OPINION: Irritant or more?
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Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium star Zach Mills was named best emerging actor at the KIDS FIRST! award show in Malibu on Oct. 7.
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Sony and Reef Check celebrated the DVD release of Surf’s Up at Malibu Bluffs Park in Malibu, Calif., on Oct. 6.
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By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 8/3/2007
AUG. 3 | WASHINGTON—THE UNSKIPPABLE copyright warning at the beginning of DVDs is one of life’s perennial, if minor, irritants, like listening to the twice annual lecture from your dentist about flossing more often. You just have to put up with it.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
But it could soon become the subject of an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, at least if Google, Microsoft and other heavy hitters in the computer and telecommunications businesses have their way.
On Wednesday, the Computer & Communications Industry Assn. filed a formal complaint with the agency, claiming the copyright warnings on DVDs, as well as those announcements during baseball and football games purportedly prohibiting any unauthorized use of the “pictures, descriptions and accounts” of the game, harm consumers by materially misrepresenting copyright law.
“Many of the warnings threaten consumers with criminal and civil penalties for engaging in ‘unauthorized’ activities that are in fact permitted by statute or by limitations imposed by the U.S. Constitution,” the complaint states. “These representations materially misrepresent U.S. copyright law, particularly the fundamental built-in First Amendment accommodations, which serve to safeguard the public interest,” a reference to the fair use rights of users codified in Section 114 of the Copyright Act.
As such, the complaint alleges, the warnings represent “unfair and deceptive” trade practices. In addition to the NFL and Major League Baseball, the complaint names NBC/Universal, DreamWorks Animation, Morgan Creek Productions and two book publishers (including Harcourt Inc., a unit of Reed Elsevier PLC, the same parent company that owns Video Business). But according to a CCIA spokesman, the studios in question were picked merely because their DVD warnings represented some of the most “egregious examples” of overreaching claims.
The complaint asks the federal regulators to order the studios and sports leagues to stop the practice and to engage in “clear and conspicuous” advertising to correct “prior misrepresentations of consumer rights, and further advise consumers that these statements misstated the nature of consumer rights under U.S. law.”
I can’t wait for those “representations” to start appearing on DVDs. They’ll be longer than the movie.
THE COMPLAINT drew support from public interest groups here, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, as well as from the Consumer Electronics Assn., which has long tussled with content owners over where to draw the lines in copyright law.
But it remains a long shot.
Though the complaint attempts to frame the issue as a case of “oppressive, unethical and unscrupulous” trade practice, as a practical matter it asks the FTC to take a position on copyright law, an area over which it has no legal jurisdiction and is likely to be leery of treading.
It may also be difficult to demonstrate a specific harm to consumers caused by the warnings.
A spokesman for NBC/Universal dismissed the complaint as “frivolous.”
An FTC spokeswoman said the agency would review the complaint, as required by law.
Still, it’s not the first time the unskippable copyright warnings have raised hackles. In 2003, the EFF unsuccessfully asked the U.S. Copyright Office to allow an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on circumventing access controls to permit consumers to fast-forward previews and copyright warnings on DVDs.
Nor is CCIA the first to allege deliberate misrepresentation by content owners.
In a study published earlier this year, American University professors Peter Jaszi and Patricia Aufderheide concluded that consumers are being intentionally and effectively deceived about their rights.
“One conclusion we came to in the study is that people aren’t confused by ignorance, they’re confused by active mis-education,” Aufderheide told VB sister site Content Agenda. “They’re being told that nearly everything you do with copyrighted material is piracy.”
The culprits, the researchers concluded, were the content owners.
“I think the industry is part of the misapprehension,” Jaszi said. “Not so much by any particular action but by a long communications campaign to convey the idea of nearly everything you do with copyrighted material is theft.”
The professors urge better education in schools and in public to counter the industry’s one-sided message.
Ironically, the content industry itself has long pushed for greater public education on the rules governing copyright.
What they may get is just another front in the ongoing copyright wars.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda. Get more of Sweeting's analysis here.
