INTEL'S BARRETT TO URGE SENATE JUDICIARY TO PROTECT FAIR USE
Intel CEO Craig Barrett will tell Senate Judiciary Committee Thurs. that consumer fair use rights must not be “trampled” in protecting digital content online, he told us in interview Tues. His testimony will come 2 weeks after his Intel colleague, Exec. Vp Leslie Vadasz, was accused of profiting from content pirates purchasing IT equipment by Senate Commerce Committee Chmn. Hollings (D-S.C.) and others at separate hearing (CD March 1 p3). Hollings and Sen. Stevens (R-Alaska) are planning to introduce bill that would mandate copy-protection system of hardware and software for all digital consumer electronics (CE) devices to protect content, and specifications would be authored by federal govt. if IT, CE and content industries couldn’t agree on solution in 18 months.
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Intel has been actively involved in Copy Protection Technical Working Group for 6 years, Barrett said, and group had developed numerous standards, including one for DVDs. He dismissed testimony 2 weeks ago of Disney CEO Michael Eisner and News Corp. Pres. Peter Chernin that solution was easily reached, suggesting any known solution would affect not only fair use rights but consumer privacy. He saw only “limited roles” for govt. to play in debate: “We'd much prefer industry to come up with negotiated solutions than have [Commerce Secy.] Don Evans design computers for us.”
“There are 2 ways that you can protect or do something with content when it’s out there,” meaning content already placed on Internet by someone without being watermarked or in some way encoded, Barrett said. “One way is you create a massive database which has in it the digital stream for every bit of copyrighted content,” he said, “and then what you do is you intercept all of the Internet transmissions on the fly and compare their bitstreams to this massive database. I have no idea of the technical feasibility of this because you'd have to intercept every Internet bitstream.” Barrett said “the legal aspects of this are, wow!” He said other approach would have to deal with content generated by individuals, not copyright holders, “because all digital streams if they're not watermarked look alike; my home movie looks like Lord of the Rings when it’s in a bitstream. If you wanted to somehow ensure that everything going in a bitstream on the Internet was protected, then you'd have to do something about all of the private bitstreams.” He said govt. theoretically could require all private content to be submitted for watermarking, “but is that invading your privacy?”
Barrett said key issue was “the expectations of the consumer balanced against the expectations of the content owner.” “I don’t think it’s so much an issue of protecting content,” he said, “it’s the balance point that you reach between the right of people to protect their content and the fair use rights of the consumer and the individual.” He said fair use was “not a right per se, it’s a defense for people who take content and in fact transpose it or time-shift it or space-shift it for their personal use… but all that’s analog. As you move into digital, complications arise.” It’s those complications that Senate Judiciary Committee Chmn. Leahy (D-Vt.) plans to explore in his hearing Thurs.
“The more interesting issue,” Barrett said, “is are there fair use rights for the individual that may get trampled in an effort to protect content? How far does the pendulum swing? It swung pretty far over to the consumer in the analog era and now the testimony you heard in the Commerce Committee, it’s kind of taken a swing back to the other side in the digital era.” Acknowledging difficult spot copyright holders find themselves in when dealing with digital content and Internet, he said “the one difference here is in the analog world you didn’t have a central site that was spitting out this content for free… It’s unfortunate that the content owners did not move faster to take advantage of digital distribution and put in business models… very early on. You had this kind of free culture emerge that they're now trying to unravel and push back in the can. That’s the tough part. And the really tough part is that all of that content is now out there in an unprotected fashion.” Barrett didn’t care for suggestion he had heard from content community that IT industry could police piracy, saying “no chance… Do you seize it? Send the person a speeding ticket… or impound their hard drive? Who’s going to do that?”
“There are probably limited roles for the government to play in terms of closing some loopholes” on digital content protection, Barrett said. He called fact that DTV signals had mandate that they couldn’t be encrypted “a nonstarter,” because it was easy way for pirated content to end up online: “You'd probably need some action by the FCC or legislative action.” He didn’t propose any other areas of govt. intervention.