Slashdot Mirror
President Signs Law Creating Copyright Czar
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "President Bush has signed the EIPRA (AKA the PRO-IP Act) and created a cabinet-level post of 'Copyright Czar,' on par with the current 'Drug Czar,' in spite of prior misgivings about the bill. They did at least get rid of provisions that would have had the DOJ take over the RIAA's unpopular litigation campaign. Still, the final legislation (PDF) creates new classes of felony criminal copyright infringement, adds civil forfeiture provisions that incorporate by reference parts of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, and directs the Copyright Czar to lobby foreign governments to adopt stronger IP laws. At this point, our best hope would appear to be to hope that someone sensible like Laurence Lessig or William Patry gets appointed."
Why would politicians care about money? They are only allowed to use campaign contributions for their campaigns. What will their campaigns spend the money on? Publicity!
Who do you think lobbied congress for this law? It was the major media conglomerates that control 95% of all the media we are exposed to. What would happen to a politician that challenged the media? They would be torn apart in the press. This is why politicians always vote in favor of the media.
By the way, this bill went down just like the DMCA. Less than a month before a major election the bill came up for a vote. Virtually everyone in congress blindly voted for it with effectively no debate. The major media companies didn't publish anything on it.
In summary, congress did not vote for this law to get campaign contributions. They voted for it to keep the press from shafting them. Any attempt to persuade congress to create balanced copyrights will have to take that into consideration. This is not about campaign funds!
How much worse can it be than this, where an artist was detained for her pen and ink drawings? It's like they trained up the border patrol for the inevitable rubber stamp.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
No, let's be fair. The blame is with those who voted them in.
I didn't vote for Bush in 2004, nor did I vote for Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) in 2006. What should I have done, other than vote for other candidates and encourage friends and family members to do the same?
This is what happens when you appoint a Czar.. a fuckin' WAR is declared and any allusions that people have about their rights go quickly out the window.
Well, the only saving grace here is that the Justice Department (who, after all will be responsible for prosecuting these "cases") is dead set against it. As they said in their rather concise letter to Congress, they have better things to do with their time and our money.
... music lovers?! Huh. Just wait until all the voting public using P2P realize that they're now subject to criminal prosecution. It's gonna get ugly: they're making yet another run at Prohibition, and it didn't work the first time.
... but this is going to be different. It will have to be higher profile if it is going to have the desired effect: keeping it out of the public's eye won't do any good at all.
All in all, I have the feeling this probably won't go anywhere. If they start successfully screwing over too many people it's going to be political dynamite. Most likely this is just a step up in the RIAA's terror campaign, "Okay, so maybe you weren't afraid of us, but we're betting that you're just terrified of the United States Federal Government, so there!" This is one of those things for which you're not going to find much popular support. Drug dealers? Sure, why not: nobody likes them (even if they are supposed to have the same civil liberties as everyone else.) But
So, they'd better play this very carefully. Not too many people are aware of the DMCA, or it's implications
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Or are we going to keep complaining that copyright law gets worse each passing year?
Nerds are going to have to start running for office to get this fixed. I'd rather not have to do it myself, but as my sig indicates, I've got the spare time.
The national idiots.. I mean congress, have apparently realized that we don't actually produce anything of tangible worth in our own country anymore. So this is one of those prohibitionist efforts to criminalize significant portions of the population in the name of IP Protectionism.
And after the horrendous financial bleeding we've caused, the rest of the world these days is more likely than ever to ignore the nannering coming out of Washington D.C. ...Seems like the dumbest time ever to have gone ahead with this mess of a law.
In case there are any more Pollyannas out there...
Reading all of the gloom and doom in the comments, I began to think that there's no way this act could be so bad. I mean, wouldn't this provide the government with more knowledge and power to defend my fair use if I referenced a Disney movie on Slashdot and big brother wanted to sue the everloving snot out of me for it? If it's my tax money paying for this, shouldn't I get some protection out of it? IANAL, but a quick search of the act for 'fair use', 'public domain', and 'commons' soundly tells me no.
I would like to remind everyone that EFF donations are tax deductible.
well, you would have to first come up with a complex equation that:
in order to see the full picture you need to analyze all of these variables and see how they affect the market. in the end i think one will find that piracy/file-sharing has actually increased music-related spending and is actually a valuable source of free exposure/advertising. giving consumers the option to try out music cost-free allows them to explore a greater variety of music and artists. this results in lower sales for crappy artists, but increased sales & fan bases for good artists.
i don't doubt that the major labels are hurting and sales for pop albums are dropping. but that isn't entirely due to piracy, and it doesn't mean the industry as a whole doesn't benefit from piracy. part of this is caused by a new distribution paradigm emerging. the old means of promoting music by using Payola to get top-40 radio stations to drill catchy hit singles into the heads of consumers is losing its effectiveness. increasingly people are using the internet to discover music on their own--music that actually suits their tastes. and for the people who do still listen to the radio, they can just buy the singles from iTunes rather than spend $20 on a pop album full of filler tracks that they won't listen to.
the new digital music distribution system gives consumers what they want rather than telling them what they want. and as a result, a lot of consumer spending is being shifted away from the major artists and towards indie artists. studies have shown that music pirates spend more on music than the average person, so how can piracy be hurting the music industry? it may be hurting the major labels and fad musicians who put out derivative bubblegum music which aren't worth paying for, but being able to download an album for free won't stop real fans from purchasing music & merch from, or otherwise supporting, the bands they like.
file sharing is actually great for the music industry because it evens the playing field for indie artists who have previously been locked out of the promotion network and distribution system controlled by the major labels. and this democratization of the market may even lead to a rise in the quality of mainstream music.
That is the curious part, when it is signed in to law. That alone should be evidence of the one party system we currently suffer. Then there is the nationalizing of banks, again right before an administration change. It seems like these handover periods were always stall points, times of nothing being done, in D.C. before now. Now, big stuff happens just before the hand off.
Both parties are pro-business, and have voted to keep the consumers in line. I'm not sure where we are going.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
Sorry, I just got finished reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and am feeling overly paranoid. I used to laugh at the idea of having copyright cops who would go around and arrest kids who had pirated music on their iPods, but it seems that day is growing ever nearer. Am I the only one who feels helpless against this growing insanity of the *AA controlled congress?
Ask yourself if he wasn't right: Does your local department store not stock blank DVD's and CD's in bare pallets of 100 packs because they move too fast to put on the shelves? Do you know anybody who doesn't have an MP3 player large enough to store more music than they can afford to buy? Is there not a vast network of servers from which any copyrighted work extant can be received without compensation for the creator, available in nearly every home?
By making stupid laws that should not and will not be obeyed and cannot be enforced we train the citizen from his youth to scoff at the law. That is far more damage than even the most egregious piracy can cause - it's promotion of anarchy. It would be better to do away with copyright entirely than to do further damage to social order.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I wonder how many people will have their computers stolen by the RIAA before someone tapes a cellphone bomb inside one. Maybe they would think twice when a van full of "copyright enforcement agents" was exploded in a public place :\
What I don't get about our lack of manufacturing / exports:
1) there is a huge demand for wind energy
2) most wind turbines are manufactured overseas, and there is a severe shortage of them
3) the rust belt has tons of infrastructure for manufacturing
4) the rust belt is severely underemployed
What the hell are we waiting for?
Two parking spots, actually. Striped, dark, 3 piece suit as mandatory uniform at all times and occasions. Cigars (not Cuban, those are reserved for people who matter). An enormous apartment with ridiculously large balconies where people of less terrifying ranks party every night, with scenes of dark cities in the background. Bodyguards. Guns. A black limousine. Video game adaptations and thrilling articles in the Washington Post.
And of course, hookers.
There is an easy way to bring about a revolution in IP laws.
Make every copyright holder enforce their IP rights through the courts for
EVERY infringement that they become aware of, otherwise their claim to that
IP is null and void.
In essense, this would force the RIAA and MPAA etc, to sue for every breach
of copyright they know about (eg. the Senators daughter, the Fortune 500 CEOs son etc)
- to the point where the general public is forced to wake up to the faults of the
system and demand change.
At the moment, these bodies can selectively sue whoever they want as a show of
strength, but by and large leave the masses alone. As a result, they pick and
choose which infringements they want to fight for to ram home the message.
A case in point - under Australian law, it is still technically illegal to make a
copy of copyright content YOU OWN. As such EVERY iPod and MP3 player in Australia
(and probably every PC and laptop) contains illegal music. But are the music companies
enforcing this ?? No. Its not in their best interests to highlight the fact that you
can't legally copy a CD that you legally bought, to your MP3 player or a backup.
Whatever "lobbying" was being done previously, it seems to have been completely effective. Many countries have signed, without dispute, so-called "free" trade agreements which essentially codify every US-corporate-friendly dream that could be devised by the Bushites - including DMCA-ish and software patent provisions, to speak of 2 issues in the IT area. In non-IT areas, similar capitulations are even worse. Pharmaceuticals, agriculture, all get twisted into poisonous American corporatised pretzels, to pave the way for overpriced patent drugs and monstrosities such as GM products (which should be flat-out illegal anywhere). It's as if the "sovereign" countries didn't even read the agreements, let alone take heed of the public outry that always accompanies them.
It must be so easy for them, when the signatories are Bush-puppet governments such as the Howard government in Australia (thankfully rejected at last) and Harper (which malignancy we should pray is thrown out tomorrow, or at least held safely to a minority).
Let's be honest. "Globalisation" never meant anything more or less than "America buys your stuff cheap, you buy America's stuff dear". The world does not need Wal-Mart, Microsoft, McDonald's, or any other substandard, exploitative American brand. The height of absurdity is Wal-Mart selling rice to Indians. What do the Wal-Marts in China sell? Crappy plastic Chinese crap back to the Chinese? The whole concept is absurd. What is Wal-Mart even doing in Canada?
The ultimate irony is that those tilting the playing field towards the USA, and who would most vehemently deny the insuperable insult to sovereignty that these agreements represent, also claim to believe in a "free market" - the Bushites, the Reaganites, the Friedmanites, the corrupt fuckwads, the ignorant lying Sarah and Todd Palins, the criminal Cons and neo-Cons whose chickens, we hope, are coming home to roost at last. If you're wondering why you're having trouble competing - maybe it's because you're not competitive! Top example - Microsoft can't compete on merit. They have to be anti-competitive; and you betcha they love them some FTA help. Pity they got caught at it.
But perhaps as the world wises the hell up, we finally see some logic in Bush's response: More lobbying. "Bring it on", in the Texan moron's famous catchphrase: Just expect more pushback!
But we'd prefer if you'd just Bugger off.
you had me at #!
Ok, so the copyright czar says to the FCC, "do this with the federal prosecutors", and the FCC says "no, that's dumb" ... the federal prosecutors also take issue with the task.
... if it's the czar, exactly how powerful is he/she, what are the limits, and who oversees them?
Who is really in charge? Is it really the FCC or is it really the czar? If it's the FCC, why have a czar
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Here in Brazil we have a multi party system. And by multi party I mean, once we had 22 presidential candidates. I'm pretty sure all brazilians around will remember what happened: Fernando Color de Mello for elected, and ended up "borrowing" (according to him, other words would be "confiscating", "stealing" etc) almost all the money the people had on the banks. Savings accounts, investments, you name it.
Now ? We have a president that never even finished high school. A president that, while visiting a major city in Africa, said: "This city is so clean it doesn't even feel like I'm in Africa".
Need I go any further ? Quantity is not the key here. Quality is. And guess who gets picked, by the parties, to run for president ? Candidate the party think will win. So, in a nutshell, it is us, the populace, that pick the candidates. Do you see a pattern here ?
We have a bunch of uneducated, misinformed, brainwashed people "manning" the voting process. I'm not assigning blame here, just pointing some (obvious) facts.
We have a vicious circle.
How to break it ? I have no clue.
morcego
So who exactly are we SUPPOSED to vote for?
Anyone not "approved" by the two big parties, simple as that.
And I would extend that beyond mere "Democrats" and "Republicans"... If in 50 years we see Greens vs Libertarians, they will most likely have grown just as bad as the current idiots in power. But as long as their candidates need to struggle for their slice of power, they act as an effective filter against the inbred* Harvard-vs-Yale sycophants we inexplicable keep voting into office.
* Yes, "inbred" - Look at the family trees of the most powerful thousand or so men in the US at any given time - A few dozen families appear over and over and over throughout history. The comparison with "crazy king George" goes much further than mere dislike for Bush's policies.
... to finally emigrate to Sweden. The writing is so clearly on the wall, with both this and the Wall Street Bailout getting rammed through even an allegedly Democratic-controlled Congress. McCain is likely to be worse than Bush, and Obama isn't messianic and nowhere close to revolutionary enough to kick the money changers out of the damned temple. Kucinich would have done it, though. Hell, he's risked his career trying to drive stakes through the hearts of a couple of them (impeachment). Who else had the balls to do that?
This country is irrecoverably ruled by greed and dominated by stupidity now. We The People are too stupid to revolt again as they once did.
Why would politicians care about money? They are only allowed to use campaign contributions for their campaigns
Actually the rules have changed and you can have your relatives (even your wife and children) being paid by your campaign. There are Congressmen who have their wives being paid 120,000+ as 'political consultants' from the campaign fund. This is a fairly wide-spread practice.
Check out Dick Morris's book 'Outrage', you may not like Dick Morris, but the book has some disturbing information in it.