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.'"

Comments

Protect jobs?

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

Ermm.....more likely "will protect the stream of political contributions and lobbying money from the RIAA/MPAA/etc."

Re:Protect jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, protect jobs. Time to become a copyright lawyer...

Re:Protect jobs?

[thermian]

the theory goes that if intellectual property can be protected totally, then money will be made in large amounts.

What it actually means is that as soon as profits are assured by this sort of action we will see distribution channels becoming more powerful, taking a bigger cut, and IP owners getting a smaller piece of the pie.

Not that it would work, no government that criminalises millions of its own citizens has done well in the long term.

Re:Protect jobs?

[thermian]

in this case the criminalised group would be predominantly middle class, since that is the social group with the highest percentage of internet access.

No-one cares if you criminalise lower class/unemployed/homeless/poor people. Really, they don't. Its amazing how little people with even a little success care about people less well off then them. It sounds cynical, but I'm only being honest. How many friends do you have that aren't in or above your social class?

Criminalise people who are successful, have nice houses, jobs, and are otherwise highly respectable, and you have a potential storm on your hands.

Re:Protect jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country.... People shouldn't be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people.

Re:Protect jobs?

[Znork]

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.

Re:Protect jobs?

[Adriax]

How many friends do you have that aren't in or above your social class?
 
Ok, so you only have friends at or above your social class. Explain your friends then, or do that not count as actual people?
They have friends below their social class, so either their slumming it cause they feel bad about you, or they, like many more americans than you care to admit are different than you, don't see social class as noteworthy.

Re:Protect jobs?

[AftanGustur]

Yep, protect jobs. Time to become a copyright lawyer...

Or a Jail Warden..

It's gonna be shitty to be an artist though ..

Time for an RIAA tea party

[sakdoctor]

Although I'm not sure throwing intangible goods into the harbour is going to be so effective.

Not like DHS

[ronmon]

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.

Re:kill

[Naughty Bob]

i wonder when will people start killing these american senators who are doing things that people dont want. in democracy thats treason.

As the great Votaire put it:

"An ideal form of government is democracy, tempered with assassination."

Clever guy.

technical problem

[spikenerd]

Combine this with FISA, and suddenly the only obstacle left is encryption. We all know what's coming next... The "No encryption for potential terrorists act", the "mandatory back-door act", or the "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear act".

...so instead of posting about how we're all so insightful for foreseeing it, or just whining about the government (as though our congressman might read Slashdot), let's do what we do best and solve this problem, except this time before it even happens.

It seems to me that the solution to censorship is to route around it. How about if we code up some steganography tool to hide encrypted messages, and give them the back-door to a bunch of worthless garbage? (i.e. SSH over Nigerian scam mail.) Perhaps they'll notice that all the geeks are communicating with variations of Nigerian spam emails, but the only way they could stop us would be to solve the SPAM problem. Good luck legislating that away.