Power2010 Picks...Tony McNulty

Power2010 aims to highlight egregious cases of MPs damaging democracy and blocking its reform. For their first case, they have picked Tony McNulty, and I must say it couldn't have happened to a, er, nicer chap:

The former minister tried to hide his expenses from his constituents by voting to exempt Parliament from Freedom of Information. No wonder. His expenses revealed he'd been claiming for a second home, occupied by his parents, just miles from his primary residence forcing him to resign from government in disgrace.

His behaviour was made all the more galling by the fact that when in the Home Office he championed policies, such as ID card, designed to track, monitor and control the population. He has consistently stood for the old top-down politics of command and control and against reforms like a democratic House of Lords. That is why POWER2010 has selected McNulty as its first target in a nationwide effort to highlight the record of MPs who have opposed cleaning up and reforming our political system.

Great stuff. Just one question: why don't you put the letter's text in your Web page, using instead a great big image file? Just asking...

Anyway, there's a form you can fill in if you want to add your name to this letter. Thoughtfully, there's even a little space for that personal comment you've always wanted to send him....

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Pamela Samuelson on Copyright Reform

Here's a useful voice to have in the debate about copyright reform, Pamela Samuelson:

The Copyright Act of 1976 is far too long, complex, and largely incomprehensible to non-copyright professionals. It is also the work product of pre-computer technology era. This law also lacks normative heft. That is, it does not embody a clear vision about what its normative purposes are.

This article offers the author's preliminary thoughts about why copyright reform is needed, why it will be difficult to undertake, and why notwithstanding these difficulties, it may nonetheless be worth doing. It offers suggestions about how one might go about trimming the statute to a more managemable length, articulating more simply its core normative purposes, and spinning certain situation-specific provisions off into a rulemaking process.

Thirty years after enactment of the '76 Act, with the benefit of considerable experience with computer and other advanced technologies and the rise of amateur creators, it may finally be possible to think through in a more comprehensive way how to adapt copyright to digital networked environments as well as how to maintain its integrity as to existing industry products and services that do not exist outside of the digital realm.

Pity she's so defeatist:

The prospects of copyright reform are perhaps so dim that a reasonable person might well think it a fool’s errand to contemplate a reform project of any sort. It is, however, worth considering whether it would be a valuable project to draft a model copyright law, along the lines of model law projects that the American Law Institute as frequently promulgated, with interpretive comments and citations to relevant caselaw, or a set of copyright principles that would provide a shorter, simpler, more comprehensible, and more normatively appealing framework for copyright law.

Call me an incurable optimist, but I think we might aim a little higher....