And there’s all kinds of threats buried in both this specific document and Thom Tillis’s agenda that, even if these particular changes don’t immediately move forward to legislation, are not gonna die. Dude really wants to see copyright law turn into liability law, and that’s a fast track to censorship. He is a wholly owned subsidiary of massive entertainment conglomerates, and for him, the fact that helping those massive entities maintain effective monopolies means that they can exploit the cogs creators employed or contracted to make actual content to Dickensian levels and beyond is a feature, not a bug.
And he has a really interesting vision for the future of copyright in general. Specifically, he’d like to see it become a tiered system, delineated by maybe… oh, I dunno… market share?:
The law needs to account for the fact that small copyright owners and small online services providers (OSPs) may have more in common with each other than they do with big copyright owners and big OSPs, respectively. Accordingly, I think we should consider whether copyright law should be revised to account for such differences among stakeholders. In particular, could copyright law borrow from employment law, or other relevant fields, to establish different thresholds for copyright owners and OSPs of different size, market share, or other relevant metric?
The paternalistic posture here—“Oh, we just want to encourage solidarity among small creators; we want to make sure small platforms and providers aren’t getting crushed in the wheels of a one-size-fits-all system because we, the Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, care very deeply about businesses that aren’t maxing out donations to our reelection campaigns every cycle”—is a smidge hard to take as good faith given absolutely everything about the history and implications of the changes Tillis wants to make. There could indeed be benefit to reexamining whether IP should be addressed in the same way for holders with effectively unlimited resources as it is for those with none—but Thom Tillis is 10,000% not the guy you want as the architect.
Fortunately, we’ve got way more brains on our side than the Senate Subcommittee on IP. But we all know that being right doesn’t always have shit to do with what gets ratified, so make sure your elected representatives know how unpopular these changes are among the #1 stakeholders in the debate: individual citizens trying to live in a fucking society.
In case you missed it upthread: submit comments about proposed DMCA changes to [email protected]
And for when Sen. Tillis inevitably ignores those comments, since they don’t donate to his campaigns, donate to Democratic campaigns in Georgia’s fast-approaching runoff election to flip the Senate and have a better chance of killing this shit before it gets to the stage of a legal challenge in federal courts packed by the GOP or our newly goatfucked SCOTUS: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/pccc_2020_raphaelwarnock_jonossoff_only
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