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FC: U.S. House not willing to endorse mandatory copy

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 11:18:26 -0500 From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: politech@politechbot.com Subject: FC: U.S. House not willing to endorse mandatory copy protection Send reply to: declan@well.com

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http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,50784,00.html

House Cool to Copy Protection By Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com) and Robert Zarate

2:00 a.m. March 4, 2002 PST WASHINGTON -- The U.S. House of Representatives doesn't seem willing to intercede in an increasingly bitter dispute over embedding copy protection controls in all consumer electronic devices.

Key legislators in the House have indicated they're skeptical of the government mandating anti-piracy technology, an approach that Democrats of the Senate Commerce Committee endorsed during a hearing last Thursday.

Fretting that online piracy of digital content will imperil sales, Hollywood studios have asked Congress to bypass their negotiations with Silicon Valley firms by requiring that all PCs and consumer electronics sport technology to prohibit illicit copying. Senate Commerce Chairman Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina) has championed this approach.

"Mr. Coble believes Hollings' approach would have the government mandate specific software standards governing encryption or access to copyrighted works, which are transmitted digitally in lieu of negotiated industry standards," said a spokesman for Rep. Howard Coble (R-North Carolina), the chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property.

Spokesman Terry Shawn said: "He is concerned that this approach is too interventionist and could lead to standards which favor certain brands of software over others, and which could quickly become obsolete as technology improves or changes." [...]

"Hollings' bill would mandate copy protection chips on all sorts of hardware and machines in the same way that the V-chip was mandated on television sets," said Richard Diamond, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas).

Diamond said his boss, one of the more vocal members of the Republican Party's free-market wing, doesn't like the government requiring standards: "Rep. Armey found the V-chip inappropriate too."

[...]

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