Is SMART Copyright the way to go?

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love music, and Austin is certainly the place to live for a music lover. Most people have heard of Austin City Limits and SXSW, the two biggest music brands here, but there are many others: the Jazz Festival, the Celtic Festival, the Fusebox Festival, iHeartCountry, reggae, blues, classical, electronic, every style of music can be found here. As the Visit Austin website proclaims, “Any excuse to celebrate music” – especially after nearly two years of no live events.

One of the greatest technology innovations that impacted all of our lives was the advent of digital music. No longer were we confined to our crates of albums, stacks of CDs, or the battery life on our boom boxes. Now we can have as much music as we want, literally at our fingertips. And streaming services have enabled us to have music libraries we could only have dreamed of just a few short years ago.

Digital and streaming also greatly expanded the universe to musicians. Anyone can create music and upload it to Spotify, Bandcamp, Soundcloud and the like, and get paid a tiny amount every time someone listens to their song. But, as is often the case with technology, we take two steps forward and one step back: intellectual property violations and digital piracy are a major, global problem.

Recently, a bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress by Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) called the SMART Copyright Act (“Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies”). The aim of the legislation is to identify standard measures that both online service providers and content creators could use to help prevent copyright violations by making it harder for infringed material to re-appear online once it has been removed. It wouldn’t stop infringement, but it would make it more challenging and therefore less profitable.

The SMART Copyright Act would essentially strengthen existing measures that came about with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which provided safe harbor to online platforms that host user content. It would create “designated technical measures” that would be managed by the U.S. Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress, and reviewed – with public input – every three years in order to keep up with changing technology.

Predictably, the bill is supported by content creators and owners of IP, representing the recording, film, and publishing industries. Technology companies, which would bear the responsibility for implementation, are generally opposed to the bill and have proposed a counter approach called “balanced copyright.” No companion bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives and Senator Leahy has already announced his retirement at the end of this year, so the prevailing wisdom in Washington is that the SMART Copyright Act has no chance of passing in this Congress.

SIM rarely takes positions on specific legislation, rather we seek to keep our members up-to-date on issues that matter to them as professionals in the technology field. ?We will be keeping an eye on this and future IP and copyright legislation.

For more information on this issue, check out the Senate overview of the legislation (with a link to the full bill), a favorable statement from the Copyright Alliance, an unfavorable statement from ReCreate, and these articles from Politico, Bloomberg Law, Law360, and Plagiarism Today.?