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Are Copyright Warnings on DVDs and Games Too Scary?

by Terrence O'Brien on August 3, 2007 at 10:16 AM


The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which is made up of companies like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over copyright warnings used on books, DVDs, CDs, a sports broadcasts. The CCIA says the warnings blatantly overstate the legal restrictions placed on such material and don't do a good enough job explaining the Fair Use provisions in United States copyright law, which allow a certain amount of recording and copying for personal or scholarly use.

We've quoted it before, and here it is again: "Any rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this game, without the express written consent of Major League Baseball...." The CCIA points specifically at the NFL, Major League Baseball, NBC Universal, Morgan Creek, DreamWorks, Harcourt Inc., and Penguin Group, accusing them of misrepresenting consumers rights for using copyrighted material. The CCIA singled out the NFL and some movies studios as being particularly intimidating to consumers.

The warnings are there to prevent people from, say, recording a game and posting it on a peer-to-peer file-sharing site, but the CCIA thinks the warnings are so general that most people are afraid to simply record games for their own use in their own homes (preventing people from using their nice new Windows Vista Media Centers to record games, among other Microsoft products).

The first step the CCIA seeks is to bar the accused from using the overly broad warnings, that they should be more specific. Secondly, it is seeking to force the companies named in the complaint to foot the bill for Fair Use education for consumers.

From Boing Boing and Ars Technica

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Tags: ccia, copyright, fair use, FairUse, mlb, nfl

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