How A Fired Republican Staffer Became A Powerful Martyr For Internet Activists

Someone in DC thought they had snuffed out an official Republican report on radical intellectual property reform by convincing the authoring agency to erase the document from the Internet and fire the staffer charged with writing it. The shadowy politicking backfired. The young fall-boy, Derek Khanna, instantly became a front-page living martyr against the entertainment and telecommunication lobbies, who have long been villainized for pushing aggressive anti-piracy laws at the expense of innovation. Just 3 months later, Khanna led a massive 100,000-person petition to give consumers more rights over their cell phone carriers, convincing the White House and Congress to publicly prioritize consumer choice and uphold the principles first laid out in the now non-existent committee document. A day later, legislation was introduced to codify the White House’s support into law, with an official hat-tip to Khanna. “They sought to ‘silence’ him by firing him, but it just brought him more attention and gave him a much, much more powerful voice in the digital grassroots movement,” says Mike Masnick, intellectual property expert and founder of the popular tech policy blog, TechDirt. “To then have him so quickly achieve a big (and unexpected) success with the mobile phone unlocking petition really highlights the difference between the old way of thinking about these issues, and the new way. The old way is to focus on “punishment.” The new way recognizes the power of openness and connectivity — and when those two things clash, the new way will win almost every time.” The 25-year-old Republican was commissioned by the Republican Study Committee, a conservative policy think tank inside the House of Representatives. Contrary to the views of organizations that support hawkish intellectual property protection for artists, such as the Recording Industry Association of America (of Napster lawsuit fame), the official report sought to expose “Three Myths about Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix it”. Leveraging conservative free-market dogma, the report argued that “copyright violates nearly every tenet of laissez-faire capitalism. Under the current system of copyright, producers of content are entitled to a guaranteed, government instituted, government subsidized content-monopoly.” Critics of the copyright status quo like to point to Amazon’s attempt to patent the ‘one-click purchase button’ as examples of overreaching patents that grant legal protection for obvious innovations. Unlike physical property software isn’t scarce; Amazon and every other online retailer can use the exact same button at the exact same

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