HRRC Praises Boucher/Doolittle Bill For Defending Consumers And Fair Use

4-Oct-02

The Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC) praised Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) and Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-California) for introducing legislation that would add fair use protections to U.S. copyright law and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (""DMCA""), and would impose tough labeling requirements on ""copy-protected"" CDs. ""It seems that everywhere we look, fair use in general and the Supreme Court's Betamax holding in particular are under attack,"" said HRRC Chairman Gary Shapiro. ""In the digital age, consumers need these protections to be strengthened, not weakened. For too long, the debate in Congress and the courts has been about cutting back on the Supreme Court's decision, even though history has shown that the court's ruling was both essential and clearly correct.""Shapiro said that the present legal attack on the application of the Betamax doctrine to new consumer devices is broad and unprecedented. The DMCA, as passed in 1998, lacked fair use protections as to the use of new devices. Reasonable consumer expectations for the performance of new products have been further jeopardized by new technologies and regulatory measures, such as the cable industry ""PHILA"" license, pending at the FCC.Shapiro also praised the bill's tough compact disc labeling provisions, which would ensure that consumers know when they are being offered products that might not play in car or portable stereo components, computers or DVD players. ""In those instances where content providers choose to degrade the quality of content in order to foil certain home uses, consumers should not be fooled,"" Shapiro said. He stressed HRRC's position that device manufacturers should not be forced to anticipate or respond to such measures in designing consumer products.The HRRC noted that Rep. Rick Boucher's primary sponsorship of this bill reflects a long history of pro-consumer leadership. In the debates leading to passage of the DMCA, Rep. Boucher joined with then-Senator John Ashcroft (R-Missouri) and Rep. Tom Campbell (R-California) in forging a bipartisan coalition that added some necessary consumer safeguards to the DMCA.Rep. Boucher also has been a leader in demanding fair treatment for consumers in the cable industry's ""PHILA"" license, that could restrict viewing and recording on devices consumers already own. He was also the first member of Congress to express concern over the recording industry's practice in quietly adding ""copy protection"" technology to compact discs. In some cases, attempts to play these discs have damaged personal computers on which the ""protected"" products should have played.Further information on this and related issues can be found on the HRRC Web site, www.hrrc.org.

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