SANTA CRUZ, Calif., Jan. 31 /PRNewswire/ -- The content industries were immensely relieved in 2005 to receive the Supreme Court's landmark opinion in the Grokster case. But there's at least one feature of the decision that should cause the content owners to take notice.

Both the drafting and application of international and national copyright laws now place great importance on technological protection measures. It is logical, therefore, that the Supreme Court took the same common sense approach in Grokster. It made specific reference to the absence of filtering technology as supporting a finding of culpability on the part of the Defendants.

But what if the "absence of technology" argument is a two-way street? What happens when reasonable technical protection measures are not used to prevent piracy? Does the copyright holder forfeit his legal rights and remedies? Content owners who ignore rights protection technologies now do so, I suggest, at their peril.

As Prof. Richard Walter, Head of the UCLA Film School's graduate Screenwriting program, and court-authorized copyright expert, opines:

Talmud preaches that silence is consent. Content providers who serenely default in the warmth of the Grokster decision engage in a self-defeating prophesy. Congress and the Court require them to take action. They must make every reasonable effort to install state-of-the-art filtering technology. Copyright owners who wallow in inaction forfeit their property. They give it away freely -- and legally -- not only to those who actively seek it but also to those who merely stumble upon it.

The Sony/BMG rootkit hysteria will not disrupt the progress of rights management technologies. Clearly, the market requires more than ever the deployment of content protection and rights management technologies.

One of the albums impacted during the Sony/BMG episode was "Get Right with The Man" by the band Van Zant. I am listening to it on my portable device as I write this, unaffected by the rootkit problem because I copied the album from a legitimate streaming service, not the CD. I hooked up a stream-copying application with my online music service, pressed the record button and then transferred the digital files directly onto my portable device. Basically, I effortlessly extracted the signal as it crossed what I call the "digital chasm" between my computer's rendering device and the output from the sound card. Without proper technology, this simple process is entirely undetectable to copyright owners and their distributors; it is also now considered the #1 method of digital piracy.

The digital chasm is a prime location to access content for unauthorized copying. It's ironic to think that all the pain Sony/BMG endured in its legitimate attempt to protect its rights was in vain. With its technology in place I still could have duplicated the disc and easily created MP3 files from playing the CD and capturing its output with any copying application. This works with almost all portable devices, music services, and audio recording software.

Except one: BlueBeat.com's Internet radio, http://www.bluebeat.com/. Hank Risan and his team at Media Rights Technologies, http://www.mediarightstech.com/, the parent company of BlueBeat, identified and bridged the digital chasm early on while the music industry was focused on other problem areas in the delivery chain. Now, with the progress that's been made against unauthorized file sharing and with developments in DRM, the digital chasm is apparent to everyone. It makes no difference how sophisticated the upstream rights management is if a user can simply extract the content, unprotected, in its journey across the chasm. Without some mechanism for securing the digital chasm, there is no foundation for any other protection system.

If legitimate content providers don't adopt the necessary and available technical solutions they may find the courts less willing to apply copyright laws in their favor.

About Nic Garnett

Nic Garnett, international expert on rights management, former CEO of the IFPI and SVP at InterTrust Technologies, now serving as Chief Strategist for Media Rights Technologies.

Media Contacts: Quake Cox, Media Rights Technologies

831.426.4412, Quake@mediarightstech.com

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CONTACT: Quake Cox of Media Rights Technologies, +1-831-426-4412 or
Quake@mediarightstech.com

Web site: http://www.mediarightstech.com/