Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Crony Copyright

On Nov. 16, the Republican Study Committee sent out an internal brief to its more than 170 members and their staff. The memo was a blistering indictment of copyright law.
“Copyright violates nearly every tenet of laissez-faire capitalism,” the paper declared, and its irresponsible expansion “destroys entire markets.” Polemical arguments, to be sure, but not altogether new ones: a substantial body of literature, mostly from academics on the left—but increasingly on the right as well—argues that the lengthening terms and harsher enforcement of copyright over the last 30 years has taken us from a system that incentivizes innovation to one that stifles it. What was unprecedented here was less what the memo said than where it came from: the conservative caucus of the House of Representatives.

Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/crony-copyright-484/

No comments: