Why don't they get it?

>Rather than take the knee-jerk response that politicians must just be in the pocket of big media, I'm going to look at how some aspects of human behavior make this kind of highly damaging legislation more likely.

Maybe I'm too cynical or listen too much to the Lessig crowd, but I think ignoring campaign contributions is naive. The government does see the problem, or at least individuals in the government do. But what politician wants to stand up for this and risk potential campaign contributions, knowing they are unlikely to garner enough support to pass legislation anyway?

One can look at this conflict two ways: 1) the politician's personal gain versus the overall benefit to the country or 2) short term benefit of immediate legislation versus long term benefit of future legislation versus reelection. Viewpoint 1 is more cynical and viewpoint 2 is more naive. In reality, it's a spectrum and each legislator has to make both tradeoffs in addition to their personal beliefs and understanding of the system. But, in my opinion both these tradeoffs are bad for the efficiency of an economy. This conflict of interest is the root cause of problems like this and discussion of solutions is almost pointless if we're not trying to address that root cause.

Some excellent points made here, but they still don't dismiss what Tim O'Reilly tweeted. The legislation that broadcasters are trying to put in place is down right greedy. Placing intellectual property copyrights on content they didn't even create? It's a defensive act to block anyone and everyone out and it's difficult to watch. If something like this were successful, content creators could lose the right to have their work on anything but the original broadcasters network (in this case cable, satellite, and some Internet outlets). There may be a lack of understanding for why this isn't ok, but that doesn't make it alright.

Excellent post. Technology doesn't propagate throughout society instantaneously, people have to invest in learning to use it first. Unfortunately many people aren't willing to do that, even when the immediate costs are very low relative to the future rewards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting, thanks for that list of cognitive biases).

Nonetheless, I am continuously astounded by the number of typewriters still in use.

> human beings are "endlessly complicated and interesting."

Couldn't disagree more. Human beings en masse are endlessly boring and not interesting at all. Just because the soil of the earth contains a few diamonds doesn't make all the soil interesting.