joegratz.net

The Senate unanimously passed the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 today. It’s expected to move through the House with similar speed. This version makes three changes to existing law:

• It makes it a crime to videotape movies in a movie theater.
• It makes clear that using devices or services that automatically skip sections of motion pictures aren’t infringements, so long as no fixed copy of the resulting edited work is created.
• It renews funding for film preservation.
• It fixes a clerical error in the CTEA. They forgot to make an exception to an exclusion to an exception apply to a new exception they added. (You can see how this could get lost in the shuffle.) The upshot is that libraries can copy all types of works that aren’t commercially available during their last 20 years of protection, not just textual works.

Overall, it’s not a bad bill. I think it ought to be a crime to videotape movies in theaters. Yes, one can cook up a hypo in which this would trammel fair use — say, I want to use a clip from a movie in my review of it and it’s not out on DVD, so I go record a short clip of it in the theater with my camcorder. It’s fair use, and it’s a crime under this law. But that circumstance seems sufficiently remote that the benefits outweigh the costs. It would be nicer if it had been phrased to criminalize the making of infringing copies or transmissions, rather than the making of copies of copyrighted works, as this would have required a short trial-within-a-trial to determine whether the defendant’s use was privileged. But it’s not that bad.