PRO-IP and PIRATE Acts Fused Into New Bill 324
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) have just sponsored a new bill, the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008, which would combine the worst parts of the PRO-IP Act and the PIRATE Act. The basic idea is pretty simple: expand the Federal government to create something like the Department of Homeland Security for IP. The Copyright Czar then polices the internet and clogs the courts with thousands of civil lawsuits against individual infringers so the RIAA doesn't have to. Feel free to contact your representatives with your feelings about this bill. Right now, they believe the bill (PDF) will 'protect jobs.'"
Amazing... (Score:5, Informative)
Unbelievable. Really.
Not like DHS (Score:5, Informative)
Department of Homeland Security is a "Department", which comes with a seat on the Cabinet. This looks more like the DEA with its "Drug Czar", which I believe falls into the "Agency" category. No cabinet post.
The property seizure powers also look similar, though not so much the civil litigation stuff.
Re:Why do we need this? (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
Intellectual property legislation introduced in the Senate on Thursday would combine elements of two controversial IP enforcement bills: The PRO-IP Act, which passed the House by a wide margin in May, and the PIRATE Act, which has won Senate approval several times since its first introduction in 2004.
In fact it was the first sentence.
The Senators are trying to tie their PIRATE legislation to the already popular PRO-IP legislation that passed the house.
Re:Why do we need this? (Score:3, Informative)
Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]
Title 18, Chapter 46 US Code [gpo.gov]
Re:Protect jobs? (Score:5, Informative)
The rights of artists to their works came way before the rights of others to trample them.
Copyright has never been about the rights of artists. Since the seventeenth century stationers guild it's been about the right to profit by exploiting the artists and the crowns need to censor and control publication.
Had protecting the rights of authors and artists actually mattered, rather than being used as a thinly disguised excuse to fool the gullible, intellectual 'property' would have been concerned with funneling resources to the actual artists and creators rather than securing monopolies for the holders of the rights.
all the positive effects of copyrights.
There are no positive effects of copyrights. As a whole they damage creativity, slow down creative derivative works, hamper incremental improvement and skew the distribution channels towards creative poverty. More talent and works are marginalized than are aided, helped and spread through the current regime.
Don't get me wrong, there _could_ be positive effects of a system funneling money towards the creators of works and creating a financial incentive for creative work. But intellectual monopoly rights aren't that, nor have they been, nor are they going to be.
Re:Why do we need this? (Score:2, Informative)
But it is wrong that it even got introduced. It would be like introducing a bill that allowed the government to take whatever you owned with no warrant and the ability to sell that at auctions. Sure that bill wouldn't get voted in, and hopefully the supreme court would find it un-constitutional, but it shouldn't have gotten introduced.
They can't take whatever you own, just cash that has traces of narcotics on it (>90% of bills in circulation) or a car that had traces of drugs in it.
It's called civil asset forfeiture. See Downsize DC [downsizedc.org] for more information.
Re:Protect jobs? (Score:2, Informative)
Pastor Martin Niemoller
Re:Protect jobs? (Score:4, Informative)
A fair amount of our modern idea of property comes from the philosopher John Locke and his Second Treatise on Government. [wikipedia.org] Basically it is a person's labor and efforts that improve upon a common resource that creates and justifies property. ie: The fish in the ocean belong to everyone, until a fisherman catches one, then that fish belongs to him because is efforts in catching it made it useful. What modern IP law is failing to address is Locke's theory of Spoilage. "As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils; so much he may by his labour fix a Property in. Whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others. (II, 31)" [everything2.com] Now with the internet, the supply of a song or movie is effectively unlimited, the real question is: How long before a song or movie spoils? Most movies and songs have a short short shelf life, a year at most for songs and maybe two for movies after that their sale number have dropped into irrelevancy. The biggest problem for IP isn't control or piracy, it's the ridiculous amount of time that passes before it becomes Public Domain.
Re:Protect jobs? (Score:3, Informative)
1776 wasn't the same, tho.
Then, the people of America were trying to free themselves from what amounted to a foreign overseer with a massive global network but a relatively poor local presence.
Now, the people of America would have to free themselves from a local overseer, which lacks immediate support from foreign powers but has a massive local presence.