Federal Official Calls for Combining Communications, Copyright Acts
The federal communications and copyright laws should be merged because the subjects are inseparable, a U.S. Copyright Office lawyer said Monday. The U.S. “needs to get rid of all the silos and reinvent the Communications Act,” said Ben Golant, the office’s assistant general counsel. The laws could be combined in a new title of the U.S. Code that also could cover consumer protection, privacy, cybersecurity and competition, he said at a webcast Practising Law Institute seminar in New York. “This is a dream and may never happen,” Golant conceded. It might be possible politically in 2025, he said.
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Congress probably won’t act this year on companion TV deregulation bills by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., Golant said. Action is more likely next Congress, because the satellite statutory license expires in 2014, he said.
Proposed substitutes for the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart “are inadequate to rights holders,” not least because they don’t offer timely remedies, said Keith Murphy, Viacom vice president-government relations. The suggested replacements include a proposal by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., to send complaints to the U.S. International Trade Commission, “not a speedy body”; a “follow-the-money-only approach” that would rely on cutoffs of infringers by companies such as ad networks and payment processors; and treaties and other government-to-government actions, he said.
It’s “still too early to predict what might happen next” in Hill efforts to beef up online copyright enforcement after the failure of SOPA and its Senate counterpart this month, Murphy said. “Alarmist rhetoric” by critics of the measures produced a tidal wave of opposition that swamped support messages to one congressional office 18-1, he said.
"We have hit a tipping point on how social media are used to influence members of Congress, to influence legislation,” Murphy said. This new force “in a matter of weeks found a new target,” he said: Twitter, the subject of a boycott over a new policy of censoring tweets in line with national laws. “What piece of legislation will next face the wrath of the Internet?” Murphy asked. It could be a measure regarding taxes or healthcare unrelated to the Internet, he said.
SOPA’s demise shows that “if you don’t have a consensus, you're going to have this tit for tat” and won’t persuade people that “the rule of law is being applied fairly online,” said Brent Olson, AT&T Services’ vice president-public policy. Now the technologists have emerged “and maybe they want to talk, and that’s a good thing,” he said. AT&T couldn’t support the legislation because “there were still some concerns that we had,” Olson said.