Ars Technica, in an article by Timothy B. Lee (November
18), reports that an influential group of House Republicans published and then
pulled an article proposing "shockingly sensible" copyright reforms. EFF tweeted the story today.
The paper would have reduced maximum infringement
damages, copyright terms, penalties for frivolous copyright infringement claims
and trolling (like Righthaven) and expanded ideas of fair use.
The link for the story is here.
The American Conservative has an article (by Jordan
Bloom, Nov. 16) that includes an embedded PDF from Scribd of the proposal
(about 8 pages) as well as the brief memo pulling it back (in boldface). The article asks is this an “anti-IP turn for
the GOP?”. This is the link.
Generally, the "pelican brief" GOP memo was critical of the continuing
strategy of some large media companies to try to maintain monopoly over
meaningful content distribution and sales, as if they feared low-cost
competition much more than outright piracy.
Early Sunday afternoon, I did see a poor-looking
person trying to sell pirated CD’s or DVD’s to people caught in a traffic jam
near New York Avenue in Washington DC.
That could be a security problem in other ways. I’ve also seen this take place on NYC
subways. If I was a rich media mogul, I
wouldn’t be worried about poor people buying cheap (and probably technically
deficient) imitation copies of my work.
If my work reaches more people, so much the better. (Maybe I would be worried if I had a union or
guild job in the business.) But it is
this crude kind of piracy that leads movie theaters to have zero tolerance to
photography within their auditoriums. (See
the story of an arrest on my Movies blog, Aug 3, 2007).
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