouTube has implemented, but what's to stop people from switching to a new service with no such arrangement in place?
And who is going to pay for all these proposed changes?
Technology doesn't just appear out of the ether and start working. The RIAA 'plan' would require a never ending cycle of development, testing, implementation & troubleshooting. That means an equally never ending cost in man hours and hardware.
You won't find any offers from the labels to pay for it in their talking points, so apparently it's not just everybody's duty to lend a hand. It's also our responsibility to foot the bill.
Which leads to the most obvious question of all. What does the public get for a major overhaul of our legal system and significant financial investment?
It appears we get to help the RIAA pretend it's still 1998.