HR4137: Quick Update

02Aug08

HR4137 has passed House and Senate floor votes and reached the President’s desk. It should pass without problems – great news.

Now, recent buzz on HR4137 involves unrelated language jammed into the bill about file-sharing. CNET writes well on the P2P changes snuck into HR4137. Why does this happen? Clauses like this have major lobbies beyond them and often drive compromises in committee. Powerful legislators in committee can often force controversial language into large, important bills and so avoid an individual vote on their controversial issue. If you recall, something similar happened when Senators hijacked a Port Security bill to legislate online gambling in 2006.

Anyway, the controversy remains moot. Just as before, with the gambling bill, the chatter comes a bit too late for recourse. This is terrific for student loan reform, and just slightly poor for file-sharing college students.



No Responses Yet to “HR4137: Quick Update”

  1. Leave a Comment

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.