Tech-Policy Positions of McCain & Obama - Washington Post, 9/26/08

Re-Computing Your Presidential Choices, Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro:
"Both Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Az.) provide lengthy position papers on their Web sites. Let's dig through McCain's first, then Obama's. But let's also set aside verbiage covering broader economic topics, such as upgrading the educational system or reforming research-and-development tax credits, to focus on each candidate's stances on five key consumer-tech topics: broadband availability, "net neutrality," copyright policy, the patent system and electronic privacy...

McCain's roughly 2,700-word statement doesn't get to any of those issues until about halfway down the page. There, we have a statement that might not exactly thrill the folks at the RIAA and the MPAA:

Protecting intellectual property creates the incentives for invention and investment in commercial innovations. Yet too much protection can stifle the proliferation of important ideas and impair legitimate commerce in new products to the detriment of our entire economy.

But there's little substance following it, aside from the goals of hiring more patent examiners and setting up a faster mediation process to resolve patent disputes...

On intellectual-property policies, Obama "believes we need to update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated." But how? I was looking for more info on that this spring and I still am now. (For what it's worth, the Copyright Alliance, a group advocating stronger copyright enforcement, seems slightly nervous about Obama's views in this blog post.)
Obama, like McCain, wants to hire more patent examiners but, in addition, endorses "opening up the patent process to citizen review."
People who read Obama's tech-policy statement this spring may notice that the current version is shorter and less detailed, but it links to a roughly 5,200-word PDF that fills in some of those blanks. "
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2008/09/re-computing_your_presidential.html