On Monday I did the first half of my catchup work. Now we’ll do the second half. And one of the big issues coming up is copyright. Over the last thirty years, copyright in America has been radically reformed. While traditionally it worked as patents still do work, as a temporary grant of monopoly enforceable in civil courts, we’ve gradually moved them into the realm of criminal law enforced indefinitely. And I believe we’re gone too far in that direction.
So when I hear about the COICA, a new copyright and counterfeiting law promoted by the Obama administration, I’m concerned. At a fundamental level, the COICA would give too much power to government to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist. No, copyright is not at serious risk in America today. It is simply certain business models that are failing, and it is not the place of government to try to prop them up.
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Follow long enough most any popular online discussion of video game consoles, and eventually the same theme will come up: the popularity of Nintendo’s Wii console is supposed to be ridiculous because the games are terrible. Serious “gamers” (which is what people who like to play video games call themselves when they want to sound more serious than that) are supposed to prefer Sony’s Playstation 3 or Microsoft’s Xbox 360 consoles.
I think those people promoting these ideas are wrong, and they’re wrong because of one specific flaw in their perceptions that can be difficult for anyone to overcome. They grew up.
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I skipped Tech at Night on Friday because I was in Austin for the Red State Gathering 2010, but I’m back now, so here we go.
We start off with what would have been the lead story on Friday, too: Net Neutrality hero and all around socialist gasbag Al Franken is now under a cloud of suspicion for ethics violations, violating Senate rules to spend money inappropriately on Net Neutrality advocacy, as well as using his role as Senator to raise money for private groups.
He’s crooked enough, he’s dishonest enough, and doggone it, people pay him.
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