Sean & Liz's Corner

I read with interest today this press release from the Center for Copyright Information. I’m encouraged to see that consumer interests are represented both in the leadership of CCI as well as in the advisory committee to that leadership.  It is also encouraging that the American Arbitration Association has been chosen to administer the “third-party neutral” program.

Yet, I can’t help but wonder if the involvement of these individuals and their organizations lends too much credibility to this private ordering of the content owners and Internet Service Providers. As I recently discussed in my op-ed at Ars Technica, the Copyright Alert System represents an usurpation of government power by private industry.  This system works directly to raise the costs of Internet service, yet provides no measurable benefits to the vast majority of Internet users.  No amount of representation by consumer groups will change these facts.

Moreover, no amount of representation by consumer groups will change the basics of the agreement between the content owners and the ISPs.   The due process provisions still represent a monumental shift in the balance of power between copyright owners and those accused by them of copyright infringement.   Those invoking the due process system are still required to pay for the privilege of doing so.  Content owners are entitled to a presumption that they have correctly identified alleged infringers, based simply upon linking IP addresses to purported infringed works.  And the time limits, avalanche provisions, and other restrictions on mounting a challenge means that it is likely that a consumer will not be able to easily defend against charges, if at all.

Until or unless there is a fundamental shift in the underlying agreement toward a purely educational approach, the presence of nominally “good” parties in positions to monitor the progress of the agreement simply works to provide superficial credibility toward this effort of private companies to rewrite the law of copyright enforcement.  Given that the majority of these consumer groups traffic in public policy, and require some measure of credibility to do so, they may soon wish that they had never gotten involved in this private enforcement effort.

As aptly said by another “the road to hell might be paved with good intentions, but the traffic on that road is governed by the law of unintended consequences.” I sure hope that these organizations have thought through at least some of the potential consequences of this alliance.  It would be a shame if their own credibility were to be put at issue.

From Joe Ross.

Joe is a technologist and law student with an interest in the policy issues that underlie the digital age.

written by Ron Miller over at Internet Evolution.

Glad to see people talking about this.

A follow-up on my Ars Technica op-ed was published by Mike Masnick at Techdirt.

I just had an op-ed published in Ars Technica.