Reihan Salam wrote a great piece at National Review Online today that outlined how the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a group made up of the MPAA and RIAA among others, is pushing for the US Trade Representative to consider countries that use open-source software to be added to a list of countries that don’t respect intellectual property rights.
This is, of course, absurd. If someone chooses to give away their intellectual property and you elect to use that property, you’re making a perfectly legal and moral decision that in every way respects IP.
So what’s the motivation for this? Salam sums it up in a single sentence:
Basically, a handful of large corporations are trying to use the power of the US government to limit the ability of other firms, large and small, that are built around OSS business models.
So once again the policy of the United States government is being co-opted by large corporations to support their self-interest.
At the conclusion of this ppost, Salam gives out a nice shout out to me and Tim Lee of the Bottom Up blog:
To understand how and why OSS resonates with core libertarian principles, I recommend reading Tim Lee and Cord Blomquist.
I appreciate the recognition and being thought of as a defender of “core libertarian principles.”
For more on the USTR’s Special 301 watchlist, check out this post by Mike Masnick at TechDirt.
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