Treaty rewrite rattles RIAA
Last December, 160 countries approved the World Intellectual Property Organization pact in Geneva, and now the White House is about to send the agreement to the Senate for U.S. ratification. The RIAA says the Senate should ratify the treaty and leave it at that, but telcos and online service companies want to add an amendment that would protect them from pirates who use their networks to disseminate unauthorized works.
The RIAA and other copyright holders, including the Motion Picture Assn. of America, insist that current copyright law is perfectly adequate. "We will oppose this treaty if the (copyright) system is undermined," RIAA president and COO Hilary Rosen said. Rosen predicted that if the treaty is loaded down with extraneous legislation, it will die in Congress.
The 22-member Ad Hoc Copyright Coalition, which includes MCI, Bell Atlantic, Ameritech, Pacific Telesis, America Online and CompuServe, counters that Congress needs to add language to the treaty ratification legislation ensuring that they are not liable for serving as a digital conduit for an illegal copyright pirate. The coalition maintains that its members cannot possibly monitor every single transaction that takes place on their huge networks.
In a position paper distributed in February, the coalition urged Congress to hold copyright pirates themselves liable, not "the mere provision of server space, communications connections, software or services or facilities for the carriage and routing of signals."
While Rosen opposes the coalition's position, she told reporters Tuesday that the coalition's concerns should be reviewed by Congress at some other time. She also noted that the coalition's member companies are not faced with a flurry of lawsuits seeking damages for copyright violations. "There is no crisis on the Internet," Rosen said, adding, "If there is one, it's piracy."
