Most people will look at that title and get a bit nervous, and they should. While I was away the House Commerce Committee released its much-anticipated report on the troubled E-Rate program, a fiasco that seems to beg for the cliche "paved with good intentions." The Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee found the program, designed to help fund Internet access in public schools, "a well-intentioned program that nonetheless is extremely vulnerable to waste, fraud, and abuse, is poorly managed by the FCC, and completely lacks tangible measures of either effectiveness or impact." Why blog on this here, rather than our PFF blog? Because this seems like still more evidence against relying on the federal government to redistribute wealth, something that advocates of compulsory licensing or its derivations would welcome. A warning to anyone who thinks artists would be fairly compensated under such a system -- the government is absurdly poor at wealth distribution (look at expenses in Iraq and watch what happens post-Katrina) and charlatans are very good at milking those incompetencies. For more on this subject read this.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 10:50 AM | General

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