last Thursday saw Big Content's legislative weenies throw a dismal party on Capitol Hill to celebrate the DMCA and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). thankfully, Politech's Declan McCullagh was there to capture the truly depressing event on film. the gathering of empty suits was ominous enough to attract the attention of noted techno-crank John Dvorak, who summed the whole thing up this way:

The party was to celebrate the DMCA falling in line with the goals of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a global body set up by business interests that hope to make it a felony to do reverse engineering or to even openly discuss how software works....The event looks to have been the typical dreadful gathering of stuffed shirts. The problem is, these are dangerous stuffed shirts that seem to have things their way all the time.

they get their way, of course, because the group of flacks hosting this shindig represent a mere handful of global intellectual property strip-miners, which keeps the message nice and focused.

for example, AOL Time Warner has interests in feature films, publishing, broadcasting, online services, and music. that means that they're represented by four of the seven organizations sponsoring this soiree (well, five, really -- the International Intellectual Property Alliance, in a fantastically rendundant move, represents the other organizations) as is Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Disney is a dues-paying member of five of the trade groups behind the DMCA. these three companies have rigged it so that they have nine voices pushing Big Contnent's agenda.

and, last i checked, the Constitution gives the rest of us only one vote.