Conservatives awkwardly stumble toward tackling copyright

Common sense suggests there were other reasons for the retraction. Derek Khanna, a tech-savvy young Republican staffer who came to Washington with Sen. Scott Brown before shifting to the RSC to work primarily on cybersecurity and government oversight issues, is clearly well-versed on the subject. He simply lacked the authority to enact a change in position on a topic dominated by powerful interest groups with a ton of money. Khanna’s supervisors seem to have paid too much attention to the merits of the memo and not enough to the larger politics when vetting it. According to Mike Masnick at TechDirt, when news of the memo filtered out to the Motion Picture Association of America and Recording Industry Association of America, those organizations “went ballistic and hit the phones hard, demanding that the RSC take down the report.” They won.

And of course they did. Big shifts in policy simply don’t happen by trying to sneak memos past lobbyists. But Khanna’s gambit did succeed in making news on a subject where the gap between Capitol Hill and knowledgeable people in the tech and economics worlds is enormous.