More anti-piracy legislation

The MIT Technology Review has an article about the Intellectual Property Protection Act under consideration by the Congress. It's yet another in the continuing series of poorly thought out bills around intellectual property control.

And last week's huge federal spending bill included funding for a copyright enforcement czar:

"The legislation, part of the bill funding Justice Department operations, also for the first time funds the National Intellectual Property Law Enforcement Coordination Council (NIPLAC).

NIPLAC is charged with establishing policies, objectives and priorities designed to protect American intellectual property overseas and to coordinate and oversee implementation of intellectual property law enforcement throughout the government. While NIPLAC has been around since the early 1990s, it has never done anything, and appropriators hope that giving the organization $2 million and a new charter will make the office effective."

I wrote an essay ten years ago in college about why there was nothing broken with current copyright law. I'm still not convinced anything is wrong. I should dig that up though and see if my arguments then still hold water with the advent of peer-to-peer sharing, faster internet connections and better compression algorithms.