Bad news first: The Senate passed a comprehensive patent bill, and now the House is checking on it. ACU is coming out strongly against a comprehensive bill, to which I say: Bravo.
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It’s funny how the same House Judiciary Committee that took up SOPA is now taking up IRFA, opposed by a growing list of groups including Taxpayers Protection Alliance, ATR, CAGW, and ACU. SOPA of course would have grown government in the name of strengthening copyright. IRFA makes government meddle more in a way that weakens copyright. And not in a good way, either: IRFA would not encourage innovation or content creation. It just favors Internet broadcasters over everyone else.
Also yeah, the RSC paper on Copyright that I backed before it was wrongly pulled, it is not a statement against property rights nor is it against copyright at all. If the side favoring ever-lengthening copyright cannot argue honestly with us, and has to mischaracterize those of us who favor an approach to copyright that balances the interests involved, then that to me suggests a deficiency in their position.
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Monday night, as promised, we still have some catch up work to do. So let’s start with those Amazon Taxes, those Internet sales taxes of dubious Constitutionality. Colorado’s got tossed in federal court and Illinois’s didn’t raise any money. Obeying the Constitution counts, folks. Pass a true interstate compact through the Congress first.
Also as promised, there’s the matter of the Next Generation Television Marketplace Act. This is the one where ACU has come out against Jim DeMint, and that caught my attention. I have to side with the bill DeMint is sponsoring. I think ACU simply misunderstood what’s at stake here and had good intentions, but the excessive complexity of the regulations defeated them here.
The bill does not let cable providers become free riders, retransmitting others’ streams for free. It just stops the law from trying to dictate the parameters of the negotiations on retransmissions. I see no harm in that, and potentially much good.
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I’d like to put something out there about GOProud, conservatives, and the Republican party. I’m seeing some people having very strong reactions to the ACU’s decision to disallow future Conservative Political Action Conference sponsorship by GOProud. Some of these reactions are coming from people I respect in the greater Republican coalition of right-wing politics.
Make no mistake: I have no desire to kick anybody out of the GOP. I routinely cooperate with libertarians, some of whom I have sharp disagreement with on vital issues, because there are a great many issues we do agree on, and can do good things with to move the ball forward. That’s coalition politics 101, and why Ronald Reagan was a proponent of the big tent Republican Party.
But what is good for the GOP is not necessarily what’s good for CPAC. And that’s why I’m also happy to see the ACU make it stand, as reported by the Daily Caller today.
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