RSS
Twitter
Piracy Czar Expected To Be As Successful As Other War Czars
from the we-winning-any-of-these-wars? dept
Late last year, Congress gave the President the right to create a position of intellectual property enforcement czar, more simply known as the "piracy czar." This wasn't too surprising, given the administrations willingness to equate file sharing to drugs and terrorism as one of the biggest problems faced by the country. So, it's really no surprise to see President Bush follow through and appoint a piracy czar, Chris Israel, who (oh, look at that) formerly worked at Time Warner. It sounds like the main point of the position is to focus on stopping counterfeit goods and knockoffs coming out of places like Asia -- but, the whole idea of setting up a piracy czar sets up the problem as a "war" that needs to be fought, rather than an issue that can be addressed in multiple ways. As has already become quite clear, what's commonly considered "piracy" (a misnomer, at best) when it comes to intellectual property can often be quite helpful to an industry. However, when you have a piracy czar whose stated goal is to reduce piracy to "zero," it completely wipes out any talk of more creative responses to the situation. The similarities to other such "wars" are pretty clear -- as is the expected success of this particular war.
Reader Comments (rss)
(Flattened / Threaded)
Needed?
Do we really need a Anti-Piracy Chief? I mean, if the main focus is going to be on China, why not just appoint this guy deputy ambassador or something and have him work directly with the Chinese?
(reply to this comment) (link to this comment)
Re: Needed?
The problem is that China presently holds a gazillion dollars of US Treasury debt. That's where they've been investing the trade surplus.
Kind of hard for the USA to go into the bank screaming/yelling and by the way here's the loan payment.
(reply to this comment) (link to this comment)
Does it have meaning, though?
I seem to recall Arnold Schwarzenegger was once assigned the title of "Fitness Czar" by the President, though it didn't seem to have any meaning beyond a couple of TV appearances.
(reply to this comment) (link to this comment)
No Subject Given
Eventually we're going to need a "czar czar" to coordinate all our wars.
(reply to this comment) (link to this comment)
Piracy Captain - surely?
There's one easy way to reduce piracy to zero - redefine what you mean so "piracy" no longer happens.
The same approach would allow us to win the War On Drugs or even the War on Terror.
Meanwhile I'm off to trademark a lot of dumb phrases based on "czar", starting with "car czar" and "bar zar".
(reply to this comment) (link to this comment)
CZAR
Is it scary to anyone else that our government assigns the word "czar" to every (nearly useless) dictatorial bureaucratic position who's purpose is to eliminate something?
Last I heard, that was a title given to the folks who worked for the *Russians/USSR/Communists*. Ironically, now we use it for department heads who's purpose is to attack and eliminate "problems".
[sarcasm]That worked really well for the USSR...It's great that it's politically popular to repeat (over and over again) mistakes made by other (once powerful) gorverments and sometimes ... goons![/sarcasm]
(reply to this comment) (link to this comment)
Re: CZAR
> Last I heard, that was a title given to the folks who worked for the *Russians/USSR/Communists*.< br>
Your knowledge of history is rather slim. google 'define:czar' to learn a little bit more about what the term means. You've got the two main points completely wrong: 1) the Czar and his family predated the USSR and the communist rulers and 2) the Czar didn't 'work' for anyone, he was the King!
* a male monarch or emperor (especially of Russia prior to 1917)
* a person having great power
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
* Tsar, (Bulgarian цар&#, Russian царь; often spelled Czar or Tzar in English), was the title used for the autocratic rulers of the First and Second Bulgarian Empires since 913, in Serbia in the middle of the 14th century, and in Russia from 1547 to 1917. It is derived from the Latin title Caesar.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czar
* Title of the ruler of Russia. Taken from the word Caesar, which means emperor.
regentsprep.org/Regents/global/vocab/topic.cfm
* Czar is a word associated with the original Strength to reflect the Russian origins of the person he was based on and as a spoof of the Rex/Emperor title.
fliar.com/dictionary/dictionary_c.htm
(reply to this comment) (link to this comment)
Add Your Comment