Content is a $100Bn industry. Technology is 5-6x bigger, but the tech companies trying to disrupt content are an insignificant fraction of that industry.
Meanwhile, set aside whether you believe in the reforms proposed in the Khanna memo --- reducing statutory damages, increasing cost of enforcement, reducing copyright terms. Ask instead, "was this a politically effective policy memo?" Were its goals in the 113th congress realistic? Were its arguments persuasive? Something like 35% of all congresspeople are lawyers, and this memo starts out with a highly dubious argument about the meaning of the copyright clause.
It seems to me (and I am prepared to hear smart people tell me how wrong I am about this) that a reasonable short-term goal would have been to reduce the term of copyright, ratcheting it back to where it was, say, before Sonny Bono. Instead, this "RSC" memo proposed beyond that a gift basket of what seem like mostly not-useful policy trinkets for Redditors: expanded fair use for DJ culture (really? spend political capital to modify regulations on a $100bn industry for... DJs?), lower statutory caps for damages (the MPAA and RIAA already sue for a tiny fraction of the likely liability for many infringers), and punishing false copyright claims (the claims studios take to court are overwhelmingly not false; penalizing bogus DMCA takedowns wouldn't move the dials at all).
The real copyright reform is probably something like reduced term and compulsory licensing. What was the value to the RSC of trolling the Content industry for reforms that had no chance of happening, that wouldn't have actually kept people from being bankrupted by lawsuits, that wouldn't make it easier to launch tech companies, and that at the same time manage to almost uniformly enrage rightsholders?
Was this memo really "shockingly sensible"? A lot of smart people say it was. But I wonder whether they're more shocked that any conversation could have happened at all, and not really looking closely at the content of the memo itself.
Your points are valid, but the important things to consider are framing and negotiation. This was Obama's problem for the past 4 years.
If you initially propose something "middle of the road," you get negotiated to 3/4 down the road. If you propose something idealistic and way far to one side, then you give the opposition things to negotiate away. Then they feel like they win, and in reality you come up with something much more moderate and "middle of the road" than you would have otherwise.
I wish I could find the article, but I once read a story about a web designer who knew his clients ALWAYS had to have some feedback. "I love it, but can you change the color of this" or "make this bigger." No matter how perfect the design was, they HAD to give feedback to feel like they were doing a good job.
So the designer would make a beautiful website, and then put a really ugly snowman in the background. Then the clients would say "I love it!" But can you remove the snowman?"
Say you want reduced copyright terms, reduced damages, and expanded fair use for DJs. Then give up the DJs.
You know you have to give them something, so add things in you're okay giving up.
Now. Why is the first point about the size of the industry relevant? Unless you're talking about their ability to bribe...I'm sorry..."lobby" Congress to pass the laws they like? That shouldn't happen anyway, regardless of their size. Laws should be passed on common sense and what's good for the people at large, not based on how big is your bank account.
What is dubious about his argument about copyright? First off, copyright is not "property", and shouldn't be treated as property. It's more like a permit. The government allows you to use a certain idea for a "limited time period" as it says in the Constitution. Unfortunately, because of the bribing..sorry, again, I meant lobbying...the "limited time period" turned from 14 years to almost 10x more. That doesn't sound limited at all to me. Copyright was meant as an "incentive" system - not as a welfare system.
Ideas can and should be reused. Whoever gets something copyright, most definitely got "inspired" or copied parts of someone else' ideas. That's why there isn't really something like "intellectual property", because nobody owns an idea 100%. And since you used someone else' ideas, you have to get paid for whatever you added only for a limited period of time, and then allow others to benefit from it, too, and expand the public knowledge. The whole point of the copyright system was to benefit the "public". It doesn't say "the creators" in the Constitution.
The fact that you dismiss DJing and remixing so easily shows that you have zero understanding about why fair use even exists in the first place. I suggest going through these, and hopefully it will change your mind:
I don't "sound like" a copyright hawk. I am one. I am way, way to the right of HN on copyright issues.
So, your comment actually doesn't have much to do with mine. I am well aware that HN is full of copyright doves, and I respect that position (I feel like I'm going out of my way to be respectful of them). All your comment says is, "there's the opposite side of this copyright issue". Which is about as banal as telling me that water is wet.
From my perspective, tptacek was not trying to reignite the Great Internet Copyright Argument for the millionth time, and instead was making a point about what was politically actionable today.
mtgx is coming from a fantasy/idealistic world position and tptacek is coming from a position entrenched in reality.
I mean look at what mtgx said:
"Now. Why is the first point about the size of the industry relevant? Unless you're talking about their ability to bribe...I'm sorry..."lobby" Congress to pass the laws they like? That shouldn't happen anyway, regardless of their size. Laws should be passed on common sense and what's good for the people at large, not based on how big is your bank account."
This is an absurd response to what tptacek said. If mtgx wants to advocate some kind of political revolution that is fine, but it is not an appropriate response to what tptacek is saying about Republicans spending political capital to effect change.
After watching (and thoroughly enjoying) mtgx's second linked video [1] it's become a little more complicated to discern the left or the right of copyright. I think the talk's final point of speaking of "values" is very pertinent and in a way relevant to the way this conversation branch progressed.
From your quote about DJs your copyright values seem to be at the opposite side of openness (whatever the antonym of openness is), but having been reading and enjoying your comments for a while I suspect that comment might just be misguiding. I think I'd like to read more about what your values on copyright are.
Ideologue: One who can't elaborate their position in response to a counter argument and just repeats scripted talking points again and again until the other side gets sick of replying to someone so dull.
If I was sure who you were referring to I'd probably be using the arrows, but since I can't I'll just say that mtgox really did not address tptacek's points. Or at least not the main thrust of them which was that this memo was completely unsuited to the RSC at this time.
As a bystander to your and tptacek's debate, I'd like to point out that it seems you didn't really address tptacek's main point: this bill was badly written and dealt with minor issues which matter less, and wasn't worth spending political capital on.
It's very nice that you dragged this into HN's millionth debate on whether copyright is property or not (seriously, don't people ever get tired of the same rehashed arguments?). But this has nothing to do with tpacek's point. At least, that's how it looks to me.
> (seriously, don't people ever get tired of the same rehashed arguments?)
Is an argument only valid when it's fresh? Is e no longer equal to mc^2 because so many people keep rehashing the same tired formula over and over again?
Honest Question: Do you think I said anything about the validity of the argument?
All I asked was whether people are tired of having the same argument over and over. The reason I asked that is because tptacek was specifically not doing so, and someone was dragging the conversation in that direction. You have to understand, people like tptacek, myself and others that have been on HN (or anywhere on the internet) for a while, have seen these exact threads, with these exact arguments, probably hundreds of times. At some point, you realize that no one is bringing anything new to the table. Then someone like tptacek comes along and does bring something new (and relevant) to the table, and he can't even do that without the same old debated coming up.
The Republican Study Committee was founded by Republicans who thought the mainstream of their party was too moderate. Proposals that go beyond what is politically feasible is part of their mission, because they want to change the boundaries of what is feasible.
(For example, right now the committee’s Web page links to an op-ed advocating a flat 15% income tax. The President—any President, of either party—will sign a flat income tax into law some time after the Air Force trades its fighter jets for flying pigs.)
"This memo starts out with a highly dubious argument about the meaning of the copyright clause."
What's dubious about it? Isn't that the standard constitutional interpretation? I've always heard that it's supposed to work like a balance with incentives for creators on one side and public ___domain access on the other side, with the goal being to maximize invention and innovation.
Look through 'tzs comments for the one about the meaning of the word "science" at the time the constitution was ratified, and the clear intents of the framers. I believe Khanna's opening point about the purpose of copyright is actually incorrect.
> I believe Khanna's opening point about the purpose of copyright is actually incorrect.
Yes, you said that already. What you haven't said is why you believe this, except to cite an obscure (and not at all on point) comment on HN. I've done a little bit of searching, and it is easy to find extensive well-reasoned arguments that Khanna is spot on. e.g.:
This is a good essay, thanks for digging it up. I'm not sure it convinces me that Khanna isn't off base in the introduction to his memo, but that introduction isn't really the core of my argument and I wouldn't want to get derailed.
So what is the core of your argument? That the memo was not politically wise? That is manifestly true. But it says nothing about whether or not it was right on the merits, or even whether or not it was "shockingly sensible." As far as I can tell, it was all three of those things. If you don't agree, I'd really like to know why.
No! (Well, besides ratcheting terms back). That's the thing I'm trying to point out. If, like me and I think a lot of people, you think that the 2 big problems with our current copyright regime are (1) ordinary people are under constant threat of being bankrupted by studios for availing themselves of the most convenient access to a TV show or movie, and (2) that it's dangerous to start a consumer Internet company that deals in media, then these reforms meaningfully solve none of those problems. But at the same time they manage to be inflammatory to the content industry: exemptions for remixing rights-encumbered songs, punitive measures for mistaken takedowns, and slightly but not meaningfully increased costs of litigating infringement.
Ah, well there's your problem right there. I don't think the two problems you cite are the big problems. Those are merely symptoms of the real problem, which is that content providers are promulgating the belief that copyright is an entitlement rather than what the Constitution actually says it is: a grant. All the other problems flow from that fundamental mistake.
So long story short, even if tzs is correct I don't think that means that khanna is wrong, as his interpretation of the constitution doesn't depending on the 'sciences' part in any way. In fact, the way he is using 'sciences' seems to be consistent with the way tzs defines it.
The point 'tzs was making is that the purpose the framers had in ratifying the copyright clause was essentially the same purpose to which it is applied today. Khanna's point is that it has been warped towards a purpose other than the framers had in mind, which again does not in fact appear to be correct.
"Khanna's point is that it has been warped towards a purpose other than the framers had in mind, which again does not in fact appear to be correct."
I guess I still don't see how you're getting that. Khanna's criticism of the current copyright law is that it is being used to enrich creators rather than to maximize innovation. TZS's comment is about what can be copyrighted or patented, which Khanna never takes issue with.
What specifically do you think he is wrong about with regards to his interpretation of the constitution?
Here's a study prepared for Congress in the late '50s when they were considering a revision of copyright law that provides a good look at the historical development of our understanding of the scope of the copyright power in the US: http://www.copyright.gov/history/studies/study3.pdf
Well, the false or blanket DMCA take-down requests are a real problem.
Here's the recent HN example of how idiotic these have gotten: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4867216 (Movie Studios Ask Google To Censor Their Own Films, Facebook and Wikipedia (torrentfreak.com))
I have no idea how big of a problem false or fraudulent copyright claims are, but they are in fact already illegal under U.S. copyright law:
Section 506(c) [1]:
Fraudulent Copyright Notice. — Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500.
Section 512(f) [2]:
Misrepresentations. - Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section —
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,
shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner's authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
Can you point to a single instance of someone or some organization being successfully prosecuted for issuing a false or fraudulent DMCA take-down request? Yes, such requests are illegal under current law, but that law is never enforced. Part of the problem (in my, possibly uniformed, opinion) is that the legal standard is too high: you have to "knowingly" issue a false DMCA request, and that is a tough standard to prove in court. There is no penalty for shotgunning take-downs every which way and seeing what sticks (and saying "oops, my bad" for the ones that don't).
Why does issuing a DMCA counter-notification not automatically trigger an investigation by the FBI?
Then there is the problem that DMCA is woefully inadequate to deal with Fair Use. Fair Use is often cited inappropriately to justify unauthorized copying that does not rightfully fall under Fair Use exceptions. However. DMCA makes no such distinction, and it is up to the entity hosting the allegedly-infringing content (i.e., the one to which the DMCA notice is sent) to determine whether the content is actually infringing. Even when an unauthorized copy of a work passes each of the four parts of Fair Use test with flying colors, the DMCA takedown requester is still not in violation of the law you cited. So there is no disincentive to issuing spurious take-down requests.
Valid point. Question: When congress makes infringement a criminal matter, do you think false and fraudulent copyright claims should be treated a criminal matter (since they would be, essentially, false police reports)?
Previous discussion on HN has come to the conclusion that the false DMCA takedown prohibitions are effectively toothless because the adverbs used set an incredibly high bar of proof and malice.
They're a real problem, but how significant are they compared to the other peoples copyright reform advocates have? Spurious takedowns don't kill companies the way lawsuits do. I think takedowns are a cosmetic problem.
He was stupid, but a friend lost a load of legitimate, original work; he'd been using it as an external hard drive and sharing mechanism for his large project files.
The Mega prosecution was not spurious. The DoJ's discovery turned up a number of emails from Kim Schmitz and his team in which they openly admitted to compensating affiliates for uploading copyrighted material. Megaupload wasn't killed because of lax regulation over DMCA takedown regulations; it was killed because it was not, unlike Reddit or even Youtube, a bona fide clean-hands user-generated content exchange, but rather a piracy product wearing user-generated content clothing.
I would venture to say that the vast majority of piracy on megaupload was done without the knowledge of the people running the site. And it's obvious that some of the affiliate payments are going to go to people breaking the law on any site, unless you run background checks on your affiliates.
Megaupload may have been tuned toward being a 'piracy product' but that does not mean it was anything other than user-generated piracy.
Again: the Mega indictment is full of transcripts of emails in which Kim and his team arrange to pay people to put pirated material on the site, and in which they repeatedly acknowledge the existence of copyrighted material on the site. One guy complains to support about the quality of the video on a Dexter episode, and Kim writes concerned mail to his team about video quality!
Sorry, I somehow missed the emails about them actually arranging for pirated material. The worst I had known about was copying videos off youtube. But the Dexter email is valid. If illegal files find a bug you still need to fix the bug unrelated to removing the files.
A few minutes later: Okay I just skimmed through the indictment again and I can't find what you're talking about. There's points 54 and 55 about how they didn't cancel the affiliate accounts of people that had uploaded infringing files, but I can't find anything about them actually arranging pirated material, or specifically encouraging its upload. Also point 69d says out that copyright-violating uploads were disqualified for rewards, though Megaupload rarely terminated the accounts.
Ah, thanks. Well I see a lot of bad behavior, from them looking at user uploads, finding pirated files, and not removing them. But it's still unsolicited uploads. Page 33 mentions disqualification of 'very obvious' copyrighted files, but being 'rather flexible'. This is bad, but it's not going out and encouraging illegal-in-particular uploads. It's just poor policing on the affiliate program.
Page 32 is content from a discovered email in which a Megaupload employee calculates the affiliate bonus due to a user based on the value of the copyrighted files that user uploaded.
This isn't reading-between-the-lines stuff. It's there in black and white.
Right, it's black and white that they ignored copyright violations on a bunch of files. But that is not the same as encouraging infringing files over non-infringing files, or asking people to upload infringing files.
If you uploaded a popular infringing file, you might get $100, or you might get disqualified.
If you uploaded a popular non-infringing file, you would definitely get $100.
Megaupload knew about some of the piracy. That does not mean they arranged it. They treated it like any other file.
Also keep in mind that an indictment is designed to make the indicted party look as unsympathetic as possible. There may be additional context given which turns those e-mails from "smoking gun with Dotcom's demonic fingerprints" to just "Viacom vs. YouTube-esque questionable behavior" if that case ever goes to court.
One guy complains to support about the quality of the video on a Dexter episode, and Kim writes concerned mail to his team about video quality!
This is called "Doing it right."
If Showtime would sell me a license to view their content, I wouldn't even be tempted to download it for free. Since they refuse to, it's going to be tough to work up any righteous dudgeon towards Schmitz and crew, especially when they go out of their way to adopt a customer-oriented approach.
Copyright is a government entitlement that we spun from whole cloth. Capitalism, on the other hand, comes naturally. You can't fight Mother Nature.
Property rights, in the sense that's necessary for capitalism, requires authoritative enforcement to actually work, which in requires government. Both theoretically and empirically. It's not a novel idea at all.
My point is that some property rights can arguably be seen as natural rights, while others definitely cannot be interpreted that way. Copyright is unquestionably not a natural right. It's entirely an artifact of our legal system, and a very recent one at that.
As humans we've always had the concept of "property" to some extent, independent of government. That's not true of copyright law. That was something we invented in response to a specific need, but we invented it at a time when few/no other legal or intellectual tools were available. Copyright should never be treated as the sacred cow that property rights in general are, IMO.
> My point is that some property rights can arguably be seen as natural rights, while others definitely cannot be interpreted that way. Copyright is unquestionably not a natural right.
This "natural rights" talk sounds like theology to me. From an anthropological perspective, humans invented intellectual property around the time it became useful, just as humans invented land ownership around the time that became useful. You can say the same about owning shares of a business or owning currency. These are exactly the artificial property rights you need for capitalism, and you need government for those rights, and hence capitalism, to actually work.
A bone? Sure. Land? Stock in a corporation? These are the property rights capitalism is made of. Entire cultures have existed well into written history without either concept (one of the things that made it easier to forcibly remove them from the land they lived on, which likely means that your "natural law" arguments for land ownership are insufficient to protect the property rights of almost anyone in North America).
What you need for capitalism is centrally enforced rights to things like land and corporate equity. That is not a simple extrapolation for protecting one's personal possessions any more than copyright is. And like copyright, they require a government.
You can own a means of production without government backing, but without establishing laws and implementing a means of enforcing them, there's no guarantee that someone wouldn't come along and take it by force.
I just finished a Law 101 class so I'm by no means an expert, but I think the above explains the theory behind why we need laws. Whether you think the theory is legitimate or not is up to you. When I started the course, I was surprised to learn that our entire legal system was designed around the concept of property rights.
Your friend should be pretty pissed at Kim Schmitz for deceiving him into thinking that MegaUpload was a general-purpose file hosting site and not the criminal piracy conspiracy that it clearly, deliberately, lucratively was. You know, in addition to being pissed at the FBI.
I'm not denying that MegaUpload engaged in piracy, but that doesn't stop it from ALSO being a general-purpose file host.
This is very tangential to copyright law, but there was no good reason morally (and, as far as I'm aware, legally) not to return customers data.
Correct, and this is why Amazon S3 probably the biggest filesharing system in existence is not being sued and being taken offline. Megaupload, not so much.
(in reply to the much more nested comment) but this is the age of electronic data - it is easy to delete the content that was the subject of the DCMA and leave the rest of the site up read-only for a month while people archive (or something).
While I think the government could have been more forgiving of innocent third parties, remember that MegaUpload was a virtual company where all the computers were leased on the cloud. Those vendors were not being paid and meanwhile had capital costs on their equipment for as long as the prosecutors were copying off data. They deserved to have their equipment returned to them as soon as possible.
Sure, but he should still expect his seized "property" to be returned, just as if he had stored his archives at a storage facility whose owners were willfully ignorant of other customers running bootlegged DVDs on site.
DJs are the obvious place to start on compulsory licensing given that such already exists for covers of songs. Introducing standardized terms for sampling would be a small step in the right direction (something you seem to be advocating when you're talking about terms) in an industry that already understands it and has been there in the past (e.g. Paul's Boutique would be impossible to make nowadays). This helps build up towards e.g. standard licensing terms for reuse of characters (something that big content has a lot to gain from, but would likely be too afraid of at the moment).
> Ask instead, "was this a politically effective policy memo?"
The long-term political goal for the Republican Party is to win elections, praticularly the presidency.
Younger and tech-savvy voters tend to vote Democrat. This is a problem for Republicans because their voter base is literally dying. If they embraced copyright reform and pushed it as an issue, there may be a lot of votes in it for them. I would regard that as "politically effective".
Another point is that Holywood and the music industry massively support the Democrats. This would mean that if the Republicans adopted copyright reform as a policy, the Democrats would be in a bind: either adopt copyright reform too (and annoy the copyright industry, and give up all the money it gives) or don't (and annoy lots of Democrat-leaning voters). It's therefore a wedge issue that could be tactically effective for the Republicans.
It most be pretty obvious to intelligent, thoughtful Republicans that their current strategy -- of getting lots of white men to vote for them by exploiting prejudice against blacks, Hispanics, women, and gays -- has no future. So they're going to need a new one; copyright reform as part of an overall libertarian agenda might be part of it, and by shutting down the debate on the issue, the Republican Party is not doing itself any favours.
But I suspect it will take them one or two more election cycles before it sinks in to them that they need to do thinks differently.
I agree with your conclusion—the Republican leadership seems to have convinced itself that their policies had nothing to do with their loss in the last round, so it will probably take a couple more iterations to figure out that they've alienated just enough of the country to lose elections consistently without a platform change.
I also think a tactic like this one could be extremely valuable to a rational Republican party. However, that doesn't mean the numbers work for this particular wedge. Thomas's point is that it isn't politically effective if it costs more than you make in profit and this particular policy position costs more than it's worth. You have to count the voters you gain versus the ones you lose, but you also have to worry about your cash flow.
Say this move netted the Republican party 4% of the vote. That would probably be enough to swing an election by itself. But if the move costs them $10B in funding, we have to weigh how much of that 4% the Democratic party can win back with a $10B advantage (or more, if Republican donors become Democratic donors). If they gain 4% of the voters but lose 2% due to cashflow problems they wind up in more-or-less the same place they were before. Following this example, it would have to gain them more like 6%+ to be worth the cost, and unless 6% of our country would swing on this one issue it's not likely.
If Thomas is right and the reforms weren't well-posed (I'm in no position to judge, but his point is well made) then it's a high-risk proposition of dubious value.
I wouldn't be surprised if they returned to this topic with a more modest proposal that doesn't anger all of their copyright-holding donors but still has a certain kind of appeal. But like you said, I would be surprised if it happened in the next four years—maybe in more like 6-8.
I agree, the terms are insane, and I hope they don't keep extending them. I'm pretty sure every single person who worked on the original Disney movie Snow White is dead now, lets get that into public ___domain, the point of copyright isn't to have an income stream for one's family forever.
I think an interesting solution would be to charge a compounding fee for copyright protection. So let's say you have a no charge for the first X years. Your first renewal is almost nothing but after that it increases rapidly so that by the time you're pushing 50+ years the payments are only affordable for the largest properties. Now it might be worth millions for Disney to keep their 70 year old copyrights for another few years but at least that doesn't force every single piece of content into the same 70+ year IP regime. In fact it provides a strong incentive for most content to enter the public ___domain quickly. The licensing fees from the copyright system could be paid back to protected artists based on measures of downloads, plays and performances.
This sounds good, but how do you price the fees fairly for people who make different kinds of works?
If I'm a photographer, do I need to pay extension fees on all my thousands of works? Does my neighbor who makes movies only need to pay one fee? What if I make a book containing my photographs -- is that just one free? Can Disney make one long 40 hour movie containing all their stuff together and count that as one work?
I don't think that this would be a problem. It's not likely that a photographer would have a large number of photos that were each earning lots of money, so they would tend to just let the copyright expire. They can always take more photos to continue earning.
This is just a way of saying that the vast majority of individual photos don't represent a lot of creative work, and hence are a lot less worthy of protection. I would imagine that even a major photographer such as Ansel Adams wouldn't have more than a dozen photos earning good money more than a decade after the photo was first published.
My objection to steko's idea would be more that it is precisely the most important works that we are going to want to copy / create derivatives from, and yet these are precisely the works that will be the most able to perpetuate their protections.
Excellent point. Maybe this sort of plan would be unworkable given the ability to end run or exploit the system in certain ways (or just the way disciplines naturally blend into one another)? Maybe you could benchmark based on markets (the music industry is x billion, y million minutes of music are produced every year, etc.) and where a work doesn't clearly fall into a category it could go into the cheaper one or be interpolated.
That is an interesting and difficult problem. What if it were framed a little differently, though: Suppose there were a federal licensing tax. You'd pay, say, 5% of licensing revenue to the IRS for the first 20 years, 25% for the next 20 years, 60% for the 20 years after that, and so on. Obviously these are made-up numbers, but the idea would be that an increasing fraction of the license revenue would go to government.
I just remembered a variation on a story in which you declare what your property is worth and get taxed on that. The reason not to lower the price is that anyone can buy it from you at that price.
Maybe you can declare the value of your IP and the government taxes you like 2% on it. I don't think this would really work but I'm tossing it out anyway.
Perhaps we could allow your examples, with fair use as an escape valve. The more work you lump under the same license, the larger the excerpt that's plausibly fair use.
I've only read the reporting on the memo, not the memo itself, so I can't comment on the legal arguments within.
But aside from that, I thought it was a fairly sensible move, precisely because the policies were a) pretty benign - they're not really going to hurt the interests of the content industry, b) neutral politically - they won't offend the conservative base, and c) naturally appealing to a constituency that's outside the typical G.O.P. base.
We do a good job appealing to married, religious, older, self-employed, or rural voters - if only we could run a competent campaign, we could potentially win on the strength of those constituencies alone. But that doesn't mean we can't find simple ways to appeal to other groups of voters that are consistent with (or at least don't contradict) conservative principles.
I don't expect 'the Redditor vote' to ever go Republican, but policies like this can shift it a couple of percent, lower donations, and reduce turnout - all quite-useful things.
That's a platitude. People who work in content would say, this is about the rights of people to control the product of their own labor, and to realize the maximum value from that labor by being able to sell it to other people. That would be the same argument used by software developers when their rights are abridged by piracy, or when their code is misappropriated by (much larger) partners.
What I'd like right away is even easier -- shorter copyright terms by default (maybe even the 1790 level), with positive actions required to extend them. Politically there is support from Disney, etc. to keep Mickey Mouse under de-facto perpetual copyright, but I don't really care about Mickey Mouse -- I want most of the books written, many now out of print, from much of the 20th century to be appearing in the public ___domain.
There was copyright renewal until 1992. It seems like a useful requirement. I'd support increasingly-onerous payments and renewal requirements -- maybe you get free copyright for 14-28 years, and then each year renewal after that costs an exponentially increasing amount of money.
I don't have time to respond properly, but even though I'm a bit of a copyright hawk myself I'm strongly in favor of the Khanna propositions. When the 'limited times' exceed the median human lifespan, the effective term of copyright for most citizens is infinite. I think most of the goals identified in the Khanna memo were shockingly sensible, even the DJ bits.
That said, it's not sensible in terms of political capital; even if the Republican party decides to leap in the 21st century and propose radical reforms, there are bigger fish to fry in the next Congress, like tax/entitlement reform, immigration and so forth.
Of course I think we need a third party and my occasional hobby is drafting its manifesto, but that isn't exactly a short-term project either.
Strong agree that we need to reform copyright terms! (I'd also be happy with compulsory licensing of some sort, so there'd be some transparency in licensing and, more importantly, so that lawful access would become more convenient [with more providers offering services] instead of fighting losing battles against piracy).
But of course, this memo doesn't just say "reform copyright terms". It also says, "we need to address the problem of DMCA abuse" (everyone in the content industry and lots of reasonable outsiders, although by no means most of them in Internet circles, would say the opposite --- that's it's so hard to address blatant outright "no copyright intended" infringement today that new vectors for suppressing piracy are needed) and "we need to enable DJs".
I like Girl Talk O.K., and "It Takes A Nation" is among my favorite albums, but the needs of DJs and remix artists are (a) not at the top of the national agenda even for copyright reform, and (b) mostly not a real problem given the economics of electronic/remix music today anyways, most of which isn't and, like most music, can't be compensated through traditional label-style recorded music sales anyways. It's not like DJs are being raided at live shows for their samples.
It is a tangentally effective policy memo. It highlights the will of the status quo lobby to influence Steve Scalise and quash dialog on the issue.
Khanna's specific proposal says:
A. Free 12-year copyright term for all new works – subject to registration, and all existing works are renewed as of the passage of the reform legislation. If passed today this would mean that new works have a copyright until 2024.
B. Elective-12 year renewal (cost 1% of all United States revenue from first 12 years – which equals all sales).
C. Elective-6 year renewal (cost 3% of revenue from the previous 12 years).
D.Elective-6 year renewal (cost 5% of revenue in previous 6 years).
E. Elective-10 year renewal (10% of ALL overall revenue – fees paid so far)
This proposal would terminate all copyright protection after 46 years.
Content may be a 100 billion a year industry, but copyright violation does not put that full $100 B at risk.
Why settle on the pre-Bono copyright term? Why do you pick that instead of the original 14 years + 14 year renewal?
I think you've already decided you want copyright more or less the way it is, so you throw copyright doves a bone (breadcrumb?) by offering a single undo, and hope someone bites.
If you try to examine copyright law from basic principles, rather than from the perspective of the status quo, it becomes very tough to support even the pre-Bono copyright terms of life+50 years (personal) or 75 years (corporate), automatic, with registration only required to collect punitive damages, but not required to sue (harass) arguably legitimate fair users of content.
How does compulsory licensing work without capping license fees? Content creators have a monopoly. Forcing them to charge something for licensing does no good; they can set the price arbitrarily high.
If you cap the fees, you have to have a very complex formula so that you can arrive at a maximum license fee, given an arbitrary piece of intellectual property, and some arbitrary proposed licensed use of that IP.
Complex regulation like that invites abuse by anyone with the resources to lobby, so it becomes a lobbying contest rather than an attempted equitable settlement (how do you judge what's fair pricing for license of IP that's held by a monopoly?). If that wasn't bad enough, by capping fees you've effectively partially socialized the IP content industry: The free market and private industry would no longer be the primary drivers of the economics of IP.
I think everyone, even copyright doves like myself, fantasize about creating some incredibly desirable piece of IP that we can live off of for life. We just differ in the judgment of effectiveness, actual financial benefit, and collateral damage related to taking legal action against non-for-profit filesharers.
I am only addressing the political and legal problems here; not the practical, ethical, and technological enforcement problems, of which I think there are many.
In my eyes I saw it as less about the cause of copyright reform, and much more about the message of "We republicans are going to stop catering to the rich guys with lobbying power." Which would have had lasting and view/brand changing consequences. Take something with seemingly little effect and get a major reaction. Whether that was anyone's goals or if the memo should have been taken at face value is of course debatable. I just wanted to give a plausible bigger picture they could have been grabbing at. (mind you the republicans should have learned this last election that limitless money doesn't instantly bring you results, you need content as well.)
> Ask instead, "was this a politically effective policy memo?"
Exactly, Republicans' strongest constituency (rich white guys[1]) don't care all that much, if at all, about details of copyrights, something that costs their households a few hundred dollars a year at most. On the other hand, people who care either already lean libertarian enough to vote red, or will never, ever even consider voting for a Republican.
A senator will get more votes going door to door than by pushing through any reform like that.
You're right that perhaps what the paper was saying was to radical to be really implemented but sometime radical things are need to bring change! You can't be paying over a billlion dollars for the music in a single ipod...
In one sense, your point and mine can be true at the same time: that radical proposals are what's going to be required to reform copyright, and that the RSC is not only a wildly inappropriate venue for those proposals but also that a single "rogue" RSC staffer had no business putting the RSC behind a policy initiative that virtually nobody in the house on either side supported. Again, you'd be right here and I would at the same time.
But in another sense, I'm saying something more about the memo; not only that it was inappropriate for its venue, but that its policy goals were dumb. The Khanna memo would not have made it any less fraught to run a consumer Internet company. It would not have prevented the content industry from leveraging potential bankruptcy against infringers. Apart from reducing copyright terms, it seemed to consist mostly of extravagantly costly political expenditures in the service of cosmetic goals.
It's not the government's job to protect any industry from anything, only to foster jobs and the general economy. The 100 billion the industry makes is besides the point.
Further it's been proven that there was nothing 'rogue' about that report, it was properly vet and screened before release but the GOP bowed to lobbist pressure and came up with that lame excuse
Sorry but your post reeks of being too "inside baseball". You discount a bill because it is not passable rather than being ideologically aligned with a large portion of the public. And then bring money and stakeholders into the situation. Of course those stakeholders who are currently getting rich off of the current laws aren't going to like it. And of course it's not passable. But that is not the point. Taking power from those who have it and instituting a "takeback" are not easy. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Don't keep people from shooting for the moon b/c it's not practical.
It seems to me ... that a reasonable short-term goal would have been to reduce the term of copyright, ratcheting it back to where it was, say, before Sonny Bono.
A bit of a decrease would be possible, from life+70 to life+50, but since the U.S. acceded to the Berne Convention, it's committed itself to terms no shorter than life+50. I think expanding statutory protections for fair use would probably be a more effective approach, although expanding compulsory licensing is an interesting possible alternative.
You're right. I got the number from Commerce, but Commerce's industry breakdown is weird. I don't know what the revenue split is between content producers like Viacom (who factor into the Entertainment & Media industry) and Comcast (who appear to factor into Communications Technology).
I think we can probably stipulate that information technology is a larger industry than entertainment and media; to the extent that it isn't, though, my point is stronger, right?
I largely agree with you that Redditors go over the top with things without thinking them through but have to point out a couple of lines that I disagree with.
>really? spend political capital to modify regulations on a $100bn industry for... DJs?
The point should be whether it's for the overall public good, not just for some industry. Lets assume the $100bn industry just rolls over and dies tomorrow, ignore the losses of art and entertainment for a second. What would consumers do with a $100bn extra in their pockets? Would they spend it on buying electric cars thus jumpstarting them? Would they invest it thus making new companies easy to start? Would it kickstart alternative business models that would employ some of the unemployed? Perhaps not. But the fact that it hurts a particular $100bn industry by itself should not be a veto against such a measure, or else we would still be riding horse buggies.
>Ask instead, "was this a politically effective policy memo?" Were its goals in the 113th congress realistic? Were its arguments persuasive? Something like 35% of all congresspeople are lawyers, and this memo starts out with a highly dubious argument about the meaning of the copyright clause.
Just like in courtcases, even in Congress you need to push for the extremes in order to get something done. If you push for realistic measures, it is sure to get watered down to essentially nothing. It's like a salary negotiation, if you start with a reasonable number, HR will never agree to that and will themselves offer a very low offer which you will have trouble in getting it where you want. You need to shoot for 10 to 20% more than what is "reasonable" in order to have any hope of getting a reasonable offer. Same with the bill here. Have you not been keeping up with how bills are negotiated in Congress? If anything reasonable is suggested, the Hollywood lobbyists with bags of cash in their hand will water it down. Hollywood spends a ton of money on lobbying, and legislators are cash strapped at election time with candidates raising millions.
I addressed the latter point downthread: it's not just that the memo overshot the RSC membership and the tolerances of the Content industry, but that it did so to no good effect: if every reform in the memo had been adopted (at huge cost politically), the content industry would still be able to threaten infringers with bankruptcy and starting a content-rich consumer Internet company would still be fraught.
On the former point, about DJs: making it simpler for DJs to sell music with rights-encumbered samples isn't going to fundamentally change the economics of either the content industry or the consumer Internet. Fair use for DJs is an issue that applies to a subculture of a subculture of a subculture, and even more weirdly, is an issue that has mostly been metabolized by that subsubsubculture: Girl Talk, for instance, wasn't going to make a lot of money selling his currently non-salable tracks, because almost nobody makes money selling recorded music anymore.
Did they really have any opportunity here? Silicon Valley also (reasonably!) requires support for gay marriage, believes in and fears anthropogenic global warming, is basically pro-choice, and has dovish foreign policy beliefs. Demographically, Silicon Valley is largely college educated and is more ethnically diverse than suburban America.
I know hearing this upsets HN, and lots of smart people think I'm completely batshit when I say this, but copyright reform is a fringe issue. There are probably more people who vote for the gold standard, or to ban mosques.
I think that they did have an opportunity here. Are there going to be a lot of Democrats in Silicon Valley for the foreseeable future? Yes. But there are also a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are libertarian, want small government, low taxes, less regulation, etc.
Political parties are not full of people who agree with the party on everything. They are full of of people who agree with more of one agenda than another. There are a lot of people who the Republicans could attract. And even if the demographics are not that big for this group, some of the people who they would pull in are exactly who they need to make an answer to Narwhale.
As for how big this issue is likely to be nationally, the Pirate Party in multiple countries regularly polls over 0.5%, and has thrown up several election results where their candidate scored in the 6-9% range. No, that's not enough to win an election. But that is enough to be a significant wedge issue in a tight election. (And US elections are all tight these days.)
This is a hard pill for people to swallow, but I think even among the larger engineering crowd copyright reform is a fringe issue. Remember, software companies were hard-chargers in the push for DRM, TPM (remember that?), etc. Copy protection in games, software dongles for high-end software, etc. Most traditional software engineers still strongly support copyright--it's the thing that keeps people from "stealing" their products.
It's a subset of the software engineering crowd, the one that works in web space for companies that make money off other peoples' creative work, that sees copyright reform as an important problem. And I think there is a total lack of acknowledgement among this crowd that maybe there are more stakeholders in this issue than just themselves or the big evil music/movie companies. I think there is also a denial of how much certain web companies really depend on other peoples' copyrighted material for their viability (cough Youtube cough).
5 years ago, it was. Today, after the SOPA/PIPA thing, it's much more mainstream. People who 5 years ago thought I was weird for talking about Lessig, today are familiar with Sonny Bono and feel strongly against copyright extensions.
I know there are smart people who believe SOPA/PIPA was a game-changer that pushed copyright reform into the mainstream, but I'm not convinced. Both things can be true: that the PR cost of pushing through something like SOPA outweighs the marginal benefits (political and economical) of the bill, and that radically disrupting the content industry is not generally a winning issue for either party.
Well I'd say this issue was an example of where the GOP could burnish their free market ideals on an issue that people outside of their normal demographic care about.
Clearly the GOP is doing some soul searching and this one issue wasn't going to make a gigantic impact, but it could have been one piece of a bigger strategy. As they (potentially) move away from traditionally social conservative issues and start focusing more and more on personal liberty and the free market, this could have been a good contrast to Democrats as part of a broader picture.
Plenty of free market people believe that people and companies have a right to control the products of their own labor or of labor that they financed.
The GOP is no more likely to move away from being the party of social conservatism than the Democrats are to move away from being the party of public school teachers.
(Fair warning: I'm a casual browser of libertarian policy positions, but I am most definitely not a libertarian. My libertarian friends would call me a liberal statist.)
I think that can be taken further. I may well be wrong, but I don't find it hard to imagine many free market people would say "Why should a person's work EVER pass into the public ___domain?!"
There are a lot of people who are quite hostile to the idea of any sort of public ___domain, believing commons to be inefficient. Many people want to take things like water resources out of the public ___domain and let the free markets appropriately allocate them.
Yes, among small-L libertarians there are very strong schools of thought for both stronger and weaker IP protection. And each thinks the other is nuts.
Both fair points. And I'd argue that's a great philosophical discussion for the libertarian parts of the GOP to have.
In this case it seems like the discussion was stifled because of the big money behind copyright questions.
So regardless it seems a shame that the GOP couldn't use this memo as a starting point for a good debate around policies and where the party stood/stands.
Andrew Joseph Galambos legally changed his name (from Joseph Andrew Galambos) as to avoid infringing his identically-named father’s rights to the name, and dropped a nickel in a box every time he said "liberty", as a royalty to the descendants of Thomas Paine, the alleged inventor of the word.
(Source: Against Intellectual Property, by Stephan Kinsella)
It depends on your personal priorities and values. The issues you are pointing to are mostly social factors. If it comes down to the voting booth I am quite certain that issues like gay marriage or choice are far less dominant than supporting competition and less government intervention, that (a long time in the past) have been core issues to the GOP.
Even I, being very dovish on foreign policy, am beginning to question this point when I see for example the current negotiations on the ITU Internet regulations. All this does for me is demonstrate, that values such as free speech and individual liberties are worldwide under attack, and almost entirely depending on America's strenth.
Well, if my choice of senator or congressperson helps make the difference between a land war in Iran or not, I'm going to have a hard time factoring in that legislator's support for copyright reform.
The bigger issue here though, the reason I'll go out on a limb and call copyright reform a fringe issue, is that it's supported by crazy people. For instance, in the "purported reasonableness" camp in the house, you have Darrell Issa, who has generally been a source of supported nods towards copyright reasonableness. Sounds great, right? But Issa is also a crazy hard anti-abortion crusader who has chaired panels in the house on funding for contraception and, recently, to give a new hearing to the vaccine-autism connection.
Single-issue voting is a great way to empower crazy people.
I guess the fringe issue is always looming in these situations. The SOPA discussion at least pushed it somewhat into the mainstream. But I agree with you, that many important issues are increasingly overtaken by the "crazy". I sometimes feel even myself, that trying to defending individual liberties and privacy is putting me more and more in a corner which is dominated by anyone between Richard Stallman and Alex Jones.
With a fair appreciation for the limits of my own insight on this issue and the immediate concession that reasonable people could argue about it, I respectfully disagree.
A socially moderate republican could absolutely do well on a pro-Silicon Valley platform. It benefits the GOP to have more Scott Browns in the senate than Elizabeth Warrens.
And holy caricature Batman! You should get out and meet some real-life Republicans. I get that you think they are evil baby-eaters, but they do have many thoughtful people and good ideas that Democrats could learn from.
It matters more for financial contributions and other support than for the vote. Writing off California makes sense for libertarians, but I could imagine single-issue Bay Area tech voters who are newly rich and techie and might aggressively support a candidate over this.
I personally think the President's power is limited enough, and have enough faith in the judiciary (and overall faith in the bureaucrats who make up the government) that I'd go single-issue on any of a few issues. If there were a Republican or Democrat who wanted to "fix" firearms, IP, debt, entitlements, end foreign occupations and the drug war, and/or fix the tax code, I'd consider working for him for a campaign, donating the max to superpacs, etc., if I thought he could win. I'd be ok if that candidate was against gay rights (since the courts would protect the gains so far, and could extend them), was short or ugly, etc.
Not for New Zealand it isn't. We get no say in US politics yet the transpacific partnership is poised to force copyright issues to the benefit of US corporations. Even without the TPP we have the Dotcom saga, further weakening our laws won't help NZ.
> believes in and fears anthropogenic global warming
It's a bit frustrating to see the term 'believe' used with respect to global warming. Global warming has been described using sound science and 99% of climate scientists agree on this. Using belief suggests that it's a matter of faith like choosing to be catholic.
Honestly, choosing to be Catholic (as opposed to growing up Catholic) is not that different. You're just picking a set of claims with a weaker factual base than that of global warming.
There is, or at least ought to be, a bit of wiggle room where reasonable people disagree on global warming policy. I'm convinced that the world has gotten warmer in the last 100 years, and that there is a scientifically plausible model that shows that human activities are a major factor in that.
But the case for the urgency of addressing global warming versus other world problems or the case for addressing global warming through carbon reduction are less well-made.
According to the exit polls, voters aged 18–29 favored the Democratic candidate by 9 percentage points in 2004, 34 points in 2008, and 23 points in 2012.
In 2016, is the Republican Presidential candidate (whoever he or she may be) going to capture a majority of this demographic? Not bloody likely. But all other factors being equal, if that candidate only loses the youth vote by 10 points, it’s that much easier to win the election as a whole.
The memo was widely hailed by tech policy scholars and public interests advocates.
And also the internet.
At least one thing is certain - there is vehement opposition to any sort of copyright reform, and it is embedded deep into the political system. I don't think I've ever heard of a policy proposal being met with this kind of reaction. Really pushed some buttons.
I don't have a problem with this. I hope the GOP fails entirely, so it can be replaced by a new party that advocates social liberalism and (true) fiscal conservatism. Trying to get young voters when you're talking about legitimate rape and not allowing gay marriage is a waste of time. But if a new fiscally conservative party embraces things like those issues and ones like marijuana legalization, I think a lot of young voters are willing to embrace a message of small government and free market economics.
This is the Ron Paul demographic and it has shown consistently that it's nowhere near being popular enough for national elections. The simple fact is, having an effective and well-funded government which takes on particular problems that don't respond well to free markets (health care, energy reform, infrastructure, social safety net) is seen by most non-ideological people as a good thing.
Our government is extraordinarily effective for what it is. We have one of the most sophisticated countries in the world, and our tax burden as a percentage of GDP is at the low end of any country you'd want to live in.
By the way, the Heritage Foundation has gotten to the point where it's about as bad as DailyKOS. They've given up even the pretense of objectivity and descended into blatant ideological demagoguery.
Heritage Foundation has gotten to the point where it's about as bad as DailyKOS
It's impossible to find any news site, reporter, researcher, or article that doesn't have some angle.
If I find information on the DailyKOS that appears factual and is worth considering then I do so. The Heritage article linked to has a wealth of research pulled from easily verifiable sources, mostly the government itself.
There is a line between characterizing the facts to support your angle and misleading your reader. Heritage Foundation crosses that line.
I wrote them off for their recent trumpeting of the fact that 47% of people have no federal income tax liability to falsely imply that half the country doesn't carry any of the tax burden. This goes beyond having an angle, it's just plain intellectually dishonest. The standard of discourse for an ostensibly respectable academic organization should be higher than that of a political campaign. At one time Heritage Foundation adhered to a higher standard. It no longer does.
I think you're right. Those ideas aren't popular enough today, but the electorate seems to be trending more that way over time. I suspect that GOP leadership is smart enough to know this, but they've decided that this generational shift will take a few more Presidential election cycles until it matures to the point where they can capitalize on it. Until then, keep flogging the current strategy until all the value has been extracted. They've invested way too much not to do that.
Nitpick: healthcare (along with finance) is the most regulated market in the United States, with regulation picking up dramatically in the 60s. It's no accident that when you force insurance to cover lots of things the prices go up and insurance companies get pickier about who they insure. It's no accident that when you constrain the supply of doctors medical prices go up. It's no accident that medicare price-fixing causes shortages in primary care doctors. It's no accident that when you give a big tax break for employer-provided health care you wind up with insurance-induced indentured servitude.
The government spends 1 out of 2 dollars in the "market" for health care.
I hope the GOP fails entirely, so it can be replaced by a new party that advocates social liberalism and (true) fiscal conservatism.
Romney got less votes than McCain. Romney was more fiscally conservative and more socially liberal.
He wasn't as "cool" as Obama, though.
Unfortunately, issues have very little to do with the outcome of national elections. It's mostly about party identity and other groupthink cue following like hipness. It's not very surprising that our news media continues to be less and less distinguishable from our entertainment industry.
>Romney got less votes than McCain. Romney was more fiscally conservative and more socially liberal.
Was he? McCain had always been kind of a moderate -- he only went crazy to secure the 2008 Republican nomination after the failure in 2000, and apparently once you go crazy it sticks. And Romney was the same way: He sure didn't look very socially liberal to moderates during the 2012 primaries.
It seems like that's what doomed both of them, actually. To get the nomination they each had to move substantially to the right of their own previous positions, which convinced just enough of the base in order to secure the nomination while alienating the moderates. Then the general election comes around and neither the moderates nor the extremists like the candidate because he at one point or another expressed a number of positions they strongly disagree with.
Romney also had a couple of issues McCain didn't: He was a notorious Wall St. guy running at the bottom of a recession notoriously caused by Wall St. guys, and he was running following the 2010 census which gave more electoral votes to typically Democratic population centers nationwide (which, unlike the Congressional elections, couldn't then be gerrymandered by Republican state governments for the presidency since states typically don't allocate electoral votes by district).
The problem is that the same process is likely to play out again. Fox keeps giving airtime to the Huckabees and the Trumps to try to get out the base against the Democrats, but with those people going to the polls and voting on those issues, it makes it impossible for a moderate Republican to get nominated without taking positions that alienate moderate voters, and then they lose the general election.
Am I the only one that remembers that Bush ran as a moderate in 2000 and won? It was only after 9/11 that he went cowboy, and then only won in 2004 by beating the terrorism drum that has, by this point, worn out and lost its effectiveness.
I certainly don't mean to imply we need another Bush, but at some point the Republicans need to realize that pandering to crazies loses elections. (And in the meantime I'm happy to help them realize that by not voting for them, and I don't think I'm alone.)
The problem is that the GOP doesn't truly support any of that stuff-- simply listening to what a wealthy few campaign donors tell you is right and blindly proselytizing this warped view until you have nearly 50% of the vote is a much easier platform.
In the 2000's (I cannot find the figures for this last election), the Democrats were the party of big donors and the Republicans had more total donors each donating smaller amounts (avg was around $50). In other words, if you removed the over $1,000 donors the Democrats would be hurt more than the Republicans.
The GOP leadership seems to have forgotten that this week with its shuffle of budget committee members.
I doubt that party would be able to beat out a socially conservative alternative; there are likely more religious/morality-driven voters than libertarians in support of the GOP. Maybe if the DNC were to implode at the same time.
As the security apparatus becomes increasingly intrusive, perhaps a new party could be swept in with the promise of dismantling it.
>Maybe if the DNC were to implode at the same time.
Right? It seems that's why neither party will ever lessen. It's like an arms race in which parties will never intentionally weaken their numbers by any means. It's led to piecemeal parties that would probably be better as separate-but-aligned than being a small voice in a large party.
I just can't imagine anything to begin such a split at the same time. If, say, fiscal conservative/social liberal people all actually made the jump to Libertarian (or another party), maybe a further left liberal faction of Democrats party might follow, but probably not. I just can't imagine anything that would incite a sizable group to give up that balance.
Shame. If large enough, and they pulled a few members from the other side, there's the potential they would become king-makers.
Yeah, I don't see it. Liberals are generally in favor of improving and expanding the safety net, whereas fiscal conservatism typically espouses the opposite. Likewise for issues related to women and minorities, or income inequality; liberals generally favor more government intervention rather than less.
Certainly there's a lot that liberals and libertarians have in common (drug war, religious freedom, wars), but they have very, very different principles and premises motivating their policy positions.
I blame that stupid political compass the libertarians are always trotting out.
For example, suppose I want to leave government spending where it is, but take fifty billion dollars a year from Medicare and spend it on student loan forgiveness and basic research grants. Which quadrant does that put me in?
We need to give up on the tired old categories and start over. We built parties around heuristics like "government spending bad" or "social programs good" instead of evaluating specific programs on their merits.
Ideologically pure libertarians are really anarchists. I've encountered people who advocate private police forces and private roads. People who don't understand that there is no difference in the harm that can be caused by de facto and de jure governments when they go bad.
But if you allow public roads and a public police force, why not public schools? Why not public universities, or public parks? Why not publicly financed scientific research? The answer to any of these questions is, at bottom, "because that program is better or worse than allowing private enterprise to handle it." But you have to answer that question on a case by case basis -- and it changes with demographics and technology and everything else.
And of course, you have to throw in the nature of coalition politics. Publicly funded universities are an extremely valuable program for college-aged voters and those with college-aged children, but seen as a complete waste of money by childless retirees. So sure, you have to build a coalition, but the existing parties exist as they do only by historical happenstance.
What could be interesting it to start a party with the following principles: First, for any given issue, evaluate what the majority of the population would want. Then, evaluate whether that position is manifestly unjust or based on assumptions contrary to the evidence. If not, adopt it as the party's position. Repeat for all issues.
Take the platform that party puts out, it's pretty much guaranteed to win a majority of the votes by definition. Then the other party can try to pick off a group of minority positions to form an opposing coalition, but any success they have is liable to just change the majority's view on that particular issue -- which changes the first party's position on it going forward from the date of the next election. And if you want to change policy, get on your soap box and convince the majority, which will chance the party's position.
It's kind of like direct democracy, but with a filter for extremely bad ideas.
Whatever you do, you cannot call it Libertarian though. The word has been tarnished by both crypto-anarchists (the disguised/hiding kind, not the strong crytography kind) who adopt the label to appear more mainstream and by mainstream pundits who paint a picture of Libertarians as anarchists.
(Also Ron Paul not really being socially liberal but rather just being kind of "state's rights"-ish hasn't helped... but I think that is more of a particularly sharp edge-case and not a systemic issue. A social conservative wanting to cut back government isn't a Libertarian, it is just a Republican being what Republicans have always claimed to be, but rarely are.)
The label is toxic now. Everybody knows that Libertarians exist, the reason today that they don't have the numbers is that nobody really wants to associate with the label.
Wow, this is on top of the GOP silently kicking younger members out of budget committees earlier this week for not bowing enough to the party line[1]. The GOP has had opportunities lately to shed some of their hypocritical big-government stances; their growing younger libertarian-ish/anti-special-interests wing (Rand Paul, Justin Amash, etc) is in my view their best hope for long-term survival, but the establishment seems to be denying that as much as possible.
The 'younger members' you reference were kicked out since they voted against the Paul Ryan budget because it did not cut spending enough. They were further to the right than Paul Ryan, and Republican leadership is trying to build support for some kind of budget deal.
Not sure, but I think they're more open to military cuts, which is kinda 'further to the left.'[1] They think the leadership would rather raise taxes than cut a growing defense budget. You could say the leadership is more establishment-left (compromise by raising taxes) and the 'younger members' are more anti-establishment-left (compromising by cutting defense). From my bias I see it as more of an anti-establishment thing than a left-right thing; it's not that they weren't moderate enough, they weren't the right kind of moderate, which is why I think the GOP leadership is cutting off their only chance at courting the younger demographics.
This probably violates HN guidelines, but I'd like to suggest a modification re: keeping the original article titles if they contain names of political parties. Remove them. They invite political arguments.
The GOP seems more and more against things going the way of the "public Interest" in favor of the few connected, this makes it even harder to build a future with the more and more progressive majority.
The Internet alliance or whatever it's called formed by Reddit etc. after the SOPA fiasco needs to show their support for this person right away or there would be absolutely no point to it. Putting black badges on sites for SOPA was good but this needs to be taken up by sites too. Perhaps someone(Google?) can hire him to further write more papers analyzing copyright?
I'm okay with this. I'm not sure I want a party of bigots to lead the charge on copyright reform. It would put me in an awkward position. Firing the only intelligent person in the party seems to solidify this.
On the other hand, it could have been a way for the GOP to segue from the "bigot party" into a group with reasonable beliefs. Parties change over time, and this could have been a good first step in the right direction.
They're stuck in a local maximum. They can't throw their white, middle-aged religious base (40% of the population or so) under the bus in order to pick up a few extra points from young people who, if they've been paying attention, won't trust GOP pols anyways.
They don't have to throw them under the bus all at once. A significant portion of the GOP's support base is going to be dying over the next few decades.
Content is a $100Bn industry. Technology is 5-6x bigger, but the tech companies trying to disrupt content are an insignificant fraction of that industry.
Meanwhile, set aside whether you believe in the reforms proposed in the Khanna memo --- reducing statutory damages, increasing cost of enforcement, reducing copyright terms. Ask instead, "was this a politically effective policy memo?" Were its goals in the 113th congress realistic? Were its arguments persuasive? Something like 35% of all congresspeople are lawyers, and this memo starts out with a highly dubious argument about the meaning of the copyright clause.
It seems to me (and I am prepared to hear smart people tell me how wrong I am about this) that a reasonable short-term goal would have been to reduce the term of copyright, ratcheting it back to where it was, say, before Sonny Bono. Instead, this "RSC" memo proposed beyond that a gift basket of what seem like mostly not-useful policy trinkets for Redditors: expanded fair use for DJ culture (really? spend political capital to modify regulations on a $100bn industry for... DJs?), lower statutory caps for damages (the MPAA and RIAA already sue for a tiny fraction of the likely liability for many infringers), and punishing false copyright claims (the claims studios take to court are overwhelmingly not false; penalizing bogus DMCA takedowns wouldn't move the dials at all).
The real copyright reform is probably something like reduced term and compulsory licensing. What was the value to the RSC of trolling the Content industry for reforms that had no chance of happening, that wouldn't have actually kept people from being bankrupted by lawsuits, that wouldn't make it easier to launch tech companies, and that at the same time manage to almost uniformly enrage rightsholders?
Was this memo really "shockingly sensible"? A lot of smart people say it was. But I wonder whether they're more shocked that any conversation could have happened at all, and not really looking closely at the content of the memo itself.