Music Firms Fail to Get Anti-Piracy Proposal on Bill

As lawmakers rushed an anti-terrorism bill through Congress, lobbyists for the record companies tried in vain to insert a shield for their electronic counterattacks on pirates.

A spokesman for the Recording Industry Assn. of America said the trade group was simply trying to fix a problem that the anti-terrorism bill would create. But critics said the last-minute proposal, which Senate aides considered and rejected, would have given the record companies and movie studios more latitude to reach inside and alter Internet-connected computers.

Congressional staffers said the proposal, which also was backed by the Motion Picture Assn. of America, was dropped in part because of objections from AOL Time Warner. A spokeswoman for the company, which operates the world’s largest Internet service provider as well as a major record company and movie studio, declined to comment.

The RIAA has won a number of legislative plums in recent years, but it’s drawn flak for overreaching in trying to protect copyrights.

The trade group caused a furor in 1999 by tacking on to a satellite TV bill an amendment securing the labels’ ownership of master recordings, prompting Congress to pass a quick repeal the following term.

The dispute over this year’s anti-terrorism bill stemmed from a change sought by the Justice Department to the existing law against computer fraud and abuse. The change would have lowered the threshold for bringing criminal charges or civil suits against those who damaged a computer through unauthorized use over the Internet.

Mitch Glazer, chief lobbyist for the RIAA, said the change would make copyright owners “open to lawsuit for the anti-piracy activities that we currently do.” After offering a more narrow proposal that legislative aides rejected, RIAA officials said they circulated one that would have barred lawsuits for damages caused by measures “that are reasonably intended to impede or prevent” copyright infringement through the Internet.

The RIAA and MPAA have made no secret of their interest in a technological counterattack against piracy, particularly on the Internet’s increasingly popular file-sharing networks.

The measures they’ve explored include software that can detect a song or movie as it’s being copied through the Net, replace the unauthorized copy with a different file and even disable the original on the sender’s computer.

“The idea was not to rewrite copyright law,” a RIAA spokesman said. “If somebody is out there trying to steal our product, we want to stop them in the least harmful way without doing any damage to their computer. And we don’t want to be sued for that.”

Critics of the proposal said they didn’t object to the RIAA trying to protect its copyrights. What bothered them was the breadth and timing of the proposed change in law.

“This just smacked of vigilantism,” a Republican legislative aide said. Although labels and studios still would have been subject to criminal charges, the proposal to ban lawsuits amounted to “an authorization to trespass on other people’s property,” the aide said.

Jonathan Potter, director of the Digital Media Assn., a trade group for online music and video companies, said he was stunned at the audacity of using the terrorism bill to further the RIAA and MPAA’s anti-piracy agenda.

Ultimately, aides to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) rejected the RIAA-penned proposal in favor of one that would keep the threshold for lawsuits where it is under current law: $5,000 of damage per individual filing suit. That change didn’t make it into the bill before the Senate passed it, but proponents plan to try to push it through in the final House-Senate compromise.

Glazer said the Leahy approach is better because it would address other industries’ objections to the lower threshold, not just the RIAA’s. The change “would help everybody come back to the status quo,” Glazer said, adding, “We support that.”