shouting loudly

“Desperate company” makes bizarre DMCA threats

Using a very creative interpretation of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Media Rights Technologies (MRT) has issued a cease-and-decist notice to Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and RealNetworks.

Their alleged violation of the law? Failing to use MRT’s digital rights management technology as a means of retarding copyright infringement. (Note that each of these companies actively deploys DRM on many media products; iTunes even encrypted the State of the Union address, which is not copyrighted.) This is the equivalent of a small vendor of surveillance cameras threatening to sue Walmart, Target, and HomeDepot for aiding and abetting shoplifting–merely for choosing other cameras.

The CNet story has some awesome quotes explaining just how outlandish this claim really is:

RealNetworks spokesman Matt Graves said he hadn’t yet seen the letter, but it appeared to be a ploy by a “desperate company” to get its product licensed. “That’s a rather novel approach to business development,” he said in an e-mail interview Friday. [...]

“It looks to me like a play for publicity,” Jessica Litman, a University of Michigan Law School professor who specializes in digital copyright issues, said in an e-mail interview. “I’m no fan of the DMCA, but it doesn’t impose liability simply because some product could be redesigned to implement a technological protection scheme but its makers decline to do so.” [...]

Randy Lipsitz, a partner in the intellectual property and technology group at Kramer Levin in New York, said [...] “This one’s out there.”

Thanks in part to a certain young video games scholar (never guess who!) for bringing this Forbes story to my attention. As he wrote in an email, “I’d blog about this, but I can’t tell if it’s as stupid as it sounds like it is.”

Yes, yes it is.