If you honestly think this is just about Hollywood, you're not being cynical enough.
Hollywood's agenda (censorship, invasive control, panopticon style policing) just happens to coincide with the natural tendency of every government that has ever existed. The framers of our constitution clearly recognized the profoundly human basis for these tendencies, which is why the law specifically designed to constrain them remains valuable (if tattered) more than two centuries after it was written. Indeed, this nasty but relatively stable aspect of human nature is also why we can relate to even older plays written by Shakespeare. He also had an extroridinarly good sense of what makes people, as political animals, tick.
While I agree that corruption is a massive problem, and that Hollywood is a particular nefarious player of that game, I think this issue in particular has a much more sinister undercurrent. In truth, there's a good chance that the government would be inclined to side with maximalist views of IP rights even without the legalized bribery, since they're so convenient to anyone looking for a broader and more pervasive set of police powers, and needing a relatively innocuous excuse for rolling them out.
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If you honestly think this is just about Hollywood, you're not being cynical enough.
Hollywood's agenda (censorship, invasive control, panopticon style policing) just happens to coincide with the natural tendency of every government that has ever existed. The framers of our constitution clearly recognized the profoundly human basis for these tendencies, which is why the law specifically designed to constrain them remains valuable (if tattered) more than two centuries after it was written. Indeed, this nasty but relatively stable aspect of human nature is also why we can relate to even older plays written by Shakespeare. He also had an extroridinarly good sense of what makes people, as political animals, tick.
While I agree that corruption is a massive problem, and that Hollywood is a particular nefarious player of that game, I think this issue in particular has a much more sinister undercurrent. In truth, there's a good chance that the government would be inclined to side with maximalist views of IP rights even without the legalized bribery, since they're so convenient to anyone looking for a broader and more pervasive set of police powers, and needing a relatively innocuous excuse for rolling them out.