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20 Lawmakers Want to Kill Your Television
Macki writes "As previously mentioned, the Broadcast Flag is back before congress. There are 20 law makers currently supporting the bill. The insane thing about it is the fact that no one supports the bill except a handful of entertainment companies. Probably not even the employees of the entertainment companies. It's bad enough they want to break our televisions, but the way that they are subverting democracy is just astounding. Danny O'Brien at the EFF has done a spectacular job deconstructingthe MPAA/RIAA's efforts to ramrod this through, and more importantly, the motivations of the members of congress who are helping them."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's bad enough they want to break our televisions, but the way that they are subverting democracy is just astounding
Okay, now with this issue there might be an exception here, but there is a reason we don't have a true democracy in the United States: people are stupid. That's why we pick representatives to do the voting for us. It's not because it would be inconvenient to have a popular vote on every issue, it's because the framers were smart enough not to trust the public with such power.
Think of all the things that the majority of people in the U.S. hold as being a "good thing" for the country that would probably end up being disasterous. If slavery and civil rights were held to a popular vote, there's a good chance the laws never would have passed.
So please, before you trash Congress for against "the will of the people," bear in mind that is exactly why Congress exists; so that when the time is appropriate, Congress can go against the majority of the people in order to protect the minority.
I make no claim as to the application of my statements to this particular article. Just a general remark about the issue raised by the article summary.
What?
For me, like for many people here, TV is already dead.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
If you'll excuse me, I have to go renew my library card...
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Since I'd really like to know who the CongressCritters are who are supporting this, I found a link off the webpage to a letter of support: pdf here.In case that's slashdotted moementarily, heres the list of representatives
;)
Charles Pickering
Edolphus Towns
John Shimkus
George Radnovich
Mike Ferguson
Marsha Blackburn
Mary Bono
Bart Gordon
Joe Terry
Ed Whitfield
Bobby Rush
Vito Fossella
Elliot L. Engel
John B. Shadegg
Albert Russell Wynn
Michael F. Doyle
Charles A. Gonzalez
Charles F. Bass
John Sullivan
Frank Pallone, Jr.
You can look up what disctricts they're from at www.house.gov, and contact them any way you see fit. Let 'em have it!
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
The number of people who support a piece of legislation is irrelivant in terms of whether a law is right or wrong. At some point in our nation's history it was only a handful of people who wanted to:
There are plenty of reasons not to vote for this law, but that line of reasoning isn't one of them.
(fyi, do not mistake this comment as support for the law)
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
"Never get between an American and his TV set." If Congress passes this bill, there will be hell to pay.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The broadcast flag won't do a thing to break your TV. Your TV shouldn't have to care one way or the other about the thing.
What this breaks is your PVR, by making it unlawful for Best Buy (or whoever) to sell you one that will record something they don't want you to. That doesn't stop you watching TV.
So they're not killing your home entertainment centre per se, just transporting it back to those lovely 1970s, where video recorders don't exist and the only way to watch something is to do so when they want to broadcast it. Which is pretty rubbish, admittedly.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
You write letters, as in black print on white paper, in a real envelope, with a real stamp, to your Congresscritters, explaining that you oppose this, you think it is a really bad idea, and you want them to vote AGAINST it.
You send three letters, at a minimum: one to each Senator from your state, and one to the Congressman who represents you.
You get all your friends to do the same thing.
E-mail WON'T CUT IT. They KNOW that e-mail takes no effort, compared to sending an actual physical letter.
If any of the Congresscritters sponsoring this travesty are from your state, whether they represent you or not, you also send them letters.
The letters should be short, polite, to-the-point. They should not use profanity, they should not use 1337-speak, they should not make any kind of threat, not even the threat to vote against them in the next election if they support this. (That last threat is implicit in the fact that you sent the letter.)
The vast majority of Congresscritters *NEVER* hear from "The Folks Back Home". The corollary is that every actual physical letter they receive indicates at least 100 voters who feel the same way, but didn't bother to write a letter. (Every phone call is assumed to indicate 10 voters.)
You almost certainly will receive a reply to your letter. It may or may not indicate that anyone actually read it. If you do not receive a reply, you send more letters, to the State party headquarters, complaining about that clown in Washington who can't be bothered to answer mail from constituents. Those letters also get read, and said clown will hear about it from the guys who made his election happen.
And anyone who thinks that these things can't be fixed should re-read the results of the 1994 mid-term elections.
Posted as AC to promote non-karma-whoring
Because the law and decades of court decisions explicitly give them that right.
So as software developers, we can tack on licenses such as the GPL to determine how our works are used... but networks cannot tack on restrictions to how their media is used.
There is nothing in the GPL that attempts to restrict your standard fair use rights, such as making a backup copy or loading the program into RAM. The GPL only deals with redistribution rights. The GPL gives you broad redistribution rights with some conditions attached. It is well understood that for a TV show, the producers give you zero redistribution rights. But redistribution has nothing to do with you taping a show.
This proposed law is about revoking rights that you already explicitly have, such as timeshifting shows, and transferring them to the content producers. These particular rights are not addressed by the GPL; the GPL simply assumes that you retain the standard rights that you already have under the law.
The truth is that history is repeating itself here, I know this sounds off topic - but a few paragrapshs down I'll explain some more. The speculative industrial stock bubble in 1850 is very similar to the speculative internet stock bubble in 2000. The "war against indians" is very similar to the "war against terrorisim" - back then advances in transportation technology exposed us to indian culture in a very fast and dramatic way causing a culture clash, today the internet has exposed many unfree cultures arround the world to US culture in a very dramatic way to them and some have reacted by lashing out at us.
.... Second, there is no nicely divided north and south. Instead it is more like a division between tech and content industries. Third, copyrights are not the only information people are trying to controll - "money" is a way of storing information about value and transaction costs. The Fed and some large financial institutions are definitely trying to controll it, and all hell is about to break loose in the market place as well as the copyright space. Fourth, there is compelling reason to believe that no government will be on the side of freedom this time until the battle is all over. A flaw of democratic government is that it is often more accountable to the media than it is to securing freedoms.
Back then it was about controlling the labor market (slavery) in the industrial era, today it is about controlling information in the information age. Back then they screamed bloody murder that people were stealing their property rights as industrialists wanted to use available labor without giving a damn about who alledgedly "owned it". Today many industires and individuals want to just be able to use information at their disposal to provide effective services, without being microregulated with a zillion tons of content restrictions. (like google's guntenberg project, apple's ipod, to name a few out of thousands)
The speculative advances of the industrial revolution also caused a period of growth followed by a deflationary adjustment. Today, the housing and every other market is way over saturated in debt - and the writing is on the wall. (watch out for a major economic "adjustment")
There were even people who desperately tried to get the slave states to get along with the free states who naievely didn't understand the nature of slavery or that the forces that would drive the industries apart were far greater than the ones that bound them together. Today there are all these people who are desperately trying to cling to the copyright system, even though any sincere thought will show it's pretty much DOA, and should be DOA.
So yes, the way congress is acting shouldn't be any supprise. Renember how they extended slavery to last forever for all colored people, renember how they punished people for simply teaching others how to read. Funny how copyrights have effectively been made to last forever, and copyright violations can be punished worse than rape.
There are some important differeces though. First you can't controll information with physical violence, but you can attempt to controll it with BS, threats, lawsuits, brow-beating, etc
Correct, but each and every one of those people will keep or lose their jobs based on party-line issues. The bile in your throat you feel over this particular issue won't hurt them at all.
This is why politicians on both sides love the abortion issue, especially when raising funding for their campaigns. Nothing can be done about it one way or the other, because Roe v. Wade is established constitutional law, and not enough people want to change things for an Amendment, which is what it would take. However, Republicans know they can count on the "pro-life" vote, so long as they keep pretending they have the capacity to outlaw abortions. Democrats know they can count on the "pro-choice" vote, so long as they keep pretending that the Republicans have the capacity to outlaw abortions.
Every once in a while an honest politician like Tim Penny comes along and openly admits that the whole debate is completely irrelevant, and we should be voting on issues that matter, like the budget, but nobody wants to hear it, so it all just gets drowned out in the din of partisan screaming.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
8 of these 20 senators are up for reelection in 2006, more than the percentage of the entire Senate (40% vs 33%). Call their office, ask how they'll vote, decide whether to vote for them to represent you for the next 6 more years, and tell them that you and all your Internetted friends are voting that way next year. That's the only way to influence them, short of sending them sacks of cash bribes^Wcontributions, or finding them in bed with a dead girl (or live boy). If you really want to make a difference, don't just call them with consistent, effective talking points. Send them a paper letter. Because plenty of these neanderthals don't have any idea what a "broadcast flag" is, and probably think they're voting for some kind of "wrap myself in the American flag" rule that scores votes among the blindly patriotic.
Republicans:
Conrad Burns - Montana 202-224-2644
Trent Lott - Mississippi 202-224-6253
Kay Bailey Hutchison - Texas 202-224-5922
John Ensign - Nevada 202-224-6244
Olympia Snowe - Maine 202-224-5344
George Allen - Virginia 202-224-4024
Democrats:
Bill Nelson - Florida 202-224-5274
Maria Cantwell - Washington 202-224-3441
Senator John McCain - Arizona 202-224-2235 is running for president in 2008. Call his office, too, and tell him whether you and all your Internetted friends nationwide will be voting for him.
Senator David Vitter - Louisiana 202-224-4623 just stood up for his partymate Bush's failure to protect his state before, during and after Hurricane Katrina. He's not running, but he's so vulnerable that he doesn't need to hear that rich, smart people are against him, along with the poor evacuees and victims.
Senator John Sununu - New Hampshire 202-224-2841 is the most powerful telecom senator. Call his office and tell them what his "tech constituency" thinks of his votes to protect us from being regulated into media vassals.
Go ahead and call any of the rest of them, if they represent you. That means they represent you, not the interests of some out-of-state media cartel that's just ripping you off:
Republicans:
Chairman Ted Stevens - Alaska 202-224-3004
Senator Gordon Smith - Oregon 202-224-3753
Senator Jim DeMint - South Carolina 202-224-6121
Democrats:
Ranking Member Daniel K. Inouye - Hawaii 202-224-3934
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV - West Virginia 202-224-6472
Senator John F. Kerry - Massachussetts 202-224-2742
Senator Byron L. Dorgan - North Dakota 202-224-2551
Senator Barbara Boxer - California 202-224-3553
Senator Frank Lautenberg - New Jersey 202-224-3224
Senator E. Benjamin Nelson - Nebraska 202-224-6551
Senator Mark Pryor - Arkansas 202-224-2353
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make install -not war
The "There are 20 law makers currently supporting the bill" link in the summary is incorrect. The twenty Senators listed on that site are the ones in the Commerce Commitee who will be voting on the Senate version of the DTV bill, and may or may not support the broadcast flag.
This article, however, was about a new push to get the Brodcast flag added to the DTV bill in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce , in particular in the Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee . The way that legislation works now-a-days is that there is rarely an opportunity to get a bill ammended when it goes before congress. All the formulation and ammending of bills happens in committee, and then the house and senate usually just give it an up or down vote without any modifications (but after a great deal of grand-standing). So these are the people who have the most influence on the final wording of the House version of the DTV bill. If you have representatives from your state in this committee you should definiately write them. Even if you don't it won't hurt to pick someone from the subcommittee and write them anyway.
The representatives listed by Mad Rain, above, is the correct list of supporting representatives - 20 of the 57 members of the House Commerce Committee. If they are in you district, they are the people you should writing letters of disgust, and let them know you will be voting against them in the next election.
In addition if your Senator is on the Senate Commerce Committee and you haven't written them yet on the broadcast flag, then you should, as they will be dealing with this issue as well.
Lastly if your senators and representatives are not on any of these committees you should write them anyway in case the bill makes it out of committee. Since we dont know an exact number for this bill yet, it helps if you know in what capacity they will be working with the bill, to help them identify what bill you are talking about. Keywords - Digital Television Bill, Broadcast Flag, Commerce Committee.
You see I live in a country that has true democracy and it is called Switzerland. In fact true democracy works well because believe it or not there are "STUPID" swiss! People who say, "it's because the framers were smart enough not to trust the public with such power" are in fact saying, "An elite number of people know what's good for the masses!". Let's carry this thought through and call it what it is namely fascism.
Interestingly enough, the Swiss Germans make up the majority of Switzerland; so in any direct vote they would get to decide what is best for everyone. When I lived there one of the complaints I heard from my Italian and French Swiss friends was that if the German Swiss decided something was good it became law at the national level.
While direct democracy can work well it starts to break down as people become less homogeneous and have varying views of what is good based on their cultural norms. Even a country as small as Switzerland is not a country of only cows, Heidis, and chocolate or watch makers.
Speaking of Heide, Switzerland was the last European country to give women suffrage; and unless it has changed they still can't vote in some local (largely ceremonial) elections.
It's wonderful and interesting country to live in, but the reality is very different than the popular image (in the US at least) most people have of Switzerland.
The US has true democracy on a local level to a limited extent - we vote on laws directly, as well as many revenue issues. Some states allow citizens to overturn or create laws via popular referendum as well (CA falls to mind). We just don't do it on a national level; as a republic with limited federal powers that's probably not a bad idea considering it would concentrate power in a few very populous parts of the country.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Nationalizing the healthcare (like in Canda) isn't going to fix the problem: that a pressure group has gotten special powers from the government and is using them to benefit it's supporters at the expense of the public. If we take away the special power, the problem would largely resolve itself.
Before someone mentions "tort reform":
While it is true that in SOME states, the loose tort laws have driven the cost of insurance so high that doctors can't get insurance (decreasing the supply further). This is neither a national problem, nor in and of itself can account for the high cost of health care. Real tort reform is a good idea, but GWB style tort reform is a waste of everyone's time.
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)