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Week Ending February 4, 2005

S 167 Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 to provide for the protection of intellectual property rights and for other purposes.

BRIEF

    The bill, a combination of other bills passed last year that never made it to public law, defines several acts of copyright violations and requests fines and punishments.

   Copying a movie in a theater using a video recording device would bring up to three years, a fine or both. Second offense or greater brings up to six years and fines. Possession of a video recording device in a theater is not enough to support a conviction. Theater employees can detain a violator in a reasonable manner for a reasonable time for questioning by law enforcement and would not be held liable for civil or criminal action.

   Distributing a work in progress before publication or commercial distribution would also bring fines and imprisonment.

   The United States Sentencing Board is directed to establish appropriate sentences for the crimes included in the bill.

  The National Film Preservation Board would be reauthorized to “carry out activities to make films included in the National Film Registry more broadly accessible for research and educational purposes and to generate public awareness and support of the Registry” and program. The NFPB and the Registry exist to preserve ‘historically or culturally significant films”.

   Those companies that distribute technologies developed to permit what is known as “jump-and-skip” or “ad – skipping” practices allowing, for example, “family – friendly viewing of films that may contain objectionable content” are given what bill Sponsor Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) described as “narrowly defined safe – harbor clarifying that distributors of such technologies will not face liability for copyright or trademark infringement…”.  Altering the viewing of original unaltered films by skipping over content a parent, for example, would not want a child to see is allowable provided the altered version is not made into a permanent copy and the skipped sections are considered “quantitatively and qualitatively insubstantial in relation to the work as a whole.”

   The bill would also provide for copying orphan works, films that are in the last twenty years of their copyright, not commercially distributed with any significance and are not available at a reasonable price.    

Sponsor: Senator Orrin G. hatch (R-UT)

Vote: Passed Senate by Unanimous Consent (Feb. 1, 2005)

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