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."

Comments

Re:What this looked like in the legislature:

[slashqwerty]

We just need everyone we know to write letters to their congressmen -- Letters written on hundred dollar bills.

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!

Re:Czar

[Anonymous Coward]

When hundreds of millions of children can "manufacture and distribute" copies of works more easily than they can tie their shoes, with no cost to themselves, then the only way to stop it is with a government powerful enough to know when they do it and stop them or prosecute them.

The only government that could have such power is a global totalitarian state.

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.

How right you are...

[symbolset]

"At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.

On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions.

The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living." - Thomas Macaulay, 1841

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.