Fair Use For Wireless Too

Forbes: While text messaging is already considerd passe' by many, the newest emerging trend is sending and receiving ringtones and music/video clips to/from your friends via your mobile phone. However, like many areas in tech, this practice has outpaced our legal system and has some rightsholders in a 'tizzy'...

San Diego-based SMS.ac is a wireless communications company that is taking the bull by the horns - sending its executives to Capitol Hill to start briefing legislators on the looming copyright conflict as the global mobile data market prepares to exceed $200 billion by 2010, according to technology analysts at Frost & Sullivan....What could slow down this type of explosive growth? According to the article, "A legal crackdown on the mobile phone user who, say, points his camera phone at a concert and sends a five-second video clip to his buddies' phones--particularly if his buddies happen to be 18,000 fellow fans in an SMS.ac group."  Uh oh, is this foreshadowing that soon we're going to see the formation of a new industry trade group called the Cellular Content Industry of America (CCIA) that sues its customers too?

"If fair use [of digital media] continues to be a gray area," says Greg Wilfahrt, co-founder and executive vice president of SMS.ac, "then the mobile phone content space will become wholly litigious." The article points out that Washington doesn't move as fast as mobile phone technology, but it's started to consider the issue...Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), has proposed the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, favored by SMS.ac, which would "protect the 'Fair Use' rights of the users of copyrighted material and thereby enable consumers of digital media to make use of it in ways which would enhance their personal convenience." Scott Ellison, program director of IDC's Wireless and Mobile Communications practice also states, "Wireless is a tightly controlled environment, but the issue of fair use seems to be migrating from other areas of policy to wireless."