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An account of CCIA's FTC game - August 1, 2007

The Computer & Communications Industry Assn. thinks Major League Baseball is blowing smoke when they tell you that the "accounts and description sof this game may not be disseminated, without express written consent." And they want the Federal Trade Commission to do something about it.

On Wednesday the group filed a formal complaint with the agency alleging unfair and deceptive trade practices and asks the feds to order the league to start informing fans of their right to make fair use of the pictures, descriptions and accounts of the game.

The complaint also names the National Football League, as well as NBC/Universal, Dreamworks Animation and Morgan Creek, whom it accuses of placing copyright warnings on DVDs that "materially misrepresent federal law, to the detriment of consumers." Also named is Harcourt Inc., an educational publisher owned by Reed Elsevier Group PLC, the same parent company that owns Content Agenda.

CCIA reps several big hitters in the computer and telecom industries, including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems.

The complaint is probably a long shot, given the FTC's lack of jurisdiction over copyright law and the difficulty of showing actual damage caused by the warnings. But it's the principle of the thing that most provokes CCIA.

"We've all just become inured to lawyers spouting these things that we assume they must be true, but they're not," CCIA spokesman Will Rodger said. "I don't think any responsible trial lawyer for the content industry would get up in front of a court and say we, and we alone, get to determine every use of our content. They'd be laughed out of court. But that's what they claim in their warnings."

Why now, when the warnings have been around for decades?

"Why do the content companies keep streaming up to the Hill pushing their extreme views on copyright law?" Rodger counters. "It's time that someone starting pushing back. Copyrights are not chattel, like cars or houses or other kinds of real property. It's a limited set of rights, with a lot of exceptions, and we need to stop treating it like as if it were like any other kind of property."

Apart from the sports leagues, the other defendants named in the complaint were chosen randomly.

"Basically we just went into a number of retail outlets and looked at what is currently on sale and chose a few DVDs that seemed to have the most egregious copyright warnings," Rodger said. "It's an almost random sample, a randomly sampling of the worst."

As for tackling the issue through the FTC, rather than in court or in Congress, Rodger called it a tactical consideration.

"This is basically a law enforcement issue, requiring the attention of a law enforcement agency," he said. "The law is clear, these guys are misstating it. We can argue about how much sampling is too much, and the proper limits of fair use, but these guys say ANY sampling is prohibited. No one actually believes that because it's not true. It's a straight-up fraud on the consumer."

The FTC is required to review all such complaints, but no word yet on when or whether it might take any action.
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