The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has recently offered a "template" for legislation to states across the country that would extend their already draconian rights under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This model legislation would, on its surface, appear to be about banning cable TV descramblers, which is pretty much all the MPAA's summary and analysis would lead you (and our legislatures) to believe. It's much uglier than that. This law was designed to be sufficiently "forward looking" as to capture whatever the Internet might evolve into that could replace traditional cable TV. Unfortunately, the way it's currently written, if this bill were to pass in anything resembling its current form, it would effectively outlaw much common practice for how the Internet is used today.
In Texas, this bill current exists as Senate Bill 1116, sponsored by Sen. Tommy Williams and House Bill 2121, sponsored by Rep. Ron Wilson. Both bills are still in committee, meaning there's still plenty of opportunity to influence their ultimate contents. As of April 2, the text of the bills, as they are posted online, is word-for-word identical, so we can discuss them together.
Section 2(a) says what you'd expect: Steal cable TV, go to jail. Section 2(b) goes on to define all the wild new "communication services" that might eventually replace your cable TV. Sections 3 and 5 don't say much, and Section 4 says that having or selling gizmos that let you steal cable TV is bad. So far so good. If the law stopped there, we'd only be arguing about exactly what gizmos were okay and what gizmos were against the law.
Things start getting dicey in Section 6. In particular:
It's not hard to read between the lines and see this act as being even more sinister. Let's say the thing you're pulling across the network is some kind of "secure" music standard that you can play from your computer but you can't copy to your MP3 player or burn to a CD-ROM. If you hooked a tape deck up to your computer, or did the digital equivalent of that using your computer's S/PDIF ("Toslink") digital audio output, you'd be violating the law. Buy a tape recorder, go to jail. It's silly, on the surface, but it's right there in the text of the bill. Your tape deck, VCR, or computer software equivalent would be classified as an unauthorized access device (see Section 4(b)(2)), allowing you to be fined or jailed.
Laws like this represent a power-grab by the big media companies, trying to tell you and me how we can use our televisions, VCRs, and other home equipment. Furthermore, because modern computers have grown to the point that they can start plugging directly into the TV and stereo, these over-broad laws start restricting all sorts of things beyond their original intent.
Thre's an alternate side to this story. It's called lawful use. In short, you paid for it and they're not letting you use it. You're legally paying for your cable TV, but they won't let you record it so you can watch it later. You're legally paying for digital music downloads, but they won't let you burn them to CDs that you can put in your car or convert them to regular MP3 files that you can put on your portable MP3 player. We need laws guaranteeing lawful use rather than laws restricting it! And, we haven't even scratched the surface of fair use, which is your legal right to quote written text or extract short video snipets from a movie to use in reviews, criticism, and whatnot.
Will this have a negative impact on Texas relative to other states? Absolutely. The Section 6(a)(1)(B) restrictions effectively make it impossible for employers to use standard technologies for their employees to remotely access corporate servers. That means that Texas companies will be at a disadvantage in providing services to their own employees. If it costs more to to business here, they may go elsewhere. The Section 6(a)(3) restrictions on free speech will have huge impact on the kinds of threat assessment and analysis that reasonable companies are expected to perform in light of recent threats against national security. If companies cannot study and share information about threats against their systems, they will become increasingly vulnerable. Ironically, this law may in sum hurt the MPAA more than it helps them.
Of course, the MPAA has a reasonable need for legal protections against piracy of its products. However, when those legal protections are written as broadly as this bill, the unintended effects can be quite severe. Hopefully, our lawmakers will recognize these conflicts and will produce legislation that is more focused on the specific needs of the MPAA today, adding appropriate protections only where existing Federal and State statues are otherwise insufficient.