Yeah! Let's vote Republican!

Rep. Lamar Smith has been a busy little anti-freedom beaver lately. He's managed to systematically screw over bloggers and the little guy in general with two of his latest proposals. His extension to the DMCA is more modest, but according to CNet's News.com, it has the potential to do the following to bloggers and others:

Boosts criminal penalties for copyright infringement originally created by the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 from five years to 10 years (and 10 years to 20 years for subsequent offenses). The NET Act targets noncommercial piracy including posting copyrighted photos, videos or news articles on a Web site if the value exceeds $1,000.

Yes, if you are one of those bloggers out there who likes to reproduce just about the entire article from a MSM source, his proposal would kick your ass six ways across the gulag archipelago and back. The courts very well might actually defer to Congressional authority on this one, so don't take it too lightly because the only thing that is going to be all but guaranteed to save people from this is a sympathetic jury.

Then there's the patent law which claims to, how do they say it in Washingtonspeak? "This bill will clarify the rights of trademark holders and eliminate unnecessary litigation." In regular English this means, "I'm Lamar Smith, wholly owned lemming from the great state of IP attorney land. We have annexed your country. Please, do not resist your new trademark-bearing overlords." So what does this monstrosity of an IP bill do?

With only the most minimal notice in the mainstream press, the bill as it currently stands would remove three exceptions from part of the present trademark law:

--News reporting and commentary.

--Fair use.

--Non-commercial use.

Elimination of the news reporting and commentary protections would overnight put newspapers at much greater risk of trademark infringement actions being brought against them, for everything from a columnist's or editorial writer's ill-received reference to a company's trademark, to, say, a news photograph of a homeless person's shopping cart parked in front of a row of gleaming, readily identifiable new-model cars at the dealership of a well-known automaker.

In other words if you write I spilled some Coke on my Dell Inspiron, you are now a three strikes offender. How do you like them apples?

Lamar Smith, it allowed to do so, would systematically gut the IP law protection afforded to bloggers, journalists and pretty much every normal person out there. These efforts could be quaintly renamed the Omnibus IP Attorney 100% Employment Act of 2006.

Pork barrel spending. Pork barrel legislating. Blatant attacks on civil liberties like McCain-Feingold. Sticking the middle finger right in the face of the conservative base (immigration). Yes, those Republicans are truly different from the Democrats. If this is what a wobbly majority looks like, what will a strong Republican majority make our country like? We'd go from something like this, to something like this.