Those early days in the growth of the Internet saw Congress passing several laws that freed the Internet from potential liability – the DMCA “safe harbors” provisions, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and the Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998 – to name just a few. And the Internet responded to this light touch by growing exponentially both within the U.S. and around the world – with almost two billion users today!

Unfortunately, during the last decade, the Internet has lost its luster – at least as far as politicians and the courts are concerned – and is being subjected to ever-increasing regulation and liability. Many politicians blame all of society’s ills on the Internet. (See here and here for just two examples.) As a result, they are openly hostile to the idea of an open, global forum for the exchange of information and ideas, as well as for global commercial activity, and seem intent on killing the “goose that laid the golden egg.” Just a look at today’s online news sites will confirm that the Internet is under increasing attack worldwide.

Fortunately, the Internet is extremely resilient – both from a technical, as well as a social and economic, perspective. So far the Internet (and those who dwell within it) have been able to “work around” many of these new laws and regulations or adapt to them without significant damage to the “business as usual” nature of the system. But it’s difficult to tell from our vantage point whether real, permanent damage is being done to the Internet – as both a communications medium and a platform for e-commerce. A decade from now analysts may look back at the Internet as a failed experiment – killed off by politicians, judges and self-serving business interests, who thought the Internet had to be “tamed,” and in doing so destroyed its ultimate potential.

Only time will tell….

• With cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wristwatch.
• Email is just too slow….
• They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.
• Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.
• Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.
• The first computer they probably touched was an Apple II; it is now in a museum.
• They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus.

We all know that technology is evolving at breakneck speed. But it’s always interesting to see just what impact these changes are having on our next generation of workers, inventors and policy makers. It’s amazing how developments in technology have fundamentally affected their worldview.

The difficulty of predicting what technology is going to catch on, and the impact such technology will have on society, is obvious. However, another interesting issue is what impact technology will have on the law. The traditional mantra is that technology changes too fast for the law to keep up. Legislatures are hard-pressed to anticipate technological changes and deal with the legal issues that such changes create. However, in some cases legislatures have attempted to anticipate technological developments – often with interesting results.

I have been developing lectures for an online LLM course I will be teaching this fall in Internet and E-Commerce Law. I was reminded of two pieces of legislation that were enacted in the 1990s to deal with “emerging” technologies that can be seen as somewhat anachronistic in light of later developments.

The first is the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. The Act was Congress’s response to a controversy between the music industry and the consumer electronics industry regarding the introduction of digital audio recording technology into the domestic consumer market. Everyone thought digital tape recording was going to be the “next big thing” and the music industry was concerned about the ability of these recording devices for piracy. Exempted from the Act were computers, which were viewed in 1992 as an unlikely device for music copying. Well, we know how well that prediction panned out. Portable music players, like the iPod, were not covered by the Act, while digital audio tape recorders (what are they, you might ask?) were. Neither the music industry nor Congress foresaw such technologies as the Internet, broadband, or audio compression (MP3) that would make the copying and transmission of music files over the Internet quick and easy. Oops.

Another interesting, but somewhat irrelevant law, is the DMCA provisions on copyright management information. In 1998, pundits saw a day when digital content files would contain “copyright management information” (CMI) that would be “read” by software and hardware devices and would control the uses that could be made of a digital work. For example, futurists foresaw a time when Internet users could download or share content files and the computer would read the CMI from the file and, depending on what the user wanted to do with the file, would automatically transmit a micropayment from the user’s bank account to the copyright owner’s bank account for an appropriate license. Photocopiers would “read” microscopic barcodes printed on each page of a book or magazine, which would determine whether a particular page could be copied at all, and if so, whether a micropayment should be made to the copyright owner for that copy.

Twelve years later, CMI technology is little used and certainly not a hot topic in legal circles or the courts.. The “problem” that proponents of the CMI legislation identified has never materialized. Oops.

That is not to say that legislatures should never legislate in anticipation of new technologies, only that they should be careful in determining which issues are ripe for legislation and which are not.

Perhaps they should ask an entering college student?

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Here are the show notes for this week’s episode:

Shownotes for The Singularity Law Podcast: Episode 8 for December 8, 2008

Our Panel for Today:

• Prof. Michael Scott of The Singularity Law Blog
• Josh Kagan of The Josh Kagan Blog

Video Game Law as a Hot New Practice Area: Hype or Reality?

• Wall Street Journal: Video-Game Law: The Niche Legal Practice Du Jour
• LA Times: These Lawyers Got (Video) Game
• Michael Scott’s blog: Videogame Law: New Legal Specialty or Marketing Hype?

The Limits of Section 230 Immunity, Part 1: Malware

• 47 U.S.C. §230
• Venkat Balasubramani’s SPAM NOTES blog: Could Facebook Be Liable for Spreading the Koobface Virus?
• Green v. AOL

The Limits of Section 230 Immunity, Part 2: Trademarks

• Alleyinsider: Amazon, Google: eBay Shouldn’t Have To Hunt For Trademark Infringers
• EFF: Jewelry Company Quest to Expand Trademark Law Could Quash Internet Commerce

Practice Pointer: The Continued Importance of Forum Selection Clauses

• “Internet Cases” blog: Court enforces forum selection clause in web hosting agreement
• Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v. Shute, 499 U.S. 585 (1991)

Turning Piracy Into Profit: The Myspace Experiment and Other DMCA Issues

• Reuters: MySpace, MTV Test Piracy-Profit Plan
• Michael Scott’s blog: Priming the Pump – Copyright Style

Final Thoughts: Entrapment by Emoticon

• Wall Street Journal: Emoticons on Trial at the Nebraska Supreme Court

This recording is an informational resource only. It is not designed to offer legal advice.

This is a QuickTime video, so to view it in a larger window simply click “download” below instead of playing it in your browser. It will also be available in our iTunes podcast feed.

We’re also ramping up a new episode of our podcast for today. Episode 7: “The Global Perspective” will be available tonight, so stay tuned!

The settlement has Google paying the book publishers $125 million in exchange for essentially a perpetual license to digitize and store all of their books now in existence, as well as future books that they may publish. It places strict limitations on Google’s ability to display books that are in-print and in-copyright, but allows Google to not only display portions of out-of-print, but still in-copyright books, but to sell access to those books. Google can charge for access to the digital version of those books, and will be allowed to retain 37% of all revenues generated from the sale of those books and certain advertising revenues it may generate as well. In exchange, the publishers will dismiss their infringement action, and since it was filed as a class action, the settlement will bind both the named plaintiffs but all other U.S. publishers as well, unless they opt out.

This settlement has not gone unnoticed by Viacom, Inc., which also has a major copyright infringement suit pending against Google. Unlike the publishers’ case, the Viacom action involves the posting of Viacom owned videos on YouTube, a company owned by Google. Executives of Viacom are quoted as saying, basically, that since Google settled the publishers’ case, there is no reason it shouldn’t settle with Viacom (and pay Viacom a hefty settlement fee as well). While Google might decide to do so, if it made business sense to do so (as it did in the publishers’ case), the two cases have very little in common, other than the fact that they both involve Google as a defendant and they are both copyright infringement cases.

The Viacom case did not arise from a direct infringement by Google (or YouTube) of any copyrights owned by Viacom – which was the claim in the publishers’ case. Instead, the Viacom action seeks to hold Google liable for third party postings of Viacom videos on the YouTube website. Instead, of having to fit its actions under the fair use doctrine of copyright law, whose reach is very fact-specific, in the Viacom case, Google is able to take advantage of the DMCA “safe harbor” provisions, which immunize Google from any liability, as long as it complies with the requirements of the DMCA. While Viacom is arguing that Google cannot take advantage of the “safe harbor” provisions, that is an uphill battle that Viacom is likely to lose.

These are two very different lawsuits based on two very different provisions of U.S. copyright law. While Google may decide to settle with Viacom for business reasons, or Viacom may be able to convince a judge that Google is not entitled to the protections afforded by the DMCA, the two cases are entirely unrelated. Viacom is taking a big chance by pursuing this case, since of it loses, it will open the floodgates to having its videos posted all over the Internet (even more so that today). It is Viacom that should be looking for a way out of this mess it has gotten itself into, not Google. And you can be sure that any settlement entered into will be much more favorable to Google than to Viacom. (IMHO).

Click the play button below to listen, or click here to subscribe to us on iTunes!

[display_podcast]

Here are the show notes for this week’s episode:

Shownotes for The Singularity Law Podcast: Episode 6 for November 4, 2008

Our Panel for Today:

• Prof. Michael Scott of The Singularity Law Blog
• Josh Kagan of The Josh Kagan Blog

DMCA’s 10th Anniversary: Where Do We Go From Here?

• EFF: “Unintended Consequences: Ten Years Under the DMCA”

The Google Book Search Settlement

• Michael Scott: “Google Stares Down Book Industry: Publishers Blink, Google Book Search Wins”
• EFF: “Google Book Search Settlement: A Reader’s Guide”
• EFF: “Google Reaches Settlement With Authors and Publishers Over Google Book Search”
• Google Watch (eWeek): “Google Gets Great Deal in Book Search Settlement”
• Authors Guild: “$125 Million Settlement in Authors Guild v. Google”
• Text of Settlement Agreement
• Class Notice

Regulating Violent Video Games

• Josh Kagan: “Violent Video Games Go (Back) to Court”

Final Thoughts

• Southwestern’s Summer Abroad Program on International Information Technology Law in London
• Lawrence Lessig: “Enormously Important News from the Free Software Foundation”