IT'S A POLITICAL TALE AS OLD AS CAPITOL Hill: A lumbering industry selects a certain corporate-friendly party to be its Beltway patsy. In exchange for the requisite campaign donations and other perks, members of said party use their clout to push through the industry's legislative agenda--an agenda that would rip off consumers and harm the overall economy but enrich the corporate string-pullers immensely. Pundits and public-interest types grumble over the bald-faced cronyism, but as long as the money keeps flowing, the beneficiaries don't seem to care a whit.

Sounds like the buddy-buddy relationship between Republicans and the energy industry, right? The characters cited in the above scenario, however, are the Democrats and Hollywood, one of Washington's coziest couples. Fort years, Hollywood has poured money into the Democrats' campaign coffers and been rewarded with indispensable assistance on the industry's crusade of the moment--squelching new technologies that allow the dissemination of digital content in ways Hollywood can't control. One bill being hatched by Democrats would allow media companies to hack into networks like KaZaA, a file-sharing service which has replaced Napster as the most popular MP3 clearinghouse on college campuses. Another would outlaw high-tech devices that don't come equipped with government-approved hardware to make it impossible to copy digital media. And yet another would strip consumers of the right to play their legally purchased CDs on multiple devices. The Democrats' Pavlovian alignment with the grossest impulses of the entertainment industry was even written into the Democratic platform back in 2000, when the party urged "all steps necessary" against the leakage of copyrighted materials--a plank pushed on them by Hollywood.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, this eagerness to support Hollywood's technophobia is easy to understand. The Republicans recently achieved total control of the government by back-scratching Big Oil, Big Pharma, and their ilk. The GOP's dominance, plus strong-arming from congressional leaders like Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), has virtually grafted the corporate-money spigot to the Republican Party's bank account. A recent Washington Post analysis of the contribution patterns of 19 major industries, from liquor to health care, found that while those sectors split their contributions roughly 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats a decade ago, today they favor GOP candidates by nearly a 2-to-1 margin, which puts the Democrats at such a huge monetary disadvantage as to make them pathetically dependent on the few sources of campaign dollars they still have. The entertainment industry knows this well and is using its leverage accordingly.

As a matter of simple survival, then, Democrats would seem to have no choice but to carry Hollywood's water. But in fact, something like the opposite may be true. Democrats simply can't rent themselves out on as many issues as the GOP, and to attempt to do so will close off other, more rewarding avenues. Democrats lost the midterms, after all, largely by failing to offer a convincing alternative to the Bush administration's economic policy--a policy that consists of little more than handouts, subsidies, and protections to existing corporations, from tariffs for the steel industry, to anti-trust relief for Microsoft, to leaving emerging broadband providers to the mercies of the Baby Bells. Instead of helping Hollywood, Democrats can help themselves--and the country--by pointing out that such bought-and-paid-for policies are a recipe for long-term economic decline. Only by offering an alternative economic vision that promotes competition, innovation, and entrepreneurship can Democrats hope to rebound. But that's awfully hard to do when they're helping Hollywood stamp out the very technologies that will fuel long-term economic growth.

Broadband and Garage Bands

That Hollywood prefers to dine with Democrats isn't news. Save for a few notable exceptions--Arnold Schwarzenegger may head the GOP's gubernatorial ticket in California four years hence--the industry's major players have skewed slightly leftward for decades, especially on issues like abortion and the environment. It was sitcom powermeisters Harry Thomas and Linda Bloodworth-Thomas who burnished candidate Bill Clinton's powerhouse media persona during the 1992 elections; more recently, fundraising dynamo Barbra Streisand seemed on the verge of hara-kiri after last November's election catastrophe. Of the $30 million-plus that the TV, music, and movie companies spreadaround during the 2002 election cycle, nearly 80 percent of that sum went to Democrats--an unusually high percentage, even by Hollywood's standards. Of the top 20 recipients, only three were Republicans and only one--Noel Irwin Hentschel, a Bel Air businesswoman who got stomped during a special election--made the top 10. That snazzy $28 million overhaul of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters? It wouldn't be possible without a record $7 million donation from Haim Saban, the TV producer of "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers" fame.

Payback has come in the form of several bills designed to clamp down on the free exchange of copyrighted music and movies, which entertainment companies deem the greatest threat to their future well-being. The most contentious of these measures is the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), sponsored by South Carolina's Sen. Ernest Hollings, which actually has zilch to do with promoting broadband. Along with placing new restrictions on the importation of foreign software, the Hollings bill would criminalize the sale of any digital hardware that doesn't come equipped with government-approved copy-protection controls. CD burners, DVD recorders, MP3 players, even Palm Pilots--all will be illegal unless their manufacturers are willing to render them incapable of making unauthorized duplicates. But Hollywood's definition of "unauthorized" is distressingly broad, encompassing actions usually regarded as integral to consumers' fair-use rights (such as recording a pay-per-view movie for private viewing).

Then there's Rep. Howard Berman's now-notorious H.R. 5211, a bill that would make it legal for entertainment companies to hack Napster-like music-swapping networks like Morpheus or Bear-Share. Or Sen. Joseph Biden's Anticounterfeiting Amendments of 2002, which would make it a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $25,000 fine, to alter or forge digital watermarks, the electronic ID tags embedded in CDs and software. So if you should one day buy a new MP3 player that'll only play files with certain watermarks--say, those that denote approval of the Recording Industry Association of America--you'd have to break the law to make a non-watermarked recording of your garage band's "Freebird" rendition compatible with the device--even if that music was perfectly legal in the first place.

These bills are odious for many reasons, beginning with their blatant disregard for long-standing intellectual property rights. Copyright holders, for example, currently have no say over private performances of music or film--if I want .to play the new DJ Assault disc on my laptop during the day, and then again in my stereo at night, I'm perfectly within my legal rights. But if Biden's bill becomes law, music labels could imbue their products with watermarks that would limit playback to certain devices. Changing a watermark, even if only to play your own jug band's basement recording, could mean time in the federal slammer. Hollings' bill would similarly diminish consumer rights by making it virtually impossible for people to copy digital media, even for uses now considered legitimate, such as creating a hard-copy recording of a TV show, or transferring a movie from an analog source (that is, an old VHS tape) to a digital one.

The Clone Wars