Compliance Toolkit

Kazaa's man in Washington speaks out

Tags:
Sharman,
MPAA,
RIAA,
Philip Corwin

Declan McCullagh CNET News

Published: 06 Dec 2004 11:25 GMT

Senate approved a relatively modest package of copyright bills, but the House left town for Thanksgiving without voting on it. What happens next?
I don't know at this point whether they're even going to take up the Senate-passed bill. My current information is that they'll strip out [some of the] language and send it back to the Senate... It's by no means clear that it'll be passed by the House in a form that can be sent to the president this year.

What's your take on the creation of the US intellectual-property czar as part of the appropriations bill?
Something like that should not be done without public debate. It raises this concern that we've seen throughout this Congress -- copyright legislation slipping through without public scrutiny.

Also, I think there's a real question about whether we need to create a new federal bureaucracy. It doesn't just create a new post. It creates a whole new staff for that person. When you've already got people at the Department of Justice, at the State Department, at the Commerce Department, at the Copyright Office involved, there's a question about why we need a new office in government with new staff.

Look ahead to the 109th Congress that will take office in January. Your predictions?
I'm not privy to the inner sanctums of the RIAA and MPAA. There are individual members of Congress who have their own views too. But I'm very optimistic about the 109th Congress. It was tough lobbying on behalf of Kazaa in this Congress. Hollywood's forces have a lot of people on retainer. They have big PAC funds. They put a lot of effort into slandering peer-to-peer technology. They put a lot of effort in trying to push these bad bills through Congress.

Now there are better alliances between industry and [nonprofit groups, thanks to opposing the Induce Act]. It'll make it much more difficult to push bad bills through in the 109th.

What are your views on Senator Arlen Specter, who seems to be the next Judiciary committee chairman?
I really have no idea. Senator Specter hasn't been particularly vocal or active in copyright areas. We just don't know. I -- and others -- plan to meet with his staff as soon as possible and try to gauge what his agenda will be. There's also talk that Senator Hatch would try to convince Senator Specter to create an intellectual-property subcommittee that he'd chair.

I'm sure you'd be delighted with more proposals from Hatch.
If that does happen, my only publicly expressed hope is that we'd see these ideas from Senator Hatch get much more debate than in the last Congress. [Ed. Note: The Pirate Act permits federal prosecutors to file civil lawsuits against copyright infringers.]

The Pirate Act got through the Senate without any hearings, without any committee markup, without any Senate floor debates. Ultimately that was not in the interests of the proponents of that legislation.