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PRO-IP and PIRATE Acts Fused Into New Bill
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) have just sponsored a new bill, the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008, which would combine the worst parts of the PRO-IP Act and the PIRATE Act. The basic idea is pretty simple: expand the Federal government to create something like the Department of Homeland Security for IP. The Copyright Czar then polices the internet and clogs the courts with thousands of civil lawsuits against individual infringers so the RIAA doesn't have to. Feel free to contact your representatives with your feelings about this bill. Right now, they believe the bill (PDF) will 'protect jobs.'"
This bill basically gives federal prosecutors the right to bring a civil suit against infringers on behalf of the copyright owner (with proceeds going to the copyright owner), AND leaves the option open for the copyright holder to file his own suit on top of it. Now you can get sued twice for the same thing, with damages doubled up to $2 million per infringement. And best of all, the taxpayers will foot the bill for civil suits by the government.
Unbelievable. Really.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Department of Homeland Security is a "Department", which comes with a seat on the Cabinet. This looks more like the DEA with its "Drug Czar", which I believe falls into the "Agency" category. No cabinet post.
The property seizure powers also look similar, though not so much the civil litigation stuff.
From TFA:
Intellectual property legislation introduced in the Senate on Thursday would combine elements of two controversial IP enforcement bills: The PRO-IP Act, which passed the House by a wide margin in May, and the PIRATE Act, which has won Senate approval several times since its first introduction in 2004.
In fact it was the first sentence.
The Senators are trying to tie their PIRATE legislation to the already popular PRO-IP legislation that passed the house.
The rights of artists to their works came way before the rights of others to trample them.
Copyright has never been about the rights of artists. Since the seventeenth century stationers guild it's been about the right to profit by exploiting the artists and the crowns need to censor and control publication.
Had protecting the rights of authors and artists actually mattered, rather than being used as a thinly disguised excuse to fool the gullible, intellectual 'property' would have been concerned with funneling resources to the actual artists and creators rather than securing monopolies for the holders of the rights.
all the positive effects of copyrights.
There are no positive effects of copyrights. As a whole they damage creativity, slow down creative derivative works, hamper incremental improvement and skew the distribution channels towards creative poverty. More talent and works are marginalized than are aided, helped and spread through the current regime.
Don't get me wrong, there _could_ be positive effects of a system funneling money towards the creators of works and creating a financial incentive for creative work. But intellectual monopoly rights aren't that, nor have they been, nor are they going to be.