Re: Digital Watermarks (long, getting off-topic)

["Brian A. LaMacchia" <bal@freeside.cs.colorado.edu>]

   From: "Alex F" <alexf@iss.net>
   Organization: Internet Security Systems, Inc.
   Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 14:19:08 +0000
   Precedence: bulk

   > - The entertainment industry has a reputation of being paranoid

   The forgers of the copyright laws (at least as they relate to music) 
   had incredible foresight.  Basically, from the laws that were 
   originally drafted (30's maybe?  Then revised in the early '70's at 
   least as far as public domain goes) both videos and CDs are 
   protected.  These were written when there were no CDs or videos.

Uh, this isn't true.  The Copyright Act of 1909, the immediate
predecessor to the Copyright Act of 1976/1978 (*), did not explicitly
cover sound recordings.  *Sheet music* was protected by copyright, but
it was an open question whether sound recordings were protected.  In
fact, the recording industry was sufficiently unsure of the outcome of a
copyright challenge that they never let the issue go to court.  It
wasn't until the '76 Act that sound recordings were explicitly added to
the set of copyrightable works of authorship.  As for video and other
digital media, it also wasn't until the '76 Act that the "perceivable to
the naked eye" test was modified to allow aid via machine.

The '76 Act was a complete rewrite of copyright law; it did a lot more
than change things with respect to "public domain," although writing
into law the "fair use" test developed by the courts since the '09 Act
was certainly part of it.

					--bal

(*) It's call the Copyright Act of "1976" because (IIRC) it passed
Congress in '76.  But it didn't go into effect until Jan. 1, 1978.
Copyright law did not change between the '09 and '76 Acts.  (Work on the
'76 Act actually began in the 50s; it took Congress over 20 years to
figure out what it wanted to do.  Contrast that with today, where we've
had more changes in copyright law since 1976 than in the prior 200 years.)