23 October 2008

Media, Internet Firms Try Friendlier Approach to Internet Users

Technology allows for richer user experience, better copyright protection

Viewers were able to watch videos of 2008 Olympic competitions, including synchronized swimming, on the NBC Web site.

By Andrzej Zwaniecki
Staff Writer

Washington — Media and Internet content providers have switched to a more user-friendly approach to the protection of intellectual property rights to advance their commercial interests and accommodate the explosion of user-generated works.

Proliferation on the Internet of video and music created by nonprofessional artists who often use earlier published, copyright-protected films, videos, images and music has challenged media and Internet companies.

Film and television studios’ and recording companies’ initial response — blocking free downloads of shows and songs and threatening litigation — turned out to be ineffective and out of proportion to the scale of the problem, according to experts. It created a backlash by users and their supporters, who criticized content providers for stifling creativity.

In addition, content providers have realized that too many restrictions on the use of their materials have actually worked to their disadvantage, preventing them from developing new modes of distribution on the Internet, experts say.

At an October 8 intellectual property protection meeting at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Rick Cotton, executive vice president of NBC Universal, said new technology allows content providers to “break the old business model.”

Today, technology allows content providers to release some materials selectively for free viewing and downloads and block other materials, as well as to see whether copyrighted video or music is used according to the fair-use principle. This principle is based on a provision in U.S. copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the rights holders.

Another technology has helped Microsoft Corporation, the maker of the Windows computer operating system, “turn many pirates into customers,” according to Susan Mann, the company’s director for intellectual property policy. This technology makes pirating more difficult because it deploys an application to the user’s computer that validates the software’s authenticity before it will unlock access to a download.

Cotton said new technologies proved themselves during NBC’s coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. About 99 percent of users watched copyright-protected Olympic video on the NBC site, and only 1 percent on video-sharing sites from which video materials can be downloaded illegally, he said.

But for technologies to work as intended, media and Internet companies must make clear to users what content is protected and what is not and direct them to film, video and music that is available to view or listen to for free, Cotton said. For example, NBC released for free downloads Olympic images and photo galleries.

Free content on the Internet has expanded in recent months. In March 2007, NBC Universal and News Corporation launched their Hulu.com Web site, which allows watching popular TV series and some free downloading. Since then, other media companies have either started or announced plans for similar sites.

In 2007, major media and software firms agreed on a set of principles for user-generated content services such as YouTube to strike a balance between intellectual property rights protection and users’ creativity.

Most Internet giants that own or operate user-generated content sites, such as Google, have not signed those principles, and some proponents of online creativity criticized them.

Eric Bangeman wrote in his blog Ars Technica that the principles shift “the onus of copyright enforcement away from the [copy]rights holders and toward the [user-generated content] sites themselves.” In addition, he said, the reliance on “effective content identification technology” is all but certain to curtail fair use because the technology is prone to errors.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a coalition of public interest groups dedicated to promoting free speech and creativity online, issued its own set of fair-use principles for user-generated video content.

More information on the industry’s principles and EFF principles can be found on their respective sites.