Copyright protection and fair use of intellectual property isn't one of the things that immediately springs to mind when you think about HDTV, DVD or home theater. But that issue holds the long-term potential to be central to our home viewing experience, because Hollywood and the recording industry are on a myopic mission to limit how consumers use the content coming into our homes, whether its over the airwaves, in disc format or via online downloads.

I don't think anyone covers this important subject area better than Michael Masnick and the folks at Techdirt, and I encourage you to visit the web site and subscribe to the Techdirt blog. I know you'll be seeing frequent references to the wisdom of the Techdirt team here.

Here's an entry from today's Techdirt blog that dissects some disturbing comments made by the head of the US Copyright Office, as reported by news.com.

Marybeth Peters is our nation's "copyright czar," and over the years has tended to side with the big copyright firms over and over again, as if they need her special protection. It's not entirely clear why this big, successful industry needs increasing government protection, rather than learning how to adapt to a changing marketplace on its own (you know, like most other industries), but that's the way it is. In a recent talk, Peters repeated a familiar stance that the DMCA is a good law because it adds to "copyright owners' quiver of arrows to defend themselves." Of course, Peters doesn't discuss who those arrows are pointed at, and the fact that things like the DMCA have put a big fat bullseye on fair use, the public domain and what the general public can do with content. So why should a government official be supporting policies that help a particular industry at the expense of the very concept of copyright that she's supposed to be protecting?

The article actually offers one suggestion as to why: Peters is a self-declared "Luddite" and admits that she doesn't even have a computer at home. In other words, one of the people most responsible for setting up the rules that impact copyright in a new digital age has almost no clue how the market is changing thanks to new technologies. Combine that with putting Hollywood's own politician in charge of the Congressional committee that deals with copyright laws and guess what you get? It's certainly not an approach to copyright that acknowledges what's actually happening in the marketplace. Instead, it's an approach that focuses on setting up artificial rules and barriers designed to enforce a business model from two decades ago that has long since been made obsolete by new technologies. And, in fact, the end result isn't even helping the very industry she so thinks needs protecting. Instead, the old record labels that rely on the DMCA are dying, and it's those who are embracing new business models who are figuring out ways to profit and aren't screaming over the threat of piracy.

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