Sneak Attack

Clinton's Think Tank Given Role in Napster Hearings

Democratic Leadership Council Sides with Hollywood in Debate

"Starting with Bill Clinton's Presidential campaign in 1992, Third Way thinking is reshaping progressive politics throughout the world. Inspired by the example of Clinton and the New Democrats........."
Democratic Leadership Council

The U.S. House of Representatives Small Business Committee today began hearings on the issues of copyright protection in the face of the new technology that allows simple and easy trading of music and other materials previously difficult or impossible to duplicate. Planned expert witnesses include musicians and individuals with intense interest in the technological and economic outcome of the emerging technologies. Participants include rapper Chuck D, founder of Rapstation.com; Peter Harter, vice president of Emusic.com; Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records; and the little known Progressive Policy Institute.

The Progressive Policy Institute has issued a detailed report that proposes what they claim is a third alternative to the ongoing dispute between new technology gurus and musicians and artists who want to maintain traditional control over music and royalties.

But who exactly is the Progressive Policy Institute? The PPI is the "Think Tank" of the Democratic Leadership Council, the "new democratic movement" of moderate and centrist democratic leaders formed after the victory of Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. Under the leadership of co-founder and President Al From, Chairman Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Vice Chairman Governor Roy Romer (D-CO), the DLC attempts to mirror the centrist thinking of Bill Clinton and other liberal-progressive world leaders.

Curiously, the PPI and DLC and strayed far from their stated goals of "progressive ideals, mainstream values, and innovative, nonbureaucratic solutions" ¹ in creating their third alternative in the copyright dispute.

With Bill Clinton calling for privacy protection in every other area of Internet activity, when it comes to Clinton's Hollywood cronies, the PPI recommends amendments to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that would require users to provide extensive personal information before using any shared application like Napster or Internet Relay Chat. At the same time the PPI proposes that artists and their lawyers be allowed to easily get injunctions that would bar individual users from many Internet applications. The PPI proposals give judges more flexibility in granting injunctions against individuals.

"The original DMCA was written to keep judges from granting injunctions at all, and if these new amendments are going to be turned into legislation, judges need to be able to grant injunctions," a PPI representative said.

Precisely!! The DMCA today allows users to protest their exclusion from services like Napster and over 30,000 have filed in the Metallica lawsuit. The burden falls upon groups like Metallica to prosecute individual fans. But under PPI proposals, the individual loses virtually all rights. Since most individuals can't afford the legal costs of fighting the billion dollar record companies, the wrongly accused will simply lose their Internet privileges.

Plus, why does the PPI "solution" require extensive registration of user identity simply to participate in a group forum? This frankly doesn't make sense in copyright issues when simpler solutions are so obvious. But the opportunity for abuse of this data is overwhelming. Free Speech will be the first victim of this national registration of Internet users.

The intent of the PPI is clear from the first sentence of their report. They have no goal except to protect the recording industry from the industry's imagined "piracy of physical music products, cassettes, and compact discs costs the industry nearly $5 billion in sales worldwide every year." ² No plan is ever put forth to give artists the royalties they deserve. The PPI "Third Way" is to reward lawyers with a lawsuit bonanza and lock consumers out of trading (and information exchanging) arenas.

1.    The Third Way Philosophy - DLC Website
2.    Napster and Online Piracy - The Need to Revisit the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by Shane Ham and Robert D. Atkinson, May 2000