The Colorado Governor Bill Owens has vetoed the MPAA’s super-DMCA passed by the Colorado legislature. Very cool.
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Meta
Owens’ veto has been helpful in Texas. We’ve passed a flyer around to legislators letting them know that another state known for it’s economic ambitions around technology dumped the legislation because of its impact on tech innovation. Hopefully we won’t need the veto…
What is frightening about this episode in Colorado is the that legislature itself did pass the bill. If the Gov’nr hadn’t vetoed it, The Texas proponents of the bill would actually be using Colorado as an example of a tech-savvy state to have gone along with it.
To me this sounds like a close call, and nothing really to celebrate until the public at large is aware enough to give their “representatives” a pause before they go head first sucking up to the next industry lobbyist. Because it seems that the public apathy towards issues as these has essentially allowed the legislators to essentially do the bidding of MPAA without any regard, either for public interest which they have sworn to protect, or for the strategic importance of issues such as these.
-Amr
Amr, to be fair: if there’s a bill that’s outside a legislator’s expertise – and this would apply to many bills re. technology – they’ll listen to anyone who can give them guidance. If the only person who shows up to discuss the bill is a lobbyist, then he’ll have his way, because the legislator got only one perspective, and didn’t get a sense of the broader implications of the bill.
When that happens, it’s not the legislator’s fault, or the lobbyist’s. It’s our fault, because we didn’t show up with our arguments. In Texas, we pulled something together, and it’s fortunate that we happened to have revived EFF-Austin, and happened to have Adina Levin ready and willing to take this on ( for us and for ACLU-Texas).
As far as I know, there is no cyber liberties organization in Colorado, but there are some clueful people there, and someone got the governor’s ear.
So yeah, we shouldn’t celebrate the fact that there was no one lobbying in CO, but it’s significant that Owens got the right understanding, however that happened, and that’s cause for celebration. It certainly helped us in Texas, though we’re still waiting to see if we’ve defeated the bill.