CURRENT COPYRIGHT ACTIVITIES

"The only thing constant, is constant flux."

In April 2003, the Recording Industry of America (RIA) has brought suit against four college students who are offering access to copyrighted music files at their college's computer networks. The individuals were students at Michigan Technological Univ., Princeton Univ., and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The universities were not named in the lawsuits.

This is the first big case brought against individual users.

Jan 15, 2003, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the Copyright Term Extension Act was not unconstitutional. The Copyright Term Extension Act added 20 years to the copyright terms of works currently under copyright. It does, however, allow libraries to reproduced and distribute copies during the last 20 years, as long as there are not existing digital copies already available for a reasonable price.

Critics of the Extension Act point out that the law was passed due to lobbying by Disney -- afraid its lucritive Mickey Mouse and Snow White characters and movies were about to pass into the public domain.

In the fall of 2002, Representatives Rick Boucher and John Doolittle introduced the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA, H.R. 5544). The act would amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and requirement labels for usage-impaired "copy-protected" compact discs. See more at Tech Law Journal and at ALA.

Russian programmer Dmitri Sklyarov has been charged in San Jose, CA, with breaking the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. He wrote a program for his company (legal in Russia) that "breaks" Adobe's e-Book software--allowing users to copy and print Adobe's e-Books. He is the first person charged under the DMCA.

He was found not guilty on all counnts by a federal jury in San Jose on Dec 17, 2002.

US Supreme Court announced that it has agreed to hear the appeal of the 1999 Tasini v. The New York Times case which basically found that publishers could not redistribute writers' works in electronic databases without permission of the writers.  (This is the "Writers's Union" case.)

Congress continues to try to enact special "database protection" laws.  Currently, facts are not copyrightable.  Thus, non-original databases, such as the white pages of the telephone book, have found to have no copyright protection.  This was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1991, as they overturned some earlier court precedents that gave credence to publishers' "sweat of the brow" arguements.

Originality is a constitutional requirement.

Without a doubt, the 'sweat of the brow' doctrine flouted basic copyright principles. . . . But 'sweat of the brow' courts took a contrary view; they handed out proprietary interests in facts . . . 'But to accord copyright protection on this basis alone distorts basic copyright principles in that it creates a monopoly in public domain. . . .

Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Co., 499 U.S. 390 (1991).

Under pressure from publishers and to be consistent with European Union practices, Congress pushed to have database protection added to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It was tabled and did not make it into the final version.

Should special protection be given to databases--collections of fact--it would be at odds with the the principles of copyright and have a chilling effect on the promotion of "the Progress of Science and useful Arts."