Copyright Alliance Presses Presidential Candidates

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Not satisfied with the current copyright terms of life plus seventy years and huge financial liabilities for infringement, the Copyright Alliance is pressuring presidential candidates for stronger copyright laws. In particular, they want the candidates to promise to divert police resources to punish even non-commercial copyright infringement. After all, without copyright, what would become of the next Shakespeare, Michaelangelo, or da Vinci?"

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Part of my inaugural speech ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

"My fellow Americans, today we face many pressing issues: the war in Iraq, assaults on traditional liberties at home and abroad, a difficult economy, climate change, and the list goes on. There's another issue I'd like to address today, and it may seem like it's not quite on the scale of those others. But it's an important one, and it has implications for everything I just mentioned, because the way we're going to solve those problems isn't just to ignore them and hope they'll go away; it's to use our heads and figure out solutions. More than two hundred years ago, the Founders of this great nation decided that one of the best ways to do that was to make sure that smart people who came up with important ideas were rewarded for their work, and I'd like to thank the Copyright Alliance for bringing this issue up.

"Today, I am calling on Congress to fulfill their Constitutional duty to 'secure for a limited time' copyrights and patents. And limited time means limited time. It doesn't mean extending copyright every time Mickey Mouse might be due to enter the public domain. It doesn't mean sitting on patents for things that you didn't invent until someone else figures out how to make money off it, and then suing them out of the blue. When the Constitution was signed, it meant twenty years. If twenty years was good enough for James Madison, it's good enough for me. So I urge Congress to send me a bill restoring the terms of intellectual property law to their original forms, and making it clear that it's a civil matter, not a job for the FBI, because you know, Osama bin Laden is still out there and frankly I think the FBI has more important things to do."

"Thank you, good night, and God bless America."

But that's probably not the answer CA is looking for. ;)