Not a great start

In case you missed it…

Who did the Democrat’s appoint to the Intellectual Property Subcommittee? Hollywood’s own Howard Berman! A huge portion of his contributions come from media companies and law firms.

So what?

Lawrence Lessig stated it well:

As everyone knows, one issue critical to those who are making the Net interesting (for politics at least) is IP reform. Not “reform” in the sense of the last decade (e.g., Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, DMCA, NET Act, etc.), but real reform designed to make IP laws work sensibly in the digital age. Real reform — not the piddly full-employment-act-for-lawyers reform proposed by the Copyright Office for “orphan works,” or the puny reform suggested for digital libraries. Instead, reform that tries to fit the legitimate objectives of copyright — to assure that artists have the incentives they need to create great new work — into the contours of digital technology.

To craft that reform would require real work. I don’t think anyone has a clear picture of what would be best yet. But what is clear is that the war on technology of the last decade must come to an end. And the efforts by content holders to leverage their power over rights they can’t even prove they own (see, e.g., the Google Book Search battle) into control over the architecture of the net must be stopped. No one should defend “piracy.” But no one should believe that the way the law currently defines “piracy” makes any sense at all.

Oh well. I’m not terribly surprised, this is business as usual, but some Democrats have better records with issues dealing with technology than most other politicians, so I was hoping for something better. Al Gore comes to mind, since he actually did play a role in the development of the Internet. The intersection of politics and technology doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon.