The Nuclear Option

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A few weeks ago the Republican Study Committee put out a report entitled  “Three Myths About Copyright Law and Where To Start To Fix It.” As many noted, this was a smart and unusual report, but as things turned out, its influence was quite short-lived. The report was retracted and vanished quickly from the RSC website.

Now, the staffer behind it has been shown the door. As the Washington Examiner reports

The staffer who wrote the memo, an ambitious 24-year-old named Derek Khanna, was fired — even before the RSC had decided on other staffing changes for the upcoming Congress. The copyright memo was a main reason.

Republicans are surprisingly close to the entertainment industry. For instance, Mitch Glazier, as a Republican House Judiciary Committee staffer in the late 1990s, played a key role in drafting GOP bills expanding copyright before cashing out to the industry. He now runs the Recording Industry Association of America, a $4 million-a-year lobby operation that fights for more government protection of record labels.

So Republican politicians, with their sensitivities to K Street and their general pro-big-business tendencies, are not eager to roll back the extraordinary government protection for Hollywood and Nashville. But free-market think tanks and writers are banging the drum.