BSA lays out vision for rewritten IICA

Robert Holleyman, the head of the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and one of the witnesses at the recent IICA hearing, has issued a policy statement urging Congress to take a close look at IICA. The BSA press release can be obtained here. In the BSA press release Holleyman lays out a vision of the IICA they'd like to see:

In its policy statement, the BSA says the bill should:

1) Clarify that multipurpose technology products that can be used for commercially significant, legitimate purposes are not subject to liability. BSA suggested that the bill clearly state that the Supreme Court's decision in the Betamax case is unaffected.

2) Clarify that to meet the intent standard of the bill, an actor must be shown to have engaged in conscious, recurring, persistent and deliberate acts demonstrating that the acts
caused another person to commit infringement.

3) State specifically that mere knowledge by a developer of technology, or knowledge by a provider of a service, of the infringing acts of another person using that technology or
service is not sufficient to demonstrate the requisite specific intent.

4) Clarify that the bill does not create liability based on advertising or on providing support to users, including instructions for using the technology provided through manuals or handbooks, nor by providing assistance for using a product through a company's online help system or telephone help services.

5) Develop a mechanism to ensure that weak, harassing or frivolous lawsuits are not heard by the courts, by establishing a way to ensure such cases are not brought without some prior review for its merits.

These suggestions sound fantastic, but the truth is that the INDUCE Act will not be very useful to content providers if all of these common sense provisions are provided for in it. One of the main problems with IICA is that without a general intent standard it really will not change the copyright law much. Congress needs to find a way to write IICA so that it kills off the P2P nets while utilizing a specific intent standard, that will be difficult. If IICA is written with a general intent standard and without the BSA suggestions it will be overbroad and threatens to stifle innovation in the tech sector.

Article: Industry Alliance Takes Stance on Induce Act, in TechNewsWorld.