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Congressional Anti-Piracy Caucus Formed
questionlp writes "News.com reports that three members from the House of Reps has formed a caucus that aims to stop piracy and make for stronger IP laws. One of the members of the caucus: helped author a note last fall to 74 fellow Democrats assailing the Linux open-source operating system's GNU General Public License as a threat to America's 'innovation and security.'"
These men have just become my three favorite people to hate, along with our non-president Bush.
Here's some addresses for you to do with as you please; normally I'd recommend writing them as I usually do, but their corrupt stupidity compels me to not care if you DDOS them, spam them, or whatever:
Rep. Robert Wexler
Rep. Adam Smith
Rep. Tom Feeney
Oh, and if you haven't already, try joining the EFF.
Corporatism getting way out of hand. It's getting scary as hell if you ask me.
Here's information about Wexler's main contributors, and here's information about Smith's. It looks like Smith is the one getting the yacht, since his #1 contributor by industry is the computer industry. Which makes sense since he's the one who wrote the note attacking linux.
In fact, Smith's main single contributor was Microsoft!
- Howard Berman, Representative
- Barbara Boxer, Junior Senator
- Dianne Feinstein, Senior Senator
All three are 0wnz0r3d by the RIAA, MPAA, and Big Media.No, I didn't vote for Berman in the last election. I swallowed hard and voted for the Republican candidate, because he seemed to be genuinely concerned about eroding Fair Use rights.
I don't know what's going to happen when Berman, Feinstein and Boxer are up for re-election again. Usually the Republicans run Religious Right-sponsored, Orange County-friendly candidates at the Senatorial level here in California. I can't support someone like that. But Feinstein and Boxer make me sick. Berman does too, but I think he's gotten enough heat from geeks in his district (they do exist) to where he's not going to try anything so stupid as a "Son Of Berman Bill".
I live close enough to Hollywood to where it's a lot like living in Adam Smith's district in Washington State. This is a company town and Big Media is the company. Resistance, it seems. is futile.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Read here
Money contributed from PAC of the corperation.
(From the top contributors page)
Microsoft Corp $32,200
AOL Time Warner $5,000
This discussions seems to be more or less wrapped up and writing your Congressman and / or voting different seem to be good options. So all that's left for me is to throw in some comment.
Everytime I read about Big 'Cons heavily influencing laws that undermine basic human rights and invalidating democratic structures, in order to grow bigger and bigger, I only wait for the awakening of magic in 2012.
It's as if everyone in power in this world read the shadowrun books and thought "wow, thats a great world to live in".
The US needs to reform their electoral and governmental system fast or they'll be run down the drain by all these corporate whores.
That's what bothers me most with the eff and aclu: they just take the conservative approach of "everything has to stay the way it is" instead of calling attention to the things that IMHO need serious fixin.
If you look at the eff's site, the news section is just full of battles in jurisdiction but on the legislation side of things, it's just "state has passed this, congress has passed that".
Where is the support for a legislative proposal that actually strengthens consumer/citizen/human rights?
Where is the proposal for a system that allows for more than two parties to gain power?
Where is the continous lobbying effort to keep the politicians in line with common sense?
Code is Speech. No to Censorship.
MS and Disney represent a large body of people.
Wrong. MS and Disney are owned and controled mostly by a very small number of people (Bill Gates, et al.) That's who they represent.
Corporations act in the interests of their shareholders. Corporations are not controlled via popular elections. They are not part the democratic system, and should kept the hell out of it.
Look at it this way: How the hell can you have a functioning democracy, when one person with resouces far beyond those of most people (Bill G.) can contribute as much of his money as he wants to buying influence?
These people depend on Office and Mickey to provide them with a paycheck.
This argument is silly for a million reasons. For one, how do you know that MS is the only possible way these people could be employed? If MS was dissolved tomorrow, would everyone just stop using computers?
Two, how do you that this is the best possible why these people could be employed? Perhaps there is another way things could be organized which would produce more.
Arguments like this are a last resort of those who don't want to see change.
But you cannot blame these companies for trying to keep their source of income strong.
This statement is silly too. As long as a company is working to increase it's profits, they shouldn't be held accountable for anything they're doing? This pure idiocy.
Here's an example:
A nuclear power company has all these spend fuel rods they need to get rid of. They discover the cheapest way to do this, and increase their profits, is to buy a law that allows them to throw it out with their normal trash.
This is clearly wrong, but all the arguments you gave support it. The power company is represented, speaking for all those people you think they speak for. The power company stays afloat, so everyone who works there can keep their jobs. And all they're doing is trying to increase their profits, they're blameless right?
Your biggest failure is to consider the costs to society of these company's actions. There is no Wildlife Corp, that can buy influence to preserve our wilderness. There is no Public Domain Inc. which fights to get works placed into the public domain.
Yes, there may be citizen's groups that fight these things, but the money they get is not anywhere near the value of the damage they have to try and prevent.
Take my power company example above. Can you figure out the problem? The damage to society is not being accounted for. There is no automatic reverse contribution to take this into account. And don't say the people should take care of this reverse contribution, either. That would be impossible. It would require every person in the country to be informed about every law that was going to be passed, and donate accoringly.
Life is too short to proofread.