Pondering Value of Copyright vs. Innovation

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

I attended and spoke at both these meetings. They are both online and fun to
watch.

Dave

Pondering Value of Copyright vs. Innovation

March 3, 2003
By AMY HARMON 




 

BERKELEY, Calif., March 2 - Technology scholars, business
leaders and policy makers gathered at California
conferences this weekend to argue whether a mismatch
between two different technologies and the legal policies
that govern them could inhibit free expression and
innovation. 

At one conference, held here at the University of
California at Berkeley, the technology in question was
software known as digital rights management, which allows
copyright holders to set rules on how people can use a wide
range of products, from DVD's to garage-door openers.

The use of such software has grown since the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act was passed by Congress in 1998.
The law, aimed at restraining Internet piracy, made it
illegal to break the digital locks protecting copyrighted
material. 

Carey Sherman, a lawyer for the Recording Industry
Association of America, defended both the law and the
technologies that have sprouted since it was passed. He
said they enable copyright holders to offer users a wide
range of digital material that would otherwise stay locked
up for fear that it might be pirated.

But many speakers at the conference, sponsored by the
Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, expressed concern
that such technologies interfered with a tradition in which
innovators figure out how a competitor's product works by
taking it apart. 

Joseph Liu, an assistant professor at Boston College Law
School, said that the law could have a chilling effect on
academic researchers. "When you're regulating activity this
far upstream," he said, "you have to be careful of
downstream effects."

Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, said
digital rights management could be pushed too far. She
cited as an example a preliminary injunction issued to
Lexmark International by a federal judge in Kentucky on
Friday against a company that makes generic replacement
cartridges for Lexmark printers.

The court found that an electronic chip in Lexmark
cartridges, which marks them as authentic, could be
protected under the 1998 statute.

"We have ceded too much power to copyright owners," said
Ms. Lofgren, who plans on Tuesday to reintroduce a bill
that would amend the 1998 law. "People are afraid to
proceed on innovative measures."

At the other conference, held at Stanford University,
technologists, economists and lawyers clashed over how the
airwaves should be allocated with the advent of technology
that may make the traditional notion of "interference"
between bands obsolete.

Some economists argue that rather than have the Federal
Communications Commission allocate licenses, large chunks
of the spectrum should be sold outright, creating a market
economy for spectrum that, they argue, would drive down
prices and spur innovation.

Others argued that as technology like software-enabled
radios make it easier to communicate over the airwaves
without interfering, such ownership rights are unnecessary
and would only serve to limit the wide-ranging uses of the
spectrum by requiring cumbersome transaction costs for
whoever wanted to use it.

This conference - organized by the Stanford Center for
Internet and Society and titled "Spectrum Policy: Property
or Commons?" - featured a moot court that pitted Lawrence
Lessig, a Stanford law professor, and Yochai Benkler, a New
York University law school professor, representing the
public-ownership side of the debate against Gerald R.
Faulhaber, a business professor at the Wharton School of
the University of Pennsylvania, and Thomas W. Hazlett, a
senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, taking the side
of property. 

One judge, Harold Demsetz, professor emeritus at U.C.L.A.
business school, who acknowledged that his bias leaned
heavily toward the property side, said he had been
impressed with the debate, but he asked for more
clarification. 

"Go back to work and clear up this mess for us," Professor
Demsetz said. "And don't take too long to do it because
we're losing ground fast."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/03/technology/03COPY.html?ex=1047722278&ei=1&;
en=ee9b601e8d7b2876



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