John McCain is a Pirate (Argh!)

As most of you know, I am not at all a fan of our current copyright laws. I believe in sampling and remixing and I'm a huge fan of the work of Lawrence Lessig and the Creative Commons.

But I'm also a fan of Schadenfreude. So it' with great pleasure that I read today that Jackson Browne is suing John McCain for copyright infringement for using his song "Running on Empty" in an Obama attack ad without permission.

As it stands, McCain has now been caught pirating content from:

• Jackson Browne
• Mike Myers
• John Mellancamp
• John Hall (of Hall and Oates fame)

Just to add in your daily dose of irony, this comes out on the same day that John McCain released his technology platform. Here's what McCain's platform says about intellectual property and piracy:

John McCain Will Protect The Creative Industries From Piracy.
The entertainment industry is both a vital sector of the domestic economy and among the largest U.S. exporters. While the Internet has provided tremendous opportunity for the creators of copyrighted works, including music and movies, to distribute their works around the world at low cost, it has also given rise to a global epidemic of piracy. John McCain supports efforts to crack down on piracy, both on the Internet and off.

So in a McCain administration we would expect to see the President vigorously pursue charges against himself, right?