by John Tyler

Created on: December 10, 2009

The article “MPAA Wants Congress to ‘Encourage’ 3 Strikes, Filtering” touches on a number of instances where we can clearly see politics interact with law. The expansion of internet regulations can be used as an example of a number of interesting trends as to how and why copyright expansion has happened, how the war on crime has attempted to silence the other side in instances like copyright law, how populist appeal has resonated to make this possible and the adverse affects we could endure if unopposed expansion continues.

The discussion surrounding copyright has largely taken place inside the context of a conversation based on theft and criminal actions by persons who choose to download, in this case, movies illegally. The appeal to moral integrity that the discussion creates makes voicing dissenting opinions difficult and somewhat unpopular. In this way, the populist appeal has worked as it has made corporate interests, such as the expansion of copyright protection for the major companies that hold the rights, a common person issue where those involved have accepted stealing someone else’s intellectual property as ‘wrong’. As Lawrence Lessig points out expansive copyright law protects “Hollywood’s financial interests but eliminates the probability of remix and destroys the best use of this technology.” Lessig is referring to is fair-use applications that have always been accepted as legal in the discussion of copyright law, by eliminating the availability of material to be used in remix settings where authors take clips from copyrighted material and recreate intellectual works with it we are eliminating the opportunity for someone to “do to Disney what the Disney did to the Brothers Grimm.”

The de-politicization of important legal issues began just over forty years ago, in 1964 crackdown on criminal behavior was viewed as a scary thing with looming “Big Brother” ideas having recently been circulated by George Orwell’s 1984. Sometime between 1964 and 1967 the public mood had changed and the beginning of our transformation from a Warren Court style of legal interpretation to a crime based interpretation occurred. This transition has allowed for debates like the debate highlighted by the MPAA article to occur, as Simon might argue dialect suggesting that a government entity, such as the FCC, has the right to make the “assumption of guilt” and thereby are entitled

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