So the Local Radio Fairness Act is purely an act of picking winners and losers, a corrupt means of trying to curry favor with local media stations, come re-election time. I normally hate arguments like that but look, what legitimate reason is there to hand out copyright exemptions?
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Two colds in two weeks thanks to tourists rushing into DC. Let’s catch up with the stories of the week and hope that next week I’m doing better.
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No industry should ever get special privileges in this country. That’s picking winners and losers at a basic level. Radio gets a cutout, and it should be ended. Copyright is copyright.
Just ask any freelancer what having your stuff given away for free, in exchange for ‘exposure,’ is really worth.
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Picking winners and losers in the marketplace is a common theme in the Obama era, and Republicans want to put a stop to it. Marsha Blackburn has a bill to quit picking favorites in Radio and close up some copyright ‘loopholes’ (really just favoritism) in the current law.
Meanwhile efforts are underway to block Obama’s plan to regulate the Internet misleadingly named ‘Net Neutrality’.
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The original founders of the Pirate Bay, the Internet’s largest copyright infringement ring, used to brag about how they were technically obeying Swedish law. Well, Swedish law changed to close up the technicality they were using – they were facilitating mass copyright infringement, specifically of works by name, without hosting the bits themselves – and the founders were arrested and convicted.
The new owners thought they could run with it but it just got raided and shut down. Ha ha. Live by the technicality, die by its closure. Get wrecked, as the Internet kids say.
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If I write a video game, and launch a server to host it, I’m spending money, putting it at risk, in the hopes that it will be an investment that makes me profit. The Constitution recognizes this is a good thing, and so gives me copyright protection over my works.
It shows just how far away from human rights the EFF, a ‘libertarian’ group, has gone, that they’re now arguing against property rights specifically for video game makers.
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Conservatives often talk about how government picks winners and losers, but sometimes it’s important to discuss just how that is done. It’s easy to see in cases like Solyndra where government picks winners, but sometimes it’s harder to see when government is making one industry win at the expense of another.
Laws related to technology are full of examples like that, and tonight I’m going to illustrate two important ways government makes broadcasters winners at the expense of cable companies and content producers.
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I know, I’m late again. Turns out after being sick my body’s just been exhausted recovering. We’ll be better off next week.
Ajit Pai came to RedState on Friday to tell us about the Zapple Doctrine was being used by the FCC to stifle freedom of speech, specifically to try to hinder Scott Walker. The Zapple Doctrine is now dead, but we need to check the FCC to keep it from returning.
Broadcasters also want to check the FCC but they’re going to the courts, the same way ISPs had to over Net Neutrality.
And House Republicans are hard at work to shut Net Neutrality down again, after the courts already had to slap it down twice before.
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It’s quite a theory, and I’m not sure what to make of it, but via Instapundit I ran into the allegation that the real reason Brendan Eich was removed as the head of Mozilla wasn’t the homosexual “marriage” issue at all, but rather that he stood in the way of Hollywood-friendly restrictions called Digital Rights Managment (“DRM”) being added to the open source browser Firefox.
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When new FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler announced plans for a new Net Neutrality order, I wasn’t surprised. Despite having lost in court twice, first in Comcast v FCC and then in Verizon v FCC, the radicals weren’t going to give up on this. They were going to try a third time. And we knew he was a radical once he hired Gigi Sohn.
Some are trying to make it sound like a minor technical point, but the radicals want to take over the Internet. They’re following the Obamacare playbook with an end goal of Single Payer Internet. Wheeler put in one minor concession to reality in the form of ‘fast lanes’ being expressly allowed. Paying for what we use, and paying for even better access are good things of course, which is why we’re seeing Netflix moving to tiered pricing to charge HD users more for the bandwidth they’re taking up.
So now Wheeler is in a fight with the radicals that may or may not be real. Remember last time the radicals insisted nothing short of Title II Classification (a dramatic step that literally would regulate Internet the same as phones), when guess what? Even Title II allows fast lanes.
So it’s all just a smokescreen. They want all the government they can get.
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