Nearly two dozen public interest groups, trade pacts and library groups urged President Barack Obama on Thursday to quit filling his administration with insiders plucked from the Recording Industry Association of America.
The demands came a week after the Justice Department, fresh with two RIAA attorneys in its No. 2 and No. 3 positions, announced the administration's support of $150,000 in damages for each music track purloined on a peer-to-peer file sharing program. The administration, moreover, has just declared as classified the inner workings of worldwide intellectual property trade pact. And Hollywood is urging Obama to embrace internet filtering as the content industry seeks to cut internet access to repeat copyright violators.
Still, Obama has yet to fill the all-important role of copyright czar, a new cabinet-level position approved by Congress late last year. Other unfilled vacancies dealing with intellectual property rest in the Patent and Trademark Office, the United States Trade Representative and the State Department.
Groups such as Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Consumer Electronics Association, the Wikimedia Foundation and, among others, the American Library Association, are demanding Obama to look outside the content industry when filling up his administration.
"In selecting these officials, we ask you to consider that individuals who support overly broad IP protection might favor established distribution models at the expense of technological innovators, creative artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and an increasingly participatory public," the 19 groups wrote (.pdf) Obama Thursday. "Overzealous expansion and enforcement of copyright, for example, can quash innovative information technologies, the development and marketing of new and useful devices, and the creation of new works, as well as prohibit the public from accessing and using its cultural heritage."
The group are: American Association of Law Libraries, American Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, Center for Democracy and Technology, Computer and Communications Industry Association, Consumer Electronics Association, Consumers Union, EDUCAUSE, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Entertainment Consumers Association, Essential Action, Home Recording Rights Coalition, Internet Archive, Knowledge Ecology International, NetCoalition, Public Knowledge, Special Libraries Association. U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Wikimedia Foundation.
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