HR3291, The Intellectual Property Protection Act, may be rushed through Congress. I haven't read the text [PDF] in detail yet, but Wired is reporting that this is an amalgamation of a bunch of other copyright legislation, including text that forbids punishes taking a camcorder into a movie theater with three years of jail time (and indemnifies movie theaters from damages caused by detaining suspects), and charges the Department of Justice with persuing Internet file traders.

Wired is comparing this bill to another bill that prohibits skipping advertisements. Sec 212 indemnifies people skipping content in private, including the use of devices designed to make such a task easy, such as for censorship of offensive material—but analysts say the explicit provisioning of this right, one which we already have without this bill, effectively restricts our rights to that provisioned in this text.

Not mentioned in the Wired article or other analysis: Title IV: The National Film Preservation Act of 2004 amends the National Film Preservation Acts of 1992 and 1996 by broadening the language to encourage the Librarian to extend the "preservation plan" to include media storage format technology advances, increasing the size of the Film Preservation Board, the number of appointed members-at-large, and the size of quorum, adjusts the wording of the travel reimbursement to board members— and, via a little note at the end, cuts the budget from $250,000 to $200,000 a year. Hardly the biggest scandal of the bill, but one I care about, and one that will go unreported.

These and others are cases of crafty formulation of a bill's text, which I only assume is to fool legislators into voting for it, or perhaps to allow legislators to vote for it against the interests of their constituents with reduced political impact.

While reading these bills that amend the U.S. code, it is often essential to look at the text it is amending to make sense of it. Search the United States Code.

Check summaries and statuses of this and other legislation at PublicKnowledge.org.