Congress to RIAA: Merry Christmas

Congress and the Bush administration just gave the recording and film industries an early Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa gift, wrapped up with a neat little bow.

While everyone else was watching the world's financial markets redefine the phrase "bottoming out," President Bush quietly signed into law legislation that lines the pockets of content owners while doing nothing to protect the rights of consumers.

The bill in question: The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2007 (PRO-IP Act).

(You know somewhere in the bowels of Congress there's an office that does nothing but generate acronyms for new laws. Unfortunately they usually do a better job than the lawmakers themselves.)

The PRO-IP Act increases penalties for IP infringement and creates a new "intellectual property enforcement representative" at the federal level. What exactly would an IP Czar do? I don't think anyone really knows. The job is so ill defined it sounds like it was created just to hire somebody's brother in law. I bet ex-FEMA equestrian Mike Brown is available.

Truth is, the PRO-IP Act could have been a lot worse. It's been stripped of provisions that had the Department of Justice acting as waterboy for Hollywood -- bringing big-money civil actions against counterfeiters and funneling the proceeds to content owners. And though penalties have increased, the final bill does make distinctions between Hollywood's real problem -- international counterfeit rings that generate billions of dollars worth of fake goods -- and garden-variety file swappers that get all the headlines but do relatively little damage.

Unfortunately, it's not the bill we need. What we need is legislation that protects consumers from entertainment cartels that want to dictate how and when we can use the content we legally own. We need a law that clearly defines the boundaries of 'fair use' and strengthens protections for people who want to use existing content in new ways (something even the McCain camp seems to have recently discovered). We need a law that undoes some of the damage created by the DMCA.

The fact that music CDs are easily ripped has certainly made illegal file swapping much easier. But it also created a multi-billion-dollar industry in portable media. Would we have an iPod -- and by an extension, an iPhone -- without it? Probably not. Though iTunes has sold more than 5 billion songs, the vast majority of portable music began life on shiny plastic platters.

Meanwhile, people who purchased DRM-protected music online from Yahoo and Microsoft are getting royally screwed, because the servers that validate the music licenses are being shut down. So consumers can no longer listen to the music they purchased legally due to restrictions demanded by the entertainment cartels.

Of course, getting the right laws means electing the right lawmakers -- people who understand the technology that's changed our lives in virtually every way. They're pretty hard to come by these days.

Will a new Congress do any better? I'd certainly like to find out.

Are there new laws do you want to see? Or existing laws taken off the books? Post your thoughts below or email me direct: dan (at) dantynan (dot) com.