Law and Politics
Bad legislation and obsolete business models
Bad legislation is often a result of lobbying efforts from industrial groups trying their hardest to sustain an obsolete business model. In my last post, I mentioned a UK paper that, amongst other things, discussed how UK law is adversely affected by lobbying groups, and I also explained why I thought this was a huge problem in the US. Well, it doesn’t take long for new examples to come up. This week we saw Tennessee governor Bill Haslam signed a bill into law which classifies the “theft” of “entertainment subscription services” as a crime. “Theft” in this case may include sharing your account password, and “entertainment subscription services” refers to things like Netflix or Hulu.com. Also this week, Maria Pallante started her new job as the Register of Copyrights at the US Copyright Office by declaring at a House Judiciary Committee hearing that unauthorised Internet streaming should become a felony.
What is the problem with all this?
For Lobbycrats and Relobbycans
ArsTechnica has a nice little write-up about a report (pdf) that came out in the UK talking about how Intellectual Property law in the UK is based more on lobbying than evidence. I believe the US legislative branch suffers from exactly the same problem. And where this affects me, not being a US citizen or resident and all that, is that they push their legislation onto other countries via trade treaties (google for ACTA, for example).
This is a serious socio-economic problem that tends to get worse. The extent of the lobby influence in US and UK legislation is, quite frankly, ludicrous – a joke to democracy. And it goes beyond intellectual property legislation. Look at the net neutrality debate that has been raging in telecommunications. Or consider the recent lawsuit by several groups against the FDA for failing act against the widespread use of growth-promoting antibiotics in the agricultural industry – an activity that has been known since the 1970′s to give rise to drug-resistant bacteria. The FDA repeatedly put off proper regulation largely due to pressure from agricultural businesses (who consume 80% of antibiotics sold in the US) and the pharmaceutical industry, ignoring its mandate and putting the wider public in danger.
Admittedly, the interests of some industries coincide with those of the general public. And, sure, businesses owners have every right to defend their interests in a democracy. But what is not right is for government and legislation to go directly against the genuine interests of their constituency – to whom they should be accountable to, and who’s interest should always come first – in order to concentrate wealth in the hands of a small minority.