House Republicans release watershed copyright reform paper – Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/11/17/house-republicans-release-wate.html

This is pretty close to the full raft of reforms that progressive types on both sides of the US political spectrum have been pushing for. It’ll be interesting to see whether the Dems (who have a much closer relationship to Hollywood and rely on it for funding) are able to muster any support for this. Mike Masnick’s got good analysis of this on TechDirt, and notes that this is a huge shift from the House that, 10 months ago, was ready to pass SOPA. Update: It took less than 24 hours for the entertainment industry’s lobbyists to bully the House Republican Study Committee into retracting its eminently sensible copyright position paper. They did it with a mealy-mouthed apology, claiming the paper “was published without adequate review.

Yea…the paper wasn’t reviewed by entertainment industry lawyers, who know that without the government taking rights from the people and giving those rights to the corporations, many of these corporations would lose power. And they can’t have that, so no sane copyright policy will ne forthcoming from the Republicans. As noted, this is one of those policy areas that instead of “giving gifts” to a small number of very large companies, the Republicans could “give gifts to” (I.e. “have a policy to help”) a very large number of (young) people who will be voting in a lot of elections over their next 60 years of life.