Re: Copyright and MP3 issues

On 4/29/99, Jessica Litman <litman[_at_]mindspring.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/26/99, Dirceu Pereira <dpsrosa[_at_]ax.ibase.org.br> wrote:
> >
> > Does anyone know a good source of information about copyright issues
> > arising from the illegal copying of music through the mp3 format?
> > or about the use of digital watermarks against possible copying of
> > coptrighted materials?
>
> At least in the United States, the legal issues are hotly
> contested. The situation is complicated by the US "Audio Home Recording
> Act", 17 USC sec. 1001 et. seq., which was enacted eight years ago to
> deal with Digital Audio Tape Recorders and has remained essentially
> uninterpreted by the courts due to the commercial failure of consumer
> DAT machines. Legal authorities in the United States disagree over
> whether section 1008 of the Act privileges consumers' noncommercial
> use of MP3 software to make MP3 files of musical recordings, and over
> whether MP3 players or recorders (hardware or software) need to comply
> with the Act's requirement for serial copyright management technology
> and need to pay the digital recorder tax imposed by the Act. The Rio
> case is raising all of those issues. Meanwhile, the RIAA is pushing its
> view of the law, under which it is never legal to make an MP3 file of a
> recording without the copyright holder's permission, and MP3 advocates
> like Michael Robertson at mp3.com are pushing theirs, under which leagal
> uses of MP3 compression technology far outweigh the illegal ones.
>
> WIRED and C|net's news.com have pretty good continuing coverage
> of who is suing whom and who is knuckling under to whom. See WIRED's
> up-to-the-minute coverage at <http://www.wired.com/news/news/mpthree/>,
> and c|net's somewhat less frequently updated coverage at
> <http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,29980,00.html>.

Professor Litman is quite right, although there is a strange and unseemly complication in that the AHRA does not DEFINE what a Serial Copy Management System IS... (Even the legislative history on this makes it difficult to track down, because new technology makes such a defined system -- designed with DAT machines in mind -- more or less obsolete. So the fallback question becomes: what systems are (there aren't) certified under the law as prohibiting unauthorized serial copying.

Sabrina McLaughlin [in my unofficial capacity] U.S. Department of Commerce
Office of the General Counsel- Room 5876 14th Street & Constitution Ave., N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20230
202.482.0445
smclaughlin1[_at_]doc.gov Received on Thu Apr 29 1999 - 19:20:33 GMT