41–50 of 132 posts
That's unfair. There is nothing for free, specially in politics. It's more probable that, the work, has been already done and now they are receiving the prize for their lobbying efforts.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/01-618
It's fascinating to hear these oral arguments, because you have some of the smartest legal minds in the world making references on the fly to obscure two-hundred-year-old case law, stringing things together in logical ways in much the same way that the most exciting engineering conversations in our line of work involve rapid conversations at a whiteboard, where deep technical knowledge and logic come together to create frameworks and business models that have never existed before.
But while lawyers and justices are engineers in one way, building case-law "frameworks" to improve the citizenry's experience based on a wide range of constitutional knowledge and common sense... lawmakers are engineers in another way, "hacking" those frameworks to see what they can get away with. Sometimes "hacking" is good, but it's entirely dependent on the moral compass of the hacker.
In this specific case, the Supreme Court had argued on the basis of a balance of harm to different types of "progress" as laid out in the Constitution: is it more likely that progress will be economically incentivized if copyright terms are extended retroactively, or if copyright terms are not extended retroactively? At the time, a lot of this was tied up in ensuring consistency with international law. But that's not the case under the 144-year CLASSICS Act now being considered - as Lessig describes in the op-ed, "no other jurisdiction creates a similar right anywhere."
So to me, the balance if the Supreme Court were to review this case would be to consider a streaming music provider's incentives. Do more people hear and become inspired by 1930's public-domain jazz music if:
(a) it's all public domain, anyone can start a startup streaming it; or
(b) it's protected, and large streaming companies like Spotify can invest more money into the propagation of the work because they have exclusive rights to a subset of it, even if the subset that is now "orphaned" is not accessible as it would be in (a)?
It's a complicated question, and as a technologist I would lean towards (a) if harmony with international law is no longer a consideration. But, as I mentioned, legislators are "hackers," and with the Supreme Court unable (by design) to proactively limit their ability to build on the existing precedent that extensions are possible... it all comes down to their moral compass and alignment with their economic incentives.
...and per [1], Orrin Hatch has received $664k over his career from the "TV/Movies/Music" industry.
(IANAL but things like this make me want to be one.)
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/congress-latest-move-to-extend-c...
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/industries?c...
Here's the EFF link to contact your senator: https://act.eff.org/action/stop-another-expansion-of-copyrig... If you do so, be brief, polite, and state your position, for or against as well as the strength of your position (strongly against, etc.). The staffer will simply aggregate everyone's for/against positions. Verbal abuse or extra emotion is not helpful.
I agree that it's not helpful. I do think the verbal abuse and anger comes from the helplessness people feel since they know that these senators are greedy sociopaths that already know bills like this are bad and won't take your voice into consideration.
But if I understand the article, the current state of play is that Hatch introduced this into a bill that had already passed the House. If the Senate passes this, then it's different from the bill that passed the House, so it goes to a reconciliation committee. If the copyright extension survives that, then the modified bill has to pass both the House and the Senate.
So, yes, this is bad, and we need to work against it. But we still have several chances to block it.
> Music Modernization Act I don't know if/how it could legally be done, but I'd love to see "cute" names for laws barred from use in Congress. Refer to them all by number not brand names dreamed up by marketing professionals to make the proposed law seem unassailable ( "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act" aka USA PATRIOT Act).
So glad I live in Canada. American corporatist evil seems boundless.
> Music Modernization Act I don't know if/how it could legally be done, but I'd love to see "cute" names for laws barred from use in Congress. Refer to them all by number not brand names dreamed up by marketing professionals to make the proposed law seem unassailable ( "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act" aka USA PATRIOT Act).
This would be a great way to prevent polititians from framing the bills. For more on framing, see George Lakoff’s lecture on moral politics — reveals the way political language uses metaphors and How framing a debate ensures its outcome. Repeating the frame reinforces the intended meaning. Merely Using the name of the bill defines its outcome. “Tax Relief” - no one wants to fight a “relief” effort. Tax cuts for the r…
> Music Modernization Act I don't know if/how it could legally be done, but I'd love to see "cute" names for laws barred from use in Congress. Refer to them all by number not brand names dreamed up by marketing professionals to make the proposed law seem unassailable ( "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act" aka USA PATRIOT Act).
I agree completely. I'd like to see some sort of "No More Orwellian Names" act. The titles would be obtained using some kind of algorithm run on the bill text. But then, lawmakers would screw with the text until the algorithm returned the title they wanted. D'oh...keeping people from working around regulations is difficult.
[1] various characters replaced with their equivalents from the Cyrillic codepage
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copyright is about the least artificial monopoly that exists. An artificial monopoly is the government sending men with guns to keep bigger stronger men than me off my land. It's a chunk of dirt that existed millions of years before I was born and will continue to exist millions of years after I'm dead, but the government allows me to call it "mine." That's as artificial as it gets, but we call it "natural rights." A…
I don't think it's sensible to refer to all ownership of land as monopolistic. In most cases land is fungible. There are many landowners in my town of plots of land which are largely interchangeable. Saying someone has a monopoly on their specific plot of land is about as relevant as saying someone has a monopoly on a specific cheeseburger. If one party were to own all the land in a particular region, like a feudal l…
Err, there's a reason the first three rules of real estate are 1. location 2. location 3. location
The key thing about land is that it's unique, there is no other place on the entire planet identical to the place you're standing. There may be similar places, and that may be fine enough for some people. But plenty of wars have been fought over a particular piece of land. Just ask the Palestinians if land is fungible.
> Music Modernization Act I don't know if/how it could legally be done, but I'd love to see "cute" names for laws barred from use in Congress. Refer to them all by number not brand names dreamed up by marketing professionals to make the proposed law seem unassailable ( "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act" aka USA PATRIOT Act).