Sunday, December 9th, 2007
A trio of stupid bills that made the news last week…
One bill tells colleges and universities too cut out illegal downloading by their students or risk losing all federal funding, including student loans.
Another broadly-written bill would expand asset forfeiture laws (because they’ve worked so well in other contexts) to include copyright violations. Scary passage summarized by CNET:
Any computer or network hardware used to “facilitate” a copyright crime could be seized by the Justice Department and auctioned off.
Finally, the House overwhelmingly passed an expansive new bill requiring ISPs to keep meticulous records aimed at nabbing people who transmit illegal images over their networks, which would include not just kiddie porn, but some forms of consenting-adults obscenity. The bill’s sponsor says he didn’t mean to include home wi-fi networks, but the bill doesn’t explicitly exempt them. And let’s face it, if a bill is at all ambiguous, you can bet there’s a U.S. attorney out there ready to interpret it as broadly as possible. The Democratic leadership pushed the bill to the floor for a rushed vote, with no debate. Which makes you wonder what they were worried about.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 8:59 pm by Radley Balko
and is filed under Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
TheAgitator.com
Nice to know that our Democratic congress is no longer in the pocket of industry.
Oh, wait…
I don’t know if my theory on the third makes me a cynic or an optimist, but I assumed that the instant, bipartisan support existed because it’s a vote-getting “save the children” bill that has no chance of ever being enforced.
There have been a whole series of these bills over the years and each and every one has been ruled Unconstitutional in five minutes flat.
That said, I really wish they’d stop this nonsense. It’s absurd.
I am suddenly in favor of massive, unrestrained downloading of all manner of scene releases and smut on college and university accounts.
I kinda like the first of these three. If colleges are unable or unwilling to comply by policing their networks and getting into bed with Rhapsody or Napster or iTunes or whoever, then federal funding will go away and the artificial price inflation of a college education due to government interference will shortly follow.
Who am I kidding? IF the schools have the intestinal fortitude to refuse to comply, the government will quickly drop the requirement before the public catches on to how unnecessary and counterproductive it is to have the feds involved.
There’s quite a bit of debate in libertarian / market anarchist circles as to whether Intellectual Property fits the definition of something we should be concerned about protecting. (Is it property that people have a right to defend? Is the “property” part only the physical incarnation of the data, such as the CD or the book?)
These latest bills, combined with other RIAA and MPAA pressure for ludicrous “damages” regarding copyright have basically driven me to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter. The “benefits” achieved by having a copyright system, such as the encouragement of people to engage in IP generating activities (recording music, writing books and software, etc) no longer outweigh the costs of such heavy handed enforcement.
I say kill copyright completely. If the RIAA and MPAA think they can’t possibly do anything other than haemorrage money continuing to produce music and movies in a world without copyright, let them stop doing so. I predict the market will compensate for the loss. And even if not, the loss of diversity on music would be worth it, to no longer live under the shadow of obscenely oppressive copyright law.
The problem with the current state of copyright law, is that the life of a copyright has been extended to unreasonable limits because of the lobbying efforts of large corporations that wish to profit from their IP forever.
It was originally thought that fourteen years was a reasonable time for an artist to profit from his work before it entered the public domain. While I believe copyright laws are in dire need of reform, they should not be abolished.