House Republican Study Committee embraces EFF-style digital copyright reforms, then disavows its own report. RIAA says it didn’t ask the GOP group to yank the paper from its Web site.
In an bizarre policy flip-flop, a group of more than 160 House Republicans appeared to endorse extensive digital copyright reform on Friday, then disavowed its position the next day.
The House Republican Study Committee, an influential collection of conservatives that tends to pull the House leadership to the right, published a set of recommendations that could have been penned by Larry Lessig and the Electronic Frontier Foundation: expanded fair use rights, lower penalties for "willful" infringement, and dramatically abbreviated copyright terms.
It was, for a policy brief, a bit incendiary; one section said "copyright violates nearly every tenet of laissez-faire capitalism," and another warns that today's legal system "is seen by many as a form of corporate welfare that hurts innovation and hurts the consumer."
See the full story here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57551614-38/gop-flip-flops-over-supporting-digital-copyright-reforms/