The Mouse's Power: Popularity or Cash?

The author of the report is on Twitter and wants to continue to engage people on the memo and is defending it rather than (as some hyperbolic comments would have it) being disappeared like in the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps someone should interview him.

I suspect that it was withdrawn from the public site because it was an internal memo and white paper, and then opponents of changing the position on copyright were complaining that it was being treated as an official House GOP position. It was never actually adopted as a position, only proposed and discussed.

Further engagement on the issue seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

Timothy B. Lee interviewed the author of the memo over at Ars Technica.

A similar example: The New York Times has an article about small beachfront communities in hurricane and flood paths that continually get wrecked and rebuilt with federal money. Yet when Sen. Rand Paul was complaining during the federal Flood Insurance program renewal and trying to stop it, he was of course attacked for hating people who suffer floods. The people getting flooded far exceeded the money from the builders and insurance companies who like the federal subsidy.

[NYTimes link changed to permalink from RSS feed link.--Econlib Ed.]

An alternative explanation is that even if you are not receiving money from an industry, general principles may indicate that you shouldn't harm industry.

If the lobbyists are successful in persuading lawmakers that such copyright changes as were proposed would significantly harm the US economy, I think that would, in the eyes of most politicians, outweigh some nebulous public good.

Spooking most lawmakers is as simple as pointing out the destruction of the Hong Kong film industry and the near insignificance of the Chinese non-governmental cultural industry as examples of what a loose copyright enforcement environment looks like...

(Whether the lobbyists case is true or not is irrelevant.)

OT: I was excited when I saw the title, since I own the domain tyrannyofthemouse.com (only the "blog." subdomain works though) -- but it refers to the tyranny of computer mouse devices (and how you can do much better from the keyboard with tools like Pentadactyl), not Mickey.