speaking Right
The Wall Street Journal ran a review of Free Culture Friday. (I can't show you a link because on the Journal's theory of the web, it doesn't make sense to even allow searches on your website without paying first.) Great review, with an interestingly critical twist.
The thrust of Stewart Baker's criticism is that my argument should be directed to the Right: That copyright law is "asbestos litigation for the Internet age." "Big Copyright," he continues, "is one special interest that Republican strategists should love attacking." And he ends by mapping copyright as a wedge issue:
What's to fear, that Hollywood will end its generous support of Republican candidates? And talk about wedge issues. Voters under 40 are already more Republican than any other generation. What if the administration stood with them on this issue, proposing a cap on the damages that the industry can extract from college students for downloading music? Say, $1 a song, or even $10, instead of $150,000. Karl Rove could put that on the table, sit back and let John Kerry choose between his contributors and our kids. If that happens, Mr. Lessig could end up next to Ralph Nader in the pantheon of liberals that the Republican Party has learned to love.
Of course not a result I'm eager to see (though after my sniping about Nader, perhaps one I deserve), and of course, I am, as Baker suggests, a liberal.
But Baker is exactly right that this issue should play to the Right as well as to the Left. And as you'll see in this video from the Progress and Freedom Foundation debate with Jim DeLong (recorded the day before Baker's review), it is a point I've been making as well.
| Permalink | technorati
Comments (9)
Perhaps Baker is missing the point. He seems mystified that the republicans aren't attacking this "one special interest that Republican strategists should love attacking." He's trying to apply logic to a political situation.
The point is, this issue is about control. There is nothing that the Corporate Right likes quite as much as control. This is why the current administration, owned by the Corporate Right as it is, has not made a move to change the current IP situation. To do so would be to relinquish some level of control that the corporations imagine they have over consumers.
Here is a link to the WSJ review that will stay live for 7 days.
Is that the same Stewart Baker who was general counsel of the NSA under Clinton? I wonder if he's being facetious with that conservative argument.
Sucking up to "Big Copyright" and fucking American citizens' fair use rights is a bipartisan affair. Every evil copyright law, such as the DMCA and the just-proposed "PIRATE Act" is sponsored by one republican and one democrat.
Misleading article in one way:
"Voters under 40" are not a "generation".
The Republican group is 30-40; the group from 18-30 is quite sharply anti-Republican.
Why?...
>?Big Copyright,? he continues, ?is one special interest
>that Republican strategists should love attacking.?
The current Republicans are pro-Big Everything, and against any sort of caps on anything done by big business. There's not a chance in hell that they'll actually make the proposal suggested in this article.
>>The point is, this issue is about control. There is nothing that the Corporate Right likes quite as much as control.
You are not saying that the MPAA/RIAA orgs are Right Wing are you? It seems to me that they are more Left than Rush Limbaugh is Right. And they are the ones that want complete control of everything you hear, see, and read.
Don't misconstrue my comment - the "Right" is just as guilty, they just go about it by eliminating regulation instead of adding regulation. This allows the corporate entities to charge/change what they want.
Conservatives respect property rights. Respecting property rights means accepting their limitations. Rights to real property stop at the property line. Unfortunately, powerful owners of IP, on both sides of the political divide, will use that power to overreach with their claims.
Part of the problem is the intellectual property bar, which is less concerned with the philosophy of intellectual property rights than whoring themselves out to the highest bidder. The whole issue of IP has become an arena where the threat of litigation is used to intimidate competitors and extend, in an extralegal manner, overreaching IP rights.
Last year I was the target of a claim by Chrysler that they had exclusive rights to the images of their cars and that I was not allowed to publish my original embroidery designs derived from those images. Since I can't afford to litigate, I took a different tack to fight back. I told their licensing agency that I was compliant with Chrysler's stated permission to use their own copyright images editorially (putting aside the obvious 1st Amendment and fair use implications). I successfully pitched the Detroit News to do a 'big guy picking on little guy' story (getting the DetNews to run it was important because it meant that the folks in Auburn Hills would be reading it). Most important, in the interview with the reporter I repeatedly raised the irony of a company that just paid $1 billion into a fund for compensating Jews used as slaves in the Holocaust going after an embroiderer who made Jewish ritual items and gifts. The story ran in the Sunday business section and the lead paragraph mentioned my Judaica and identified Chrysler as a subsidiary of "DaimlerChrysler AG". I also raised this issue with their licensing agency and told them that I was perfectly willing to contact every Jewish newspaper in the United States with the story. Two days later they backed down.
I don't believe the article is saying that the majority of "under 40s" are Republican only that more "under 40s" are Republican than in prior generations.
For example, if the split in the 1980's was 70% Democrat and 30% Republican and the split in the 2000's is 60% Democrat and 40% Republican, the "under 40s" would be MORE Republican now than they were in the 1980's.
>>Voters under 40 are already more Republican than any other generation.
If by "more Republican" he means "less Democratic" then perhaps this is accurate. Probably "more libertarian" (small "l") would be a heck of a lot _more_ accurate.