June 22, 2004

Washington, DC – The Open Source and Industry Alliance (osaia.org) today endorsed The Digital Media Consumers Rights Act, a bill that promises to undo a wide variety of harms that overreaching copyright laws have caused to cyber security, innovation and consumer expectations. The bill, also known as HR 107, is expected to move to a Committee vote in the House of Representatives within weeks.

In 1998 Congress banned any effort to go around copy- and access-control technologies placed on CDs, DVDs and other digital goods. It did these things to stop illegal copying of creative works. Unfortunately, imprecise and overly broad wording in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has done little to stop illegal copying. Yet, untold numbers of open source developers, researchers and ordinary citizens can no longer engage in acts that Congress clearly thought should be legal.

“The DMCA has confused the legal landscape,” OSAIA President and Ed Black said. “Special interests have muddied the difference between legal scholarship and illegal copying for their own ends to the detriment of the rest of us.”

The DMCA, in fact:

Endangers national security by exposing computer security researchers to possible litigation for merely searching computer products for vulnerabilities that real criminals and terrorists could exploit;
Imperils American competitiveness by making it effectively illegal to take apart and analyze competitive products simply to assure that one's own goods will work with others in the marketplace.
Threatens the ability of ordinary consumers to protect their children from undue violence, explicit sexuality and other content they may deem inappropriate for their family.

HR 107 would correct these problems by clarifying what Congress wanted in the first place: to afford citizens the right to employ digital goods for a wide variety of uses, as long as those activities do not trample the rights of their producers to be recognized and paid for their work.

“Computer security, consumer electronics and creative tinkering used to be matters for engineers,” OSAIA President and CEO Ed Black said. “Each of these is increasingly looking like a legal specialty. We need HR 107 to protect the process of innovation and ensure our country's progress.”

Since many open source developers are individual programers, small business owners and academic researchers, open source is especially vulnerable to nuisance suits brought by overzealous copyright interests. OSAIA, therefore, stands with the rest of the open source community in calling for passage of HR 107.

OSAIA parent CCIA recently filed an amicus brief in support of Skylink, maker of a universal remote for garage door openers. The case exemplifies the problem faced by so many innovators today: Chamberlain sued Skylink because Skylink had bypassed codes that limited the remote controls that would work with Chamberlain openers. Although the case was ultimately dismissed, the ruling court suggested Chamberlain could forbid others from producing competitive products by merely saying so. Neither plaintiff nor judge suggested that Skylink intended to copy and distribute anything written by Chamberlain.

Researchers today are under assault from special interests that prefer that their products never faced the scrutiny necessary for computer security. Developers of anti-smut technologies face the real possibility that Hollywood will misuse the nation's laws to thwart their efforts to protect children from inappropriate materials in their own homes.

Indeed, legal action that has sprung up around legitimate research has led many computer scientists to cease working on anti-terror systems for fear of litigation by others who do not want them examining the ins and outs of their software.

OSAIA, together with more than 25 other industry, consumer and scholarly organizations, is committed to restoring freedom, fairness, innovation and security to our nation's copyright laws.

OSAIA is dedicated to the creation, use and sustainability of open source software.

© 2004, Open Source and Industry Alliance