[FC-discuss] Oppose New Outrageous Copyright Legislation

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Tue, 15 May 2007, Ringo Kamens wrote:

> Dear Fellow Activists,
>
> A proposed bill called the "Intellectual Property Protection Act of
> 2007" would allow civil seizure (using the Drug Abuse Prevention and
> Control Act procedure), allow prosecution for attempted infringement,
> require restitution, allow wiretapping in copyright cases, require
> notification of importation of infringing goods, and allow life
> imprisonment if a infringing good causes death.

Public Knowledge also blogged about this issue at 
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/942 .  They wrote, in part:

"The truly sad part about this bill is that it’s nothing new. The Justice 
Department submitted a nearly identical piece of legislation to Congress 
in 2005. Our response to it now is much the same as it was then. This 
package of proposals will have wide-ranging, deleterious effects on IP law 
- if it passes. It didn’t go anywhere then, because of its overreaching 
provisions. Let’s hope this ill-conceived package meets the same fate."

This is bizarre insanity, repeated.  Why do government people think that 
copyright infringement should be handled with the same urgency as bribing 
officials, taking hostages, or unlawful use of explosives?  Maybe they 
should be spending their time and money working on protecting the public 
from situations where there is bribing of officials, taking of hostages, 
or the unlawful use of explosives.  Or misuse of power by government 
officials.  Like in the Department of Justice, who proposed the bill in 
2005.

Ringo's letter also mentioned something Copyfight noted at 
http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/05/15/this_is_almost_funny.php :
"If you want to find the humor in this one, note that the draft bill 
requires that Homeland Security notify the RIAA. No other copyright holder 
- not even the MPAA - gets such special treatment."

-- Asheesh.

-- 
The essential ideas of Algol 68 were that the whole language should be
precisely defined and that all the pieces should fit together smoothly.
The basic idea behind Pascal was that it didn't matter how vague the
language specification was (it took *years* to clarify) or how many rough
edges there were, as long as the CDC Pascal compiler was fast.
 		-- Richard A. O'Keefe