A real good example of why persons dislike or distrust their government, Hatch makes so many inane comments it's hard not to call him an uninformed Moron. Is he misled or is he that dumb?

Posted by: Conrad Zulus on June 18, 2003 04:17 PM

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You often hear people saying that politicians don't take notice of the opinions of their constituents, and demanding referenda to make them fall in line. My usual response to this is that we vote for MPs, senators, congressmen and so on in order that they can be professional legislators, acting on our behlaf. Their job is to analyse and make the informed decisions which the ordinary public can't make (or haven't got the time to make). And then along comes an idiot like this, and my argument starts to seem very naive...

What is also worrying here is that the discussions seem to be taking it as a given that downloading is a bad thing and needs to be stamped out. In fact, the evidence for copying and downloading having an adverse effect on sales is very weak.

Posted by: Alan on June 19, 2003 06:44 AM

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Perhaps someone should ask Hatch if the same should be done to sites used by spammers. If he says "no" he's in someone's pocket. If he says "yes" ask if the same standards of proof apply in both cases and if anyone is free to take this kind of action. If "no" he's guilty of double standards which favour big corporations. If "yes" he's advocating cyber-vigilantism.

Posted by: Philip Chalmers on June 20, 2003 04:08 AM

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Interesting Development: One of the millions of out-of-work SW programmers took a few minutes break from Kazaa, and instead checked out Hatch's own website. Lo and behold, he was using an illegal copy of copyrighted code on it!

The story is available here:

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59305,00.html

Posted by: David C. Dunkle on June 20, 2003 04:32 PM

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