The Rabid Paladin

I knew as soon as I saw the headline of this article what I would find. Sure enough, Orrin Hatch, Utah's leading disgrace, is the third highest taker of RIAA direct cash donations.

I've watched this develop because I noticed Hatch's evolution from someone with reasonable suggestions from both sides of the debate in July of 2000, including this:

a complete lack of licensing puts in question the labels’ professed desire to be ubiquitous, and a policy of merely cross-licensing among major label-related entities might raise some competition concerns that this committee would have a duty to consider.

into one of the most partisan distribution company shills less than three years later:

"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions.

"There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws," Hatch said.

That's right. He went from being troubled that recording companies were sitting on their licenses to accepting, as a matter of course, that labels might be justified in destroying someone's computer if they were determined by the label to have illegal copies on their machine.

Such an about-face would be puzzling if you didn't know that after 2000 major labels (collectively as RIAA and individually) began donating to Hatch's campaign coffers.

And people wonder why I maintain that Utah, while undoubtedly majority Republican, can hardly be considered a conservative state...