What is Hatch's Hit List? Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has introduced the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (IICA, née INDUCE Act) in the Senate. The bill would make it illegal to "intentionally induce" copyright infringement, but is worded so broadly that it would have all sorts of unintended consequences, one of which is to severely limit, cripple or kill innovation in many different fields. Hatch's Hit List is a daily exploration of some of the technologies and fields that the bill would likely affect. See also, Introducing Hatch's Hit List and the Hatch's Hit List Archives. Send list suggestions to ernest.miller 8T aya.yale.edu.
Today on Hatch's Hit List: Large Portable Hard Drives (and Mark Cuban)
Mark Cuban wrote a very perceptive article on what the ever-increasing capacity of hard drives means for HDTV (HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future). He argues, mostly persuasively, that hard drives, with their tremendous capacity, are a better mean for distributing HDTV signals in all their high-resolution glory compared to DVDs, even the next generation high-capacity DVDs. A highly recommended read.
Of course, one of the benefits of all that read/write storage is making (copyrighted) content portable. After all, why will people need 200G portable drives? Their OpenOffice documents? Please. Clearly, these drives are meant to store and make content mobile, the vast majority of which will be copyrighted. Heck, even the example Cuban provides shows this (luckily Cuban can probably afford to defend a lawsuit):
I had a couple DVDs that I had PURCHASED, that I hadn’t had the chance to watch. I had a couple 512mb Flash Drives that I had bought specifically to test them out for video. I took the first movie, and using an encoder with compression (not going to tell you which one, don’t want to play favorites), I encoded the movies at DVD quality and saved the output onto each of the 512mb Flash Drives. I popped those tiny little puppies into my pockets and off I went to the plane. Keys, some money and my keychain flash drives in one pocket, phone in the other. No hassle, no fuss no muss.
On the plane, I popped the first keychain drive into the USB Port. Got the ready signal, got prompted to open my video player, and watched a nice movie right from the keychain drive. On the way home, did the same thing with the other movie. I loved it. Far less space than DVDs. Could put them in my pocket instead of filling up my briefcase. I immediately went out and bought a 1gb keychain drive so I could hold 2 movies on 1 drive, in addition to my first 2 drives.
Let's tally up the crimes here, shall we? Violation of subsection 1201(a) of the DMCA is clear. Making backups or format shifting is not fair use according to the MPAA. And, if the INDUCE Act were in force, this sounds like inducement to infringement to me. Heck, he calls this illicit conduct a "great experience" - he has to know he was encouraging other people to engage in such conduct also.
Oh, sure, Cuban provides some alternate business models that can take advantage of these larger hard drives. Heck, some of them are probably even very good and profitable ideas. But content providers shouldn't be forced to adopt these new and more profitable business models by technology. The development of technology must be restrained so that older business models will continue to thrive.
Want to know more about the INDUCE Act?
Please see LawMeme's well-organized index to everything I've written on the topic, including Hatch's Hit List: The LawMeme Reader's Guide to Ernie Miller's Guide to the INDUCE Act.
Ernest Miller pursues research and writing on cyberlaw, intellectual property, and First Amendment issues. Mr. Miller attended the U.S. Naval Academy before attending Yale Law School, where he was president and co-founder of the Law and Technology Society, and founded the technology law and policy news site LawMeme. He is a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
Ernest Miller's blog postings can also be found @
