Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship Act of 2007

This Act was introduced by Rep. Rick Boucher (Va.), and co-sponsored by five others, on February 27, 2007, and is a bill “to amend title 17, United States Code, to promote innovation, to encourage the introduction of new technology, to enhance library preservation efforts, and to protect the fair use rights of consumers, and for other purposes.”  This Act may be cited as the “Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship Act of 2007.”  As of March 19, 2007, the latest congressional action on this bill was its referral to the House Subcommittee on Courts, Internet, and Intellectual Property.

Under Section 2 (“Copyright Infringement”), the bill mandates courts to remit statutory damages for secondary infringement, except in cases where “the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that the act or acts constituting such secondary infringement were done under circumstances in which no reasonable person could have believed such conduct to be lawful.”

The bill also provides that no “person shall be liable for copyright infringement based on the design, manufacture, or distribution of a hardware device or of a component of the device if the device is capable of substantial, commercially significant noninfringing use.”

This proposed piece of legislation renders the prohibition on the circumvention of a technological measure (to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or to otherwise avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure without the authority of the copyright owner) that effectively controls access to a protected work not applicable to a person by reason of that person’s engaging in a noninfringing use of any of the six classes of copyrighted works set forth in the determination of the Librarian of Congress in Docket No. RM 2005-11, as published as a final rule by the Copyright Office, Library of Congress, effective November 27, 2006.

Also See:

FCC Adopts New Rules Permitting TV Channel Sharing by Broadcasters; Enacts First Step Towards Freeing UP Spectrum under Incentive Auction

FCC Modernizes Broadcast Television Public Inspection Files to Give the Public Online Access to Information Previously Available Only at TV Stations

Copyright Office Conducts Proceedings on Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems

Legislation to Deregulate Television Market Introduced in House and Senate

Copyright Office Proposes New Fee Schedule