thedailybell.com / by Staff Report / Monday, December 10, 2012
GOP sides with Mickey Mouse on copyright reform … Illegally downloading a couple dozen songs can earn you a million-dollar fine. Setting some Robert Frost verses to music can make you a criminal. Software or hardware that could possibly be used to copy DVDs – illegal. And thanks to congressional action every couple of decades, Disney still holds a copyright over Mickey Mouse, whom Walt first created nearly a century ago. The law and law enforcement around copyright has moved far beyond its purpose of promoting arts and sciences and has become a textbook case of collusion between big business and big government. If Republicans took on this issue, they could make a play for younger voters while fighting for free enterprise. But that would require standing up to big movie studios and record labels – and that’s not really how Republicans roll, as a GOP memo on copyright reform painfully showed. – Washington Examiner
Dominant Social Theme: Always side with Hollywood.
Free-Market Analysis: The lede of this article is a bit buried, in our humble view. Here’s the real news: “The staffer who wrote the memo [see above], an ambitious 24-year-old named Derek Khanna, was fired – even before the RSC had decided on other staffing changes for the upcoming Congress. The copyright memo was a main reason.”
But admittedly the article is generally terrific reporting, though the firing is important because it illustrates the pettiness and even brutality of those involved in this fight. There’s no give here. No intention to compromise.
It is this same mindset that sent a posse of FBI agents halfway around the world to shut down Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload empire on charges of copyright infringement. Law enforcement pursued Dotcom into a safe room of his house, knocked him down and stepped on his fingers. Then they confiscated his wealth, sent him to jail and illegally took his servers back to the States.
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