On ars technica yesterday, Nate Anderson wrote about the Computer & Communications Industry Association's "Defend Fair Use" initiative.
It's a nice run-down of the effort by Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Sun, Red Hat, and others to rein in the overly broad copyright notices that accompany sports broadcasts, DVDs and a wide range of other "big media." Toward the end, however, Anderson notes:
Self-interest might well be among of their motives, too, as companies like Google and Microsoft are routinely sued over copyright-related issues. Defending fair use might be good for consumers, but it might turn out to be good for business as well. (emphasis mine)
Oh, I don't know... Ya think?!?
Google's mantra be be "don't be evil," and I'm sure all the member companies care about consumers, but industry associations don't launch big initiatives like this unless it serves their members' interests.
And in this case, it is in the CCIA's interest to make sure the Fair Use Doctrine -- which has already been severely hamstrung by both technical and legal DRM restrictions in recent years -- doesn't disappear from the public consciousness.
Sorry MPAA, but my wife can legally show an "Alias" clip as part of an academic presentation on the portrayal of women in television. Of course, the encryption on "Alias" DVDs makes pulling said clip a royal pain, and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes most of the actual tools for doing so illegal. And a right that can't be easily exercised usually won't be -- which in turn means that eventually most people won't miss it if that right gets taken away.
In the book Wired Shut, Tarleton Gillespie details how effectively the late Jack Valenti crafted a compelling narrative of piracy, digital potential and noble artists when the MPAA was pushing for the DMCA and other copyright protections/restrictions. It's not that Valenti's arguments were flat-out wrong -- only that the issues had more shades of grey that he would ever acknowledge.
And because Valenti was so good at framing the debate, his narrative became the narrative -- which was invaluable in getting the MPAA's priorities written into law.
What the CCIA is trying to do is re-write some of that narrative. The more fair use seeps into the public consciousness (and into Congress' and the media's) as an important part of copyright law -- and as an important right for average citizens to excercise in this era of the "read-write Web" -- the more wiggle room the YouTubes of the world are going to have when those copyright lawsuits are filed against them.
TechCrunch's Duncan Riley picked up and expanded upon the ars technica story today, offering this bit of commentary:
It's a noble cause, if only because the alternative is absurd. Would we want to live in a society where you would need permission to discuss a football game due to copyright restrictions?
Which, of course, is exactly the sort of reaction the CCIA is hoping to generate.
The TechCrunch audience alone isn't going to cut it, though. The Valenti touch is hard to come by, and the CCIA is going to need more than just www.defendfairuse.org. But it's a good and important start -- because in this case, what's good politics for the CCIA is good public policy as well.
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