House revokes music industry’s carte blanche

Posted by Dirk Avery at 4:58 pm under Copyright, Legislation.

CNet’s Anne Broache writes:

To avoid having a copyright bill favored by the music industry become mired in controversy, a U.S. House of Representatives panel has agreed to remove a section that would have dramatically increased fines in copyright infringement lawsuits.

Under the original Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act (the PRO IP Act), a defendant accused of unlawfully downloading each track from, say, the best-selling 22-track Janet Jackson album Discipline could be forced to pay $30,000 in damages per song. That’s $660,000–far above the $30,000 maximum damages-per-compilation that current law allows.

Now the current $30,000-per-compilation limit will stay intact. An outcry from digital rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge prompted a House Judiciary subcommittee that presides over intellectual property law to remove that provision from the version of the PRO IP Act that was approved Thursday. With no debate, the subcommittee approved a manager’s amendment and then, by a unanimous voice vote, the full bill…

Despite the amendment passed Thursday, Democratic committee leaders warned the heightened damages section is not dead and said they’d continue to fight to up the penalties…

That action nevertheless leaves a bill that numbers more than 60 pages and proposes a number of sweeping changes to copyright law aimed at beefing up penalties for pirates and counterfeiters.

Most notably, it would allow federal officials to seize property, including computer equipment used to commit intellectual property crimes or obtained as a result of those proceeds. An amendment adopted Thursday, however, attempts to narrow that enforcement power, saying the government would have to establish that “there was a substantial connection between the property and the offense…”

The bill would also create a new federal bureaucracy called the White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative, or WHIPER, that seems in some ways to be modeled after the U.S. Trade Representative. It’s designed to help coordinate the efforts of the eight government agencies that have jurisdiction over intellectual property cases, Berman said…

The bill would also offer state and local governments $25 million in grant money to help them combat intellectual property crimes, and it would dispatch 10 “intellectual property attaches” to embassies around the world.

Michael Petricone, a senior vice president with the Consumer Electronics Association, told CNET News.com after the vote that he thought the revised bill was “balanced” and “responsive to the tech industry’s concerns.”