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Senator Seeks Restrictions to Music Laws, Fines
Justen writes "Following this article from last month, Senator Norm Coleman (R.-Minn.) has announced that he will seek to limit federal penalties for copyright downloads and seek to restrict the subpoena power essentially granted to the industry through the DMCA. The RIAA responded by calling the current situation an 'epidemic.'" Sadly, there's no quantitative values for proposed reduced measures yet, but given the speed at which government moves it's reassuring to know the issue is this far along already.
Putting aside what this guy is doing, I've always been a little surprised that the GOP doesn't side with downloaders on the P2P issue. I think that the fact that they don't shows that they have a very real committment to property rights, and that they don't want to compromise that for political expediency. In that sense, I think it's fairly admirable.
Because on the other hand, Hollywood is one of the main sources of support for the Democrats. The Democrats raise tons of money out there, and movie stars and other prominent Hollywood types are almost all Democratic.
P2P represents an almost ideal way for the Republicans to extract revenge on Hollywood, to "cut off their air supply." But there's almost no support at all for doing that within the party.
I know it will rub a lot of people the wrong way to say that it's possible to interpret protecting the property rights of international corporations as a principled position, but I think that's what's going on.
I sort of wish they wouldn't, though...
It seems to me, copyright laws were written with publisher in mind. The high penalties prevent a company like Random House from lifting a work from McGraw Hill and selling and distributing the books. Fining a 15 year-old $100,000 for sharing the latest Limp Bizkit single is just a little out of whack. The "crime" doesn't fit the punishment.
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"Our team"? Since when do you decide what "team" the members of the /. community belong to?
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Politicians survive by persuading the public to re-elect them. The RIAA has made a really good job recently of persuading politicians that most of there electorate are file sharers.
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It also suggests that at this point, they've become so entrenched in this mindset that they probably WOULD happily start suing more and more people, the more their sales start to slide. Which, I personally think represents one of the most profound perversions of our economic principles imaginable. Did anyone else who bought something from Magnatunes in the last week stop to think, gee, I probably just sent another subpoena to some grandmother in NYC? That's virtually how bad the situation has gotten, and a logical conclusion that can be drawn from their quixotic belief that ALL their sales problems are from piracy. It boils down to, "Buy our stuff or we sue you."
Since the government can't act DIRECTLY to stop them (well, it could, but it won't) the best thing they could do is seek to limit the RIAA's power to weild lawsuits. If you eliminate the chance of them profitting from this (the fines would be less than the lawyers' fees), and make sure no one suddenly wakes up to discover a quarter-million lawsuit in their mailbox, then the RIAA might just be forced to face reality.
(WHY the RIAA is taking this stance is another issue altogether. I personally think it's a snowball, once they started trying to convince their shareholders that their problems were due to piracy, it took on a life of its own)
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