There was something decidedly scarey about the hearing last week before the Senate Commerce Committee regarding copyrights

There was something decidedly scarey about the hearing last week before the Senate Commerce Committee regarding copyrights. Disney CEO Michael Eisner and News Corp. president Peter Chernin spoke on behalf of record labels and movies studios to lobby Congress for laws to prop up their beleaguered business model as they cope with the Internet downloads.

Sen. Fritz Hollings, announced "When Congress sits idly by in the face of these [file-sharing] activities, we essentially sanction the Internet as a haven for thievery," said the committee chairman, charging "over 10 million people" with stealing. This is where citizens stand right now in the eyes of Congress. Not as potential consumers, but as citizens guilty of stealing.

This tracks with the mentality of the record labels and film studios these days. Despite a plethora of problems that have nothing to do with the Net, media executives are obsessed with the idea that their customers are shiftless pirates who want their wares for free.

The world got a chance to sample this mind-set at the Grammys last week, when National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences head,

Michael Greene, hijacked his own awards ceremony to rant about music downloading, calling it, "the most insidious virus in our midst."

In the short run, the media companies are counting on the courts to shut down the Napsters of the world. Long range, they’re betting on security schemes that intentionally limit the functions of both hard and software. Some labels have already begun to ship compact discs encoded with a special process that prevents copying.

Consumer advocates are appalled that the copy-protected discs deny users their legal rights to copy music for personal use on digital devices like computers and MP3 players, limited the customer’s use of the copyright material which they paid for.

To make sure that the customer’s larcenous options are totally closed off, however, copy protection must be built into computers and other devices.

There is now a thing called "Hollings’s proposed Security Standards and Certification Act" that demands that all digital electronic devices be saddled with systems that restrict copying of tunes and movies.

Millions of people commonly, and legally, buy CDs, rip the tunes on computer hard drives, and then either download to MP3 players or mix and burn their own CD compilations. But if new discs are copy-protected, someone who wants a classic album might do better to buy a vintage disc on eBay.

MP3 fans desiring a rip-friendly disc would be forced to seek a pirated version where someone has illegally broken the security controls.

I can’t see how this situation would boost album revenues or help protect the copyright holder.

Then there’s the impact on the electronics industry. If new computers, CD-DVD players and personal video recorders are hobbled to protect copyrights, then consumers will hold on to their pre-Hollings machines. As I predict, your legislation will substantially retard innovation and will reduce the usefulness of products to the consumers.

What makes this all totally insane is that Internet file sharing is not necessarily the foe of copyright holders. True, the ease of making and distributing digital files will always present a challenge for the labels and studios. But it’s also a potential gold mine: an instant, ultra-low-cost delivery system and a targeted marketing vehicle. No outlaw service can ever provide consumers with the deep libraries at guaranteed high quality that content owners can deliver.

If a media company adopted a perfectly feasible system of "digital-rights management" that allowed music fans to make a few copies for personal use, most people wouldn’t bother to do the pirate thing. If the prospect is scary, the media giants can take comfort in history—their original reaction to previous technological advances, from talkies to television to the VCR, was just as hysterical as it is with the Internet.

I have mentioned again and again on my tv show that copyright enfringement is a civil matter. This means that protecting copyrights is the responsibility of the author or copyright holders.

The library of congress is not going to come to your assistance, they are not sending any attorneys to help you battle it out in court if your copyrights are enfringed. Until this matter is settled with some reasonable advancement in both technology and legislation, I hold to my opinion that it is best for the artist/author to maintain a vast system of evidence to support their claim to authorship. The best evidence to support authorship is publication and public witnessing of the work under copyright. The use of public access television is one medium that can be used to create a system whereby a local artist can establish such evidence.