With a simple amendment to some future Congressional bill, the legal terminology of ‘infringement’ will be redefined to further remove Fair Use rights and make blogs and forums like FreeRepublic illegal under COICA due to the infringing nature of the copyrighted articles and excerpts of articles posted by end-users that are used to foster political discussion. Under this future redefinition of infringement, FR will be infringing upon copyrights several thousand times a day, and be classified as “dedicated to infringing activities”.
And the media industry in this country has been pushing for further redefinition of copyright infringement since the late 1990’s, and are spending over $50M a year for lobbyists in DC, London, Tokyo and Brussels.
Further, the 1995 Feinstein Amendment for bomb making instructions over the internet was put into law in 1998/9, http://cryptome.org/abi.htm
How can the penalties for distribution of copyright infringements be more severe than distribution of bomb making materials?
COICA is simply poison that will be used by ideologues and demagogues in the states’ Attorney Generals offices in the future to upend the 1st and 4th Amendments.
On an cultural viewpoint, why should the cultural history of the Western world be held captive for 75 years or longer in copyright and not be allowed to be expressed and shared by the peoples of the world specifically to protect corporations that aggregate copyrights at the harm to society as a whole? Holding our cultural history hostage is indefensible, buying out the political class in a democratic republic to do so makes it doubly egregious.
If copyright returned to 17 years, there would be much less than the $600B in mark to fantasy revenue losses seen by copyright holders in the world.
One last thing to read:
http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=h_brian_holland
Inherently Dangerous: The Potential
for an Internet-Specific Standard
Restricting Speech That Performs
a Teaching Function
By H. BRIAN HOLLAND*
Assistant Professor of Law, Barry University School of Law; J.D., summa cum laude,
American University Washington College of Law; LL.M., with honors, Columbia University.
Many thanks to my research assistants, Kevin Wimberly and Alexandra Steele and to my
colleagues at Barry University School of Law for their insightful comments. Finally, thanks
to Sarah, Will, and Ella for the most important things.