Consensus at Lawyerpoint: Fox reps enjoy fair use

April 04, 2002

[Rants]
Fox reps enjoy fair use

A moment of delicious irony from yesterday's BPDG meeting. The Fox reps sitting next to me spent the morning pillorying the suggestion that a standard should reflect technical criteria, not the whim of the studios ("It's our content, we should decide what criteria we use when evaluating new technologies that we may entrust it to!").

When they came back after supper, they were passing around a photocopied printout of the Doonesbury series on Napster, in which Mike Doonesbury and his daughter Alex argue both sides of the file-sharing debate.

They got quite a chuckle out of it, but seemed not to appreciate the irony -- copy-prevention flags at the browser, printer or copier would have given cartoonist Garry Trudeau the ability to restrict the very use they were making of his strips.

Posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:49 PM

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What is the BPDG?

In the year 2006 all over-the-air television will be digital. This is pretty hot stuff: crystal-clear pictures, ear-popping audio and interactive features for days. But as the technologists give, the studios take away.

The Broadcast Protection Discussion Group is an obscure group of Hollywood studios and technology companies that are negotiating a "consensus" for any gadget or code that can touch the studios' product. Once they're done, they want to go to Washington and ask Congress and/or the FCC to give their "standard" the force of law.

So what? Well, this is a radical departure from the way it's usually done. Usually, bright nerds invent something cool and the entertainment industry has a nervous breakdown and runs around telling everyone that the sky is falling (Marconi got sued over the radio, Sony got sued over the VCR, and it took a near miracle to get movies out of the studios' vaults and onto television). People pick up on the tech and all the interesting ways that it can be used as a creative tool, and gradually the entertainment industry realizes that a new day has dawned and gets its act together, starts shipping product for the new media, and takes home yet another squillion dollars.

This time around, the entertainment industry wants to take away all that sloppy, inefficient fooling around where technology companies try out lots of different approaches, where garage inventors go from obscurity to posterity under a hail of customers, where you and I get to invent amazing new uses for our stuff that a bunch of engineers in a board-room never would've thought of in a million years. This time around, everything not forbidden is mandatory. MORE...