I see on Copyfight a link to a post by Fred von Lohmann of the EFF - he’s a copyright lawyer who works for them. In it he talks about the INDUCE act and its implications:

[Let’s] call [the Induce Act] what it is: a tax on innovation. Technology companies would find themselves under constant pressure from entertainment industry lawyers waving their newly-minted “inducement” law. This means many great products would be hobbled, and many others would never be built. Less flexible, less useful products means fewer sales, lower revenues. That’s a tax on our nation’s technology companies, a damper on earnings, a drag on competitiveness.

And all for nothing - this tax won’t magically solve the file-sharing dilemma, nor will it put a nickel into the pockets of artists.

That’s why the Amercian Conservative Union and National Taxpayer’s Union have both joined the long list of public interest and technology industry groups opposing the Induce Act.

I’m a copyright lawyer. I believe in copyright. But copyright has never given an oligarchy of media companies a veto over new technologies.

The INDUCE act is the devil. If you’re american, immediately go here and add your support to the fight against INDUCE. Copyfight also points to this excellent post on Groklaw, talking about the abusive copyright stances of companies such as SCO and Disney. They take the example of The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe and change it, illustrating the crazyness of the stringent copyright now in effect around the world. Quote:

And if you enjoy it, stop and think of this: If Edgar Allen Poe was alive and thought like SCO, you couldn’t write this without the risk of being sued by the venerable Mr. Poe, because he might say, like SCO, if he shared their concept, that we had “stolen” his plot line. Just think of how much creativity the world would lose if such ideas about copyright were to be adopted. Without a doubt the world would be the poorer for it. Happily, The Raven is in the public domain, which means we can be as creative as we like with Mr. Poe’s original work, with delightful results.

If you own the rights to Mickey Mouse, of course, you might not care about creativity on the part of others. In fact, you might wish to stamp it out whenever it rears its pretty little head, because it is in your corporate interest that there be no competition to your Mouse, so people will go on buying the same old, boring Mickey Mouse watches and lunchboxes and all the derivatives of your long-ago creativity. Actually, Disney’s Mickey Mouse was himself a derivative of someone else’s intellectual property. As you can see from the Big Cartoon Database’s page on “Steamboat Willie”, they say it was “a loose parody of Buster Keaton’s movie Steamboat Bill”, and the lead character later became Mickey Mouse. Creatively building on the work of others is what creative people do.