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New Congressional Bill Makes DMCA Look Tame
An anonymous reader writes "Representative Lamar Smith is sponsoring the Intellectual Property Protection Act. The new bill is designed to give the Justice Department 'tools to combat IP crime' which which are used to 'quite frankly, fund terrorism activities,' according to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Among the provisions is lowering the standards for 'willful copyright violation' and increasing the corresponding prison term to 10 years." More information is also available at publicknowledge.org.
that's a pretty constructive response, wait a while & it'll happen to you? You've absolutely hit the nail on the head with your implicit acceptance of the status quo - that you, as the populace of allegedly free nation, are utterly powerless.
http://www.majorityleader.gov/
Roll this in the pages of your civics book and smoke it. It was obviously written by someone who didn't know a whole lot about the topic.
This guy is obviously an idiot, but there's a really easy way to completely bypass this bill - stop pirating shit.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
I feel powerless.
I'm a USian, I know there are going to be a number of other rants in this thread about political power and how you don't undertand politics and how they're trying, but I can do nothing, and it's depressing and demoralizing. People who have been paying attention for the past 3 years can verify.
We live alternatingly in fear, releif, and anger.
Fear that someone will harm us. Relief that it doesn't happen. Anger when we realize that 14 (at last count) people you went to highschool with never came home from the desert alive.
Fear that they're taking more rights away. Relief that they didn't. Anger when we realize that the laws already on the books are pretty restrictive.
I don't know what to do, and it is depressing. People I had been friends with for years I can no longer talk to because of this divided political climate. Groups of friends, brought together by a non-related common interest are divided down the left-right voting spectrum. It's hard to describe if you're not experiencing it.
When you add that together with the fact that the 51% in power seem to care less than nothing about what the other 49% of us have to say, and that we are looked down upon as unpatriotic, it's very scary. Most police officers and military personel are republicans. The military because the republicans fund their actions, the Police because... I dunno. Authoritarianism seems to be the republican line lately. Whatever. But, you're more likely to get pulled over if you have a John Kerry bumper sticker left on your car, I do know that. If you've got one of those yellow "support our troops", it's like the unwritten sign that you're also a republican and your own kind won't mess with you.
What do you do when the people in power and the people in positions of authority above you think you're an unpatriotic, drug-addicted, welfare loving cretin?
You say we always let stuff like this happen. I say... what can we do? I've almost given up. My voice doesn't matter.
~W
sig?
Because, quite frankly, we have only the epidemic proportions disregard for copyright to thank for acts like this.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
There are two theories of government... one, that central government should be extremly limited, and should stick to a few basic things to keep the peace (like defending borders, printing money, making sure people aren't dumping waste into lakes, etc)... then there are those who believe that the government should have broad powers and unlimited resources, and it's job is to "run" society, and manage it, and address every single problem in society.
The benifit of an activist government is you can scream and cry and there isn't a single problem that it won't try to help you with (if it actually does help you is a matter of debate)... but all benifits have an associated cost. The cost is that EVERYONE gets to ask the government for help... And since we have a population of hundreds of millions of people, and since we live in a society where millions of people can have conflicted interests with millions of other people, and since governments ability to control things is rather crude (it can only promise punishment/violence for generalized situations) - There are going to be a lot of people hurt by the government. You can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs.
You can't have your cake, and eat it too. Most people here want a ultra-powerful centralized government that regulates all of society, but they want that same government to keep it's hands out of the Internet, or intellectual property, or whatever it is that they are into. That is just not possible. In the same way you dismiss anyone who complains about drug regulation, or enviornmental regulation, or other regulation... the average Joe is going to dismiss you at best of being some crazy Libertarian, and at worse of being a terrorist-loving greedy capitalist bastard who wants to take away our precious rights, OUR IP RIGHTS! After all, the government is here to help us and protect us, and you want to eliminate that protection!
You will not be able to stop the massive regulation and centralized control of information, because you support massive regulation and centralized control as an ideology in itself. I know, I know, you say "Well, I support regulation, but I support GOOD regulation, not bad"... but "good" and "bad" are subjective, so that isn't an excuse. You support regulation first and foremost, and in a democracy that is trying to balance the will of millions it is hard to come up with regulations that don't screw over millions of people. Strict IP controls are just another price you have to pay for having an activist government to "protect" you.