This morning the executive producer of Hannah Montana testified before
the House Commerce Telecom Subcommittee on network management. Steve Peterman,
representing the Writers Guild of America, West, made some important
distinctions between legal and illegal creative works online:

But when we talk about an open marketplace we don't mean a thieves
marketplace. The Guild recognizes that piracy is a major problem. I've
experienced this first hand – just look for Hannah Montana on You Tube;
you'll find more than 110,000 results, many of which were stolen, and none of
which provide any income to me, the other writers of the show, or the studio.
The two bills on internet preservation that have been introduced during this
session of Congress – Senate Bill 215, introduced by Senators Dorgan and Snowe,
and HR 5353 introduced by Chairman Markey and Congressman Pickering,
specifically reference the right of consumers to access lawful content.
Piracy is and will remain illegal. I applaud the work of the Motion Picture
Association of America, the networks, the Copyright Alliance and everyone
else working to ensure creators and copyrights are
protected.

Let me confess that the boldface above is not original; yes, I'm highlighting
the shout-out that we got from Peterman.

We received a similar
shout-out from actress, writer and producer Justine Bateman at a similar
network management hearing recently, and at the same hearing FCC Chairman Kevin
Martin made the same distinction Peterman did between legal and illegal creative
works online.

I have been following the network management debate for many years now and I
refuse to predict where it will end up, but it's nice to see unanimity on this
important point.

Share this:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 12:30 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under capitol hill, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.