White House Lauds MN RIAA Win, Analysis of Victory

cnet-declan writes "The Bush administration's copyright czar says the RIAA's $222,000 recent jury verdict against a Minnesota woman shows copyright law is 'effective' and working as planned. C|Net's coverage has comments from Chris Israel, the U.S. Coordinator for International Intellectual Property Enforcement. Israel is formerly a senior Commerce Department official appointed by President Bush in July 2005 who previously worked for Time Warner's public policy arm (Warner Bros. Records is one of the plaintiffs in the RIAA case). The site also features an interview with Rep. Rick Boucher, no fan of the RIAA, on whether Congress will change the law, an analysis of why U.S. copyright law is broken, and four reasons why the RIAA won."

Comments

RIAA and GNU have a lot in common

[tjstork]

Let's face it. RIAA is doing a lot of the dirty work for the open source movement. IF, a judge were to rule, or the congress were to decide, that copyrights did not somehow apply to electronic documents, or that, users could freely copy a digital image without having to abide by any sort of license or royalty restriction, the OSS movement would be screwed because the GPL would become utterly meaningless. That is, if the little consumer can steal a song, then mega corporation can also violate the GPL, as both are based on copyrights. You could, when the dust all settles, be allowed to copy music legally, but then, you would also have to allow companies to grab all the GPL code, commercialize it, and do exactly the very thing that spawned the GPL to begin with.