Making the Case
In this morning's News & Record, I go into more detail about the P2P bill, including a specific rebuttal of Coble's article from yesterday (still not online). In the same column, Tara Grubb gets her first print coverage in Coble's district. You can read it all after the jump.
Gillmor on Grubb
"Certainly the information flow among weblogs is having a cumulative effect." San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor gives a level-headed appraisal of what weblog activism could mean. "Industries have learned to put their dollars in the hands of people who can repay the largesse through legislation and other favors. Now, people on another kind of network -- the Internet -- have found a way to challenge Coble."
Tara Grubb's New Site
Coble needs to rethink digital vigilante bill
by Edward Cone
News & Record
8-25-02
Rep. Howard Coble is co-sponsoring a bill that would give Hollywood the right to disrupt your Internet access and, possibly, files on your personal computer. The proposed legislation would also severely limit your recourse against these corporate vigilantes.
Coble's office says that any problems with the proposed law can be ironed out in hearings next month. That's the good news. The bad news is that Coble's initial response to my earlier column on this subject, and to a subsequent News & Record editorial on the same theme, has been to insist that the bill seems to be fine as is.
The bill is not fine. Coble, the chairman of the House subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, has put his name on a piece of legislation that would give corporations unprecedented and overbroad powers - and you won't even have to be a participant in one of the targeted file-sharing networks to feel its weight.
I was disappointed in Coble's response to my column, which consisted mainly of a lecture on the importance of copyright protection (preaching to the choir, since I make my living as a writer) and a virtually substance-free attempt to rebut some key criticisms of the bill. But politics is a process, and I'm not giving up. I continue to believe that Coble respects property and privacy rights, but it is clear that at this point he more fully grasps the importance of copyright protection than he does the workings of the Internet and the rights of its users.
Not everyone is so sanguine about Coble's motives. An online poll at the Scripting News site (www.scripting. com) asks if our congressman is in the pocket of the entertainment industry that provides much of his campaign funding, or if he just doesn't understand the content of the bill, or both. At press time, the leading answer was "both."
The bill is aimed at stopping the illegal exchange of copyrighted files on so-called peer-to-peer, or P2P, networks. By definition, P2P involves personal computers, like the one you or your kid or your neighbor might use to swap music files. The proposed law would let copyright holders carry out denial-of-service attacks to block the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. It's bad enough to allow private entities the right to disrupt Internet traffic, but the bill also says that in some cases where your service is blocked in an attempt to target a pirate, well, tough.
Coble's office made a specific objection to my statement that the bill would allow Hollywood to hack onto your desktop. This may be an area they don't fully understand (Coble's chief of staff, Ed McDonald, says his boss doesn't know how to operate a computer.) While the bill has provisions against tampering with your personal property, it also contains a backdoor method that could allow just that eventuality. The loophole lies in those complex licensing agreements we all click through without thinking when we get new software or services.
"A copyright owner can invade your computer if it has your 'authorization,' " says Fred von Lohmnann, an intellectual property attorney with an advocacy group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "When would you ever authorize such a thing? When it's hidden in a 'clickwrap' license agreement. If the bill passed, there's nothing to stop PressPlay, Microsoft, or any other copyright owners, from putting a 'pre-authorization' into their service agreements."
He adds, "The worst thing about the bill is that it entitles copyright owners to ignore any law, so long as they stay within the (murky) bounds of the statute. ... Copyright owners are saying that, unlike the rest of us, they should be above the law. This is a power that we as a society don't give to anyone, even to the FBI."
One person who opposes the digital vigilante bill is Tara Sue Grubb, the Libertarian candidate opposing Coble in the November election (there is no Democratic candidate). A 26-year-old Realtor who lives in High Point, Grubb seems bright, earnest, and young; I don't know enough about her yet to judge her as a serious politician. She casts the bill in terms of a larger struggle between personal liberty and corporate power. "P2P is the issue that forecasts the future," she says.
Whatever Grubb's merits, she faces what might optimistically be termed an uphill battle: Coble got 91 percent of the vote against the previous Libertarian challenger. He is popular for a lot of reasons, and his district seems unlikely to be galvanized by this particular single issue.
But suddenly Grubb stands to get a lot of support from people across the country who oppose this bill. Any discomfort among local voters over the help she may receive from outside the district should be more than offset by the massive financial support provided to Coble by the entertainment industry. That's the bigger story unfolding here: the use of the Internet to push power - information and money - to the people, to offset the enormous clout that corporations hold with our elected officials. Tara Grubb appears to be the first congressional candidate to have her own Web log (http://radio. weblogs.com/0112137/); that may be the real revolution. The Web isn't going to beat Howard Coble in November, but this new network will help determine a closer race somewhere, and soon.
Copyright protection is a serious issue, but enforcement shouldn't overly empower an entertainment industry that has a history of resisting new technologies from television to the VCR. My hope is that Coble, who two years ago reversed his stance on work-for-hire rules for musicians when an industry-backed bill he supported came under fire, will live up to his reputation for fairness and emerge as a champion of individual liberty. Fixing the digital vigilante bill would be a great place to start.
© News & Record 2002
Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com, www.edcone. com), a magazine journalist and Greensboro native, contributes a column to the News & Record each Sunday.
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