FUD about DVDs
This letter to the editor, The Law and DVDs, in the Washington Post infuriated me when I read it this morning. The letter is a response to Rob Pegoraro’s June 22 Fast Forward column, DVD-Piracy Paranoia Proves Counterproductive.
The letter’s author, Roberth Sugarman, is counsel for the DVD Copy Control Association, the people who control the Content Scramble System (CSS), the DVD copy-protection mechanism.
Sugarman’s letter is full of blatant, outright lies about copyright law. I’m not a regular writer of letters to the editor, but I couldn’t let this one pass. Here’s the letter I wrote and sent today:
Dear Editor:
It disappoints me to see Richard Sugarman misrepresenting the law in his July 3 letter to the editor. ["The Law and DVDs"].
In responding to Rob Pegoraro’s June 22 column ["DVD-Piracy Paranoia Proves Counterproductive, Business], Sugarman says “it is illegal for [Pegoraro] to use the content of those discs for anything other than his own viewing pleasure.” As a member of the bar, Sugarman should be better acquainted with the many legal uses of copyrighted material. US Code Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 states that “the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies . . . for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”
Fair use of copyrighted material does not require the copyright owner’s permissions to make use of the copyrighted material, however the Content Scrambling System (CSS) on every DVD prevents fair use copies from being made. The CSS technology is licensed by the organization Mr. Sugarman works for, the DVD Copy Control Association Inc.
Mr. Sugarman also says “CSS was developed to prevent the illegal copying and circulation of DVD movie content.” While that is true, he fails to acknowledge that CSS also prevents the thoroughly legal fair use of the content on a DVD.
To complicate matters, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 makes circumventing copy-protection systems, like CSS, a crime. Therefore, to make legal fair use of CSS-protected content requires one to break another, contradicting law.
Congress continues to pass legislation like the DMCA and copyright term extensions that benefit the large media companies that own most of the copyrights and make most of the money from them. Mr. Sugarman and the industry he represents certainly have a right to worry about mass piracy of their content. However, we should not allow media companies to strongarm Congress into trampling fair use and the public domain in the process of protecting copyright.
Greg Ritter
Washington, DC