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May 17, 2002

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Business 2.0 article on Replay and BPDG

A May 8 Business 2.0 article by Eric Hellweg discusses the ReplayTV litigation and BPDG.

Two sources who attended the meetings -- and provided me with their notes -- don't paint a pretty picture of what happened behind closed doors at the late-April BPDG meetings in Los Angeles. In one exchange, in which consumers' fair-use rights were being discussed, Andy Setos, president of engineering at Fox Broadcasting, admitted that consumers' fair-use rights (granted by Congress in the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act) would be negatively affected by the group's proposal. "One thing is for sure," he reportedly said. "There are fair uses that this document precludes." (When asked to confirm these remarks, Setos insisted that he never made them.)

That's interesting -- I remember hearing Andy Setos say that! (I think it was part of the "content protection comes first" exchange, in which Setos said several memorable things which ought to cause concern for every user of copyrighted material.) The controversy over whether he said this, though, is a fine example of why having the press at these events would be helpful. It's clear that journalists are continually missing valuable material which would improve their coverage of BPDG.

By the way, consumers' fair use rights weren't "granted by Congress in the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act" (which doesn't apply to TV broadcasts); the particular fair use rights at issue are mainly those affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1984 in the Betamax case. There are parallels between the AHRA and the currently-proposed legislation because both contain technology mandates (in fact, both mandates have been drafted by several of the same attorneys). AHRA, like most industry-negotiated legislation, is a complex issue -- about which we should have more to say in the future.

Posted by Seth Schoen at 09:36 AM