Whether it's the music industry or adult video producer Titan Media, a U.S. Senator wants to stop subpoena campaigns demanding Internet service providers give up subscribers' identifying information, introducing a bill aimed at doing just that, among other things.
"I support strong protections of intellectual property," Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) told a hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee September 16, where he introduced his bill. "And I will stand by my record in support of property rights against any challenge. But I cannot in good conscience support any tool such as the (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) information subpoena that can be used by pornographers, and potentially even more distasteful actors, to collect the identifying information of Americans, especially our children."
Brownback's bill would require the copyright holder to file John Doe lawsuits instead of just asking for and serving subpoenas to obtain identifying information of Internet users. The bill would also allow digital transmission content providers to impose a mark on their transmissions that tells other electronic gadgets electronically that the content cannot be distributed over the Internet.
Titan Media filed a subpoena early in the summer against SBC Communications, demanding the ISP reveal the names of 59 subscribers Titan said had been swapping its video content online. "Since that time," Brownback said, "Titan has offered a(n)…amnesty program: those (Internet service providers) it suspects of piracy can go to their Website and buy porn and in exchange Titan won't identify them."
That carries no little irony: the Recording Industry Association of America, defending its subpoena and lawsuit campaign against peer-to-peer music file swappers and their ISPs, has lately tried tying peer-to-peer networks to online porn distribution. The P2P networks, like Kazaa and Grokster, say they don't encourage or directly abet porn swapping on their networks but acknowledge individual "irresponsible" users do it anyway.
Titan told AVN.com September 17 they wanted to study the bill more closely before commenting extensively about it, but the company did say if Brownback was trying to treat adult copyright holders differently than others, "then clearly there's going to be a constitutional issue. But we don't know if that's what he's trying to do."
But in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee a week before Brownback introduced his bill, Titan president Bruce Lahey stressed that the company's primary concern isn't so much stopping P2P file swapping as keeping adult material out of children's hands, given that children are among the most active P2P swappers in cyberspace.
"(T)he most important tenet of our business is that we deliver our product only to adults who wish to view it!" Fahey said in the letter, which was dated September 10.
"We take many measures to prevent the illegal distribution of our content, including registering each of our works with the U. S. Copyright Office," he continued. "Constitutional rights…are meaningless if we are unable to protect our works from illegal distribution or other forms of infringement. Our ability to protect our intellectual property rights through the legal system is the only way we can control the distribution of our content through (P2P) networks or anywhere else."
Fahey said thousands of P2Pers steal Titan content by copying DVDs freely and swapping them in cyberspace, "including children," whom he doesn't want seeing his materials.
"I founded this company with the core belief that only adults wishing to view our content would be allowed to do so," he wrote. "We fight daily to ensure that this happens. TITAN Media is not placing unprotected adult material on P2P networks or anywhere else. We have never done so and we never will. To the contrary, when others illegally distribute our material on P2P networks, we do all we can to remove it." (Emphasis in the original.)
Brownback also said the RIAA's better known and more controversial campaign – launched after a judge ruled the DMCA meant Verizon Internet had to give the RIAA the name of a suspected peer-to-peer music swapper – was a target of the bill, which he calls the Consumers, Schools, and Libraries Digital Rights Management Act of 2003. But his major focus involved digital piracy of video content, and not just porn.
He said his bill would create what he called a "self-certification" environment, where hardware manufacturers could use any technology they think would answer Hollywood's proposal for a "broadcast flag," aimed at attaching a "flag" to digital video programming that tells consumer electronics devices the content cannot be distributed on the Internet.
Titan has said in the recent past that they don't oppose P2P technology or networks on principle. The company estimates over 100,000 file swappers have traded Titan videos online, and that adult materials may well be the majority of materials being swapped on P2P networks, even though the music swappers have received the most notoriety.
The RIAA campaign had already attracted another senator's attention. Sen. Norman Coleman (R-Minnesota), who identifies himself as a former Napster user, has promised hearings of his own Senate Government Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to deal with the music industry's subpoena campaign. One concern he expressed was that the music industry was targeting parents and even grandparents who didn't know their children were using the family computers to swap music online.
Last week, the RIAA hit the mother of a 12-year-old girl with a $2,500 fine for online music swapping, a fine paid by a group who formed to fight against the RIAA subpoenas, P2P United.
"The industry has legitimate concerns about copyright infringement," Coleman said in late July, declaring his intention to investigate the subpoena campaign. "We are dealing with stealing recording artists’ songs and the industry’s profits. The industry has every right to develop practical remedies for protecting its rights." However, as of this writing Coleman's subcommittee has yet to schedule or conduct hearings in the matter.
