Disturbing news over at Justice...
This is somewhat disturbing news...
Barack Obama's picks for No. 2 and No. 3 over at the DOJ are two lawyers who were heavily involved in extending copyright terms beyond all sanity and (in the latter case) in suing students and others for sharing music. Details in this excellent summary article by Declan McCullagh at CNET.
For those who don't follow this stuff closely:
In 1998, Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, largely at the behest of Disney and other big media companies. The extended already-long copyright terms even further: lifetime of the author plus 70 years, in the common case. It meant that many works that would have passed into the public domain now would stay locked up. There was an unsuccessful lawsuit to declare the extensions unconstitutional ("Eldred v Ashcroft"), and the lawyer who defended the Act for the government was David Ogden, who is now nominated for deputy attorney general. Maybe he was just defending what he was told to defend, like a good lawyer, and his heart wasn't in it...
Meanwhile, Tom Perrelli, the pick for No. 3 (associate attorney general) did a lot of work for the Recoridng Industry Association of America, suing people who shared music with each other without asking permission first (the industry likes to call it "filesharing", but let's call it what it is: music sharing). The RIAA lawsuits have become a cause célèbre in the copyright reform movement, partly because the copyright laws are so out of hand now and partly because the RIAA's tactics were extremely sleazy. (Google it, you'll see what I mean.)
No doubt copyright reform is not on Obama's radar screen, what with economic collapse and all, but still it's disheartening to see him give two top jobs to people who apparently have their feet firmly planted in the restrictive past regarding the potential of the Internet to enable a vibrant public domain. We can do better than this.
Barack Obama's picks for No. 2 and No. 3 over at the DOJ are two lawyers who were heavily involved in extending copyright terms beyond all sanity and (in the latter case) in suing students and others for sharing music. Details in this excellent summary article by Declan McCullagh at CNET.
For those who don't follow this stuff closely:
In 1998, Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, largely at the behest of Disney and other big media companies. The extended already-long copyright terms even further: lifetime of the author plus 70 years, in the common case. It meant that many works that would have passed into the public domain now would stay locked up. There was an unsuccessful lawsuit to declare the extensions unconstitutional ("Eldred v Ashcroft"), and the lawyer who defended the Act for the government was David Ogden, who is now nominated for deputy attorney general. Maybe he was just defending what he was told to defend, like a good lawyer, and his heart wasn't in it...
Meanwhile, Tom Perrelli, the pick for No. 3 (associate attorney general) did a lot of work for the Recoridng Industry Association of America, suing people who shared music with each other without asking permission first (the industry likes to call it "filesharing", but let's call it what it is: music sharing). The RIAA lawsuits have become a cause célèbre in the copyright reform movement, partly because the copyright laws are so out of hand now and partly because the RIAA's tactics were extremely sleazy. (Google it, you'll see what I mean.)
No doubt copyright reform is not on Obama's radar screen, what with economic collapse and all, but still it's disheartening to see him give two top jobs to people who apparently have their feet firmly planted in the restrictive past regarding the potential of the Internet to enable a vibrant public domain. We can do better than this.
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