The Republican Study Committee released a report on Friday that is so brilliant and visionary it's difficult for me to believe it was written by Republicans. You can read it in its entirety (in text format) on my reference blog.

The original link to that paper was here -- you'll notice that link now just goes to a blank page.

That's because of how good ideas in Washington work these days. The Republican Study Committee wrote a concise article outlining the problems with copyright law and suggesting some commonsense solutions to those problems.

Then the lobbyists started calling.



However, as soon as it was published, the MPAA and RIAA apparently went ballistic and hit the phones hard, demanding that the RSC take down the report. They succeeded. Even though the report had been fully vetted and approved by the RSC, executive director Paul S. Teller has now retracted it, sending out the following email to a wide list of folks this afternoon:

The spineless bastard answering the phones at the Republican Study Committee had this to say to cover for his quivering jell-o bosses: Yesterday you received a Policy Brief on copyright law that was published without adequate review within the RSC and failed to meet that standard.

...among other, more boring things.

You can of course read the whole thing on my web site, but I'll go into some of the problems they (correctly) identify with current copyright law and their suggestions for how to overhaul it to actually work and not just create a bunch of welfare queens with names like Warner Brothers and Viacom:

First, the three myths:



1. The purpose of copyright is to compensate the creator of the content

2. Copyright is free market capitalism at work

3. The current copyright legal regime leads to the greatest innovation and productivity