But in this case it only seems to be in progress because one party got mad at Disney and is now just looking for ways to hurt Disney’s interests in revenge.
If a the school bully beats up a kid who torments you for a terribly unfair reason… should you root for them?
It would be pearl-clutchingly terrible if 50+1% of the country/state thought a cabal of (gays, nazis, woke commies, abortionists, pedophiles, etc.) were in the NSA using surveillance tech + weak encryption to accomplish their goals
That is quite literally facism.
This law under discussion would only apply to Disney, and could only ever apply to Disney.
However, only Disney has copyrights which would be expired by this law due to the retroactive termination of copyright periods and extensions.
Of course it's not. Governments make legislation to deal with specific organisations or individuals all the time; it's pretty normal. I would go so far to say this is "quite literally" the entire job of the legislative branch: respond to problems as they develop with new laws.
This specific act and pissing match with Disney is of course petty beyond belief, but that's a different matter.
Here is the actual text of the bill:
https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2022-05/Co...
As written, it could only apply to 2 companies, Universal and Disney (as those are the only 2 companies that both are in the movie production business and also operate theme parks), and both Universal and Disney are (or at least last month were) over $150 billion in market cap. A bill that narrowly drafted has been held to be a bill of attainder in almost every circuit in the U.S. (A bill of attainder does not need to be limited to a single target; what makes it illegal is that it is narrowly drawn and attempts to legislatively punish a person or entity for otherwise legal acts.)
The punishment part is that the bill would retroactively limit copyright extensions for just those two companies 1 28-year term, and Disney copyrights would expire automatically upon passage of the law for everything dating back to at least Fantasia. Note that retroactive termination of copyright law is not permitted by our existing copyright laws, nor is it permitted by international treaties to which we are signatories.
Or, in other words, it's unconstitutional multiple ways, and is a blatant attempt to exert fascistic coercion over a business with different ideological concerns than the author.
Plus, who knows if it will be well drafted and all that. The article suggests it would be retroactive, which is rarely a sign of fair legislation, IMHO; of course, the same was true of the term extension, but I don't think that necessarily justifies making the change back in the same way; especially for works that were created with an originally long copyright term.
The Republicans used to be the party of big business but that stopped being true around 2016. They’re now squarely populist which is why you’ve noticed a change in behavior. However, it’s not that anti-woke is more important than big business it’s that big business isn’t a constituency of the populists in the first place.