Wednesday, October 15, 2008

McCain and copyright laws

It seems Senator, and Presidential candidate, John McCain, uses the copyright laws at his, or his campaign staff's, discretion. The latest is his outrage over YouTube pulling his Internet ads with news footgage the main stream news companies complained to YouTube were copyrighted. YouTube pulled the ads on the request and verification of the ads.

McCain's staff complained YouTube should then pull all political ads until they can verify those also don't violate copyright laws, but some advocacy groups support YouTube as the platform, leaving the review to users, while some have support the views the provider should be the copyright police. The law passed by Congress in 1998 supports the former, holding provider innocent of copyright violation unless they were knowingly complicit in the violation.

And over the course of his campaign, he and Governor Palin have made free use of songs by three groups who have sent cease and desist letter to the campaign. The campaign did so but then just found another song to use or they cited that they're not in control of the songs played and public events. That's bullshit as we know campaign staffs control every aspect of a candidate's public events.

So, this is a facet of McCain the public doesn't seem to want to know about, or do they really care? McCain is similar to Bush, beside voting 90+% of the time with the President's view - so much for touting being a maverick, in that he simply disregards or doesn't even care about the people's right to copyright their work.

So what kind of President decides the American people are meaningless and only incidental to their personal and political agenda? Gee, that one we've had for the last 8 years? And now we want 4 or even 8 more years of the same?

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