Slashdot Mirror
The Power of Backroom Lobbying: How the Music Industry Got a Copyright Extension
An anonymous reader writes: The Canadian government's unexpected budget decision to extend
the term of copyright for sound recordings came as a surprise to most copyright watchers, but not the music industry lobby, which was ready with a press release within minutes. How did the industry seemingly know this was coming? Michael Geist reports that records show the extension is the result of backroom lobbying with monthly meetings between senior government officials and music industry lobbyists paving the way for copyright term extension without public consultation or debate.
It's a disgusting, dirty, sordid job, and deserves all the contempt it gets.
But the real traitors are the politicians in bed with those lobbyists. Supposedly representing the greater interest, in reality just serving their own greed.
Those should go to jail, no less.
How about mandatory 24-hour surveillance on all politicians, publicly live-streamed? Sure it's an invasion of privacy, but it's an invasion of privacy that could be mandated as the price of wielding the power we grant them. They want to watch us - who can individually do so little of significance, we should be able to watch them *MUCH* more closely.
Of course there's a bit of a "can't get there from here" problem, but periodically opportunities for major revisions do arise.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
To some degree also it is that one of the safeguards in the system has broken down, or is not performing as it was expected to do. Namely, the government is expected to act as a check on corporations, but we, the voters, are expected to act as the check on the government. Politicians ought to be afraid of angering the voters by engaging in corrupt activity. And yet, they're not. Who are they afraid of? They're afraid of powerful (i.e. wealthy) donors, interest and lobbying groups.
Canada is a little different in that right now the present political troubles stem in large part from a first past the post system, when votes on the center to left are being split, while those on the right are not, leading to a majority of seats going to a minority of votes. I'm simplifying a bit, and there are money and corruption issues too, but that's the biggest problem from what I've seen. The Harper government has been able to get away with a lot of this despite consistently getting at best a plurality of votes. Hopefully the next election goes differently, though I'm not holding my breath at this point.
The US, however, is having far more of a problem with money. The FPTP system there is an issue too, but the money is as much or moreso the current issue there.