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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!
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.
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.
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.
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?