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WASHINGTON -- Hollywood won't get a hand from the head of a Congressional subcommittee on the Internet and intellectual property, who says he is wary of passing new laws to protect copyrights online.

But Representative Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, is also critical of users who swap music files online. He also accused university officials of being slow to punish students who download music from file-sharing services. But music downloaders should be subject to existing laws, instead of Congress creating new ones, he says.

"It believe existing copyright law is adequate," Smith said Tuesday at a conference, Promoting Markets in Creativity: Copyright in the Internet Age. "It simply needs to be enforced."

New Laws for Net?

The day-long event was sponsored by conservative think tank The Progress and Freedom Foundation. At it, Smith said music downloaders should be punished for their actions, but that he is skeptical of the usefulness of more laws.

"This process begins with education and ends with disciplinary action," said Smith, a Texas Republican. New laws "are hard to write, easy to ignore, and hard to repeal if unintended consequences harm the marketplace."

As recently as late 2002, Congress was considering a bill that would let groups like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) disable PCs used for unauthorized file-trading. The RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America applauded this way to fight piracy. That bill stalled, and Smith didn't mention any legislation by name in his speech.

Enforcement Urged

Earlier in the conference, a panel of lawyers and economists debated whether the Internet warrants new copyright law.

Copyrighted works should have the same protections on the Internet as they have elsewhere, despite arguments from some Netizens and academics that copyright shouldn't apply online, said Edmund Kitch, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

Kitch noted that the 1976 Copyright Act anticipated future technologies that could distribute copyrighted materials and built-in copyright protections under any new technologies. He argued against file-traders and others who suggest works released online are in the public domain.

"Works on the Internet are subject to copyright," Kitch said. "This means that today in America that those who advocate an absence of copyright ... are the ones who must go to Congress and get a revision of the statute."

Kitch said current copyright law has problems being enforced, but predicted copyright-holders will find a way to control the Internet.

"The idea, articulated in various ways is ... the Internet is this wild zone of freedom and autonomy where anarchy reigns," he said. "The Internet, it seems to me, is one of the most natural environments for enforcement of law that ever existed. It's a centralized electronic system which has its own systems of keeping a historic record."

Flexibility Suggested

But Michael Einhorn, author of a forthcoming book on copyright and senior advisor to intellectual property consultant InteCap, disagrees with Kitch. He says the Internet should be treated differently in copyright law because it has given rise to new ways of using copyright, such as the open source approach of sharing computer code.

"The Internet has changed everything," he said at Tuesday's conference. "We have a new way of making contributions, the Internet enables, and copyright law is part of it."

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the reigning Internet copyright law in the U.S., went too far in outlawing all technologies that circumvent copy controls, without also putting place a mechanism for administrative review, Einhorn suggested. While Einhorn did not endorse present proposals in the U.S. that would immediately legalize any circumvention devices, he questioned why Congress doesn't give the U.S Copyright Office authority to review the antitrafficking clause through public hearings. Then, the Copyright Office could recommend possible changes in the law that Congress could consider.

"In the past what we basically did was say, 'Look, there are some technologies that can be used for copying, but we understand there are some good reasons for it, and we generally will side with the new technology,'" he said. "For the first time, the DMCA says, 'We understand there are technologies out there that can be used for very good purposes, but we still must keep them illegal to make sure they're not used for the worse purposes.'"

Einhorn didn't defend online music-swapping, saying he supports the courts that shut down Napster in 2000. But the DMCA's passage means "there's no checks and balances on the system," he said.

Society may have to draw new lines, and decide whether actions like posting one copyrighted newspaper article for reader comment is a copyright violation, Einhorn said. "In our appreciation and understanding of the capacity of the Internet ... to increase the possibility of cultural interaction, we have a whole new way of thinking," he said.

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