Declan McCullach interviews Sarah Deutsch, a vice president and associate general counsel at Verizon:
- The copyright wars on Capitol Hill have begun to drift into the political equivalent of trench warfare, with Hollywood and the music industry pitted against hardware makers, electronics manufacturers, and ragtag activists at nonprofit groups.
Now consumers have a powerful new ally. Verizon and other telecommunications giants have ordered their phalanx of lobbyists to oppose the entertainment industry's demands for new copyright laws. The company is also fighting the Recording Industry Association of America's request for information about a subscriber.
So at the center of the copyright scrum, you'll find Sarah Deutsch. The 41-year-old Deutsch, a vice president and associate general counsel at Verizon, represented her employer during the negotiations over the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) copyright treaties and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). These days, she is marshaling the opposition to proposals in Congress that would permit attacks on peer-to-peer networks, boost technology used for digital rights management, and grant more power to copyright holders.
CNET News.com sat down with Deutsch, who was recently in town for a Progress and Freedom Foundation conference, to talk about this looming confrontation over digital copyright law.
Q: The Recording Industry Association of America wants you to reveal the name of a subscriber who's an alleged peer-to-peer pirate, but you're saying they're not following the appropriate legal procedure. What's the dispute?.......
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