John Edwards, who refused to take a stand against poverty-promoting laws such as the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, is going into the poverty-fighting business at the University of North Carolina.
An email to Edwards supporters–and, yes, I held my nose and voted for Kerry-Edwards–said the ex-Democratic VP candidate will be “joining UNC to launch its new Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, which will examine innovative and practical ideas for moving more Americans out of poverty and into the middle class.”
Yes, I’ll cut the new UNC professor some slack. Maybe without Hollywood campaign contributions to distract him, Edwards will do more good on the copyright front than he did on the IP-related Senate Judiciary Committee. Guess what can help fight poverty? Well-stocked public libraries and good schools. But thanks to Hollywood-bought copyright laws, they’ll be paying many more millions over the years, and freedom of expression will suffer as well.
Related: Copyright and K-12: Who pays in the Network Era?, my Clinton-era paper for the U.S. Department of Education.
