Slashdot Mirror
Senate Majority Leader Takes On File Sharing
An anonymous reader writes "Colleges are up in arms — and the entertainment industry is ecstatic — over Sen. Harry Reid's plan to crack down on file sharing by students. Floor votes could be imminent." A commenter on the post said, "Unfortunately we are likely to see neither sense nor principle from the Democrats on this issue, as Hollywood is their biggest cash machine."
You want some copyrighted lyrics? How about this, from The Who:
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
Not shocked in the least. This is merely another showing of the American political arrangement favors not the citizen, but the biggest donor.
Raise your hand if you thought your congressman would listen to you.
Who would you listen to: a very small donor at best, or the group who bankrolled your campaign(especially the "care about the people" PR)?
Why is this shocking news? Hell as a former die hard repub, I've lost pretty much all faith in the nation and it's future
His relationship with powerful lobbyists makes him (or any other Democrat congressman) no better than the ones in the other side. They are all puppets, hold in the hands of the same puppeteer. Naive are the ones that thing that party allegiance is guarantee of anything at all.
The politic system is rotten, third party can't win (even if they had more support, there are so many hurdles for an independent candidate to overcome), majors parties are in fact one, people are cattle and vote based on frivolous fads and superstitions instead of on important issues and past actions.
The "manifest destiny" ended up being a self defeating prophecy, U.S. people got so used to the idea that U.S. fate is to lead the world that forgot to care about their own house and get a decent leadership for themselves.
Call me cynical, but if a politician shows sense, they won't get enough of the conservative vote to ever get elected. And if they show principle, well, they're probably so lacking in even common sense to ever get liberal vote. So why should we expect either in any measurable form?
That trolling asside, from TFA:
Roads also facilitate theft. Roads also have police to patrol and set up roadblocks if necessary, that sort of thing. But funds are appropriated for such services. If one is to mandate that measures be taken to prevent intellectual property theft, one should provide a plan for funding of such an endeavor. It's not a universities fault that students steal any more than it is a construction worker's fault of someone later uses a road to facilitate a crime because the road happens to go past a bank.
At least, that's the way I see it.
If you can't bring your party up to where people could vote for them with a clean conscience, you can at least bring the other party down and pretend that they're at the same level. Responses, if any, will be along the lines of "yeah, because Democrats are such angels, perfect in every way, and they always do what the people want" which is not what I said. I have long said that Dems and Repubs are about the same when it comes to pork spending, subservience to lobbyists, and general corruption (including legal but unethical stuff), but Repubs are essentially The Torture Party as far as I'm concerned. You don't have to impress me much to beat out The Torture Party.
If the Dems just run as the "We Think Habeus Corpus is Important" party, that's good enough for me, even with the usual complement of pork spending and knee-jerk overreaction that we always expect from congress. I wish Dems were better, but this equivocation where going after filesharers proves that the Dems are just as bad as the Republicans is a bit ridiculous. If torture, habeus corpus, and warrantless surveillance aren't part of the discussion about which party is better, at least right now, then we aren't really having a discussion.
The report talks about colleges enforcing illegal downloading, not P2P technology. It's funny that even a defender would confuse the two.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
What do you want to do to avoid it? Log the IP addresses of people using it? People will start onion routing their packets, using also existing onion routers so you can't tell that an IP you got is actually a culprit. Also people will start using "private" trackers and networks more than they already do. To avoid packet identification through mandatory logging at ISPs, packets will get wrapped in other headers (HTTP offers itself due to being the perfect "noise" to duck into). Hmm... According to TFA this plan proposes that colleges be required to:
The article does not say that P2P networks will become illegal which would be strange since there is nothing so fundamentally wrong with P2P computer networks that they have to be banned any more than there is a reason to ban hammers because they are occasionally used to murder people. Using P2P networks to distribute pirated multimedia content and pirated software is however illegal. Unfortunately, at the moment, the only really effective way to stop illegal sharing of pirated software and multimedia content over P2P networks is for educational institutions, government institutions, businesses and even ISPs to disable P2P completely. From my point of view this is unfortunate since I don't pirate software or media content, I cover most of my software needs with FOSS and purchase any additional software and what little multimedia content I use. The fact that people use things like Bittorent to distribute pirated material is unfortunate since it has made it impossible for me to download Linux distributions and other FOSS software that is distributed via Bittorrent when I am at work which has impacted my productivity as a worker. Until recently Linux distributions like Centos, for example, relied heavily on Bittorent for distributing their DVD ISO images and it's only recently that these became fairly widely available via FTP/HTTP. Distributing pirated material off P2P networks isn't a fundamental human right, it's not legal, it's something people are able to do because they can get away with and now draconian measures are being taken to kill off the distribution of pirated material over P2P networks to the huge inconvenience of those of us who use P2P for legitimate purposes. Another reason why this amendment is crap, apart from it's detrimental impact on the legitimate use of P2P, is because it singles out colleges when there are communities and institutions who are much worse than college students when it comes to distributing pirated content and software via P2P so to that extent I agree with you.
Just my €0.02.
Isn't that just the normal form of democracy in a capitalist nation?
Not quite. During most of the XX century, more often than not, Washington managed to strike a balance between business interests and the interests of society as a whole - think of the cries of corporate outrage when recordable cassettes and VCRs came out, how it supposedly signaled the end of the world as we now it, etc, and how Washington stood its' ground, deeming the technology legal for public consumption.
However, since the advent of the internet, something snapped. Panicking, ignorant fossils (democrats and republicans alike) who think in terms of dump trucks and series of tubes and don't even know how to bookmark a page in their browsers, have now allowed a few major corporate players to determine, one insidious step at a time, how the internet should work and what constitutes fair use and theft, in the exact opposite direction of what used to be the norm.
A corporate iron grip on western culture is almost complete, on paper, on an unprecedented scale. And now, the do-nothing, good-for-nothing distinguished congressman from Nevada is giving us a glimpse of just who owns everything - those who own him. I am convinced that he is completely ignorant on american legal history of intellectual property and ownership.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
The problem is, what is an "illegal download"? How do you distinguish it, technically, from a legit one?
Simply: You can't. So what colleges will do (and already do) is to simply disallow any kind of P2P traffic altogether.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ok, let me rephrase that. I will not become illegal to use P2P, but the only way for colleges to stop the illegal transfer of data through P2P is to disallow them, essentially resulting in the same.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Then they'll turn off connections for "excessive" bandwidth usage, or for using a high number of SSL connections to IPs listed as residential in a DNSbl. Encryption is not a panacea.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Reid is getting plenty of money from "Hollywood", as is the rest of the Democratic Party. And this policy is clearly bought and paid for by the content industry.
But is Hollywood "Democrats' biggest cash machine"? No. It's not the biggest source of money to the Democratic Party. I'd like to see some evidence to back up that Republican talking point, before it's promoted on the Slashdot front page.
And are Democrats really the "Hollywood Party"? Schwarzenegger, governor of California, is a Republican - and all Hollywood. Fred Thompson, a favorite of Republicans to run for president next year, is a Republican, a popular TV actor, and all Hollywood. Ronald Reagan, patron saint of the Republican Party, was nothing but Hollywood, after his career as B actor, culminating in roles as California governor, then US president. And of course Hollywood, the ultimate corporate media cash machine, prefers the Republican Party, which represents precisely Hollywood's values: corporate media, rich people, marketing appearance over substance, popularity contests determining power, the lot.
Hollywood is America. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are America. Pretending only Democrats are Hollywood, while Republicans are their real blockbusters, is not really "the American Way". It's the Republican Way. But it's just a made up story, projected on screens across America and the world.
--
make install -not war
It seems to me these are the practical questions that get lost in all the rhetoric.
How about nothing? Quit trying to make information sharing illegal, and stop being babies and admit that the current business models of Hollywood, the gaming, and the music industries are obsolete now, like newspapers, and either die out, or find a business model that's compatible with the internet? :)
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
Or how about term limitations on Congress and Senators and elimnination of life time tenure for judicial officials?
The constitution defines the states as owning the election process for its officials. It seems to me then that each state has the right to decide on term limits for their representatives (Congresspeople and Senators work for the state). So if enough people in a given state vote to limit terms for their reps they should be able to.
The founders of the country envisioned a part-time federal government made up of citizen statesmen that would server for a short time then go home to their jobs/farms/etc. If the politicians were term limited then they wouldn't always be chasing the re-election dollar.
And why should judges get life time appointments? Why not give them say 10 year appointments at any one level. If they can't get an appointment to the next level then they go back to private life.
Yet somehow PC games have managed to survive all of the doom and gloom. It's been 20 years already with rampant piracy the whole way and they're still around.
That just goes to show that if you put out a good product and don't abuse your customers too much, people will still pay for your stuff even if it is readily available for free.
That is the "business model shift" that both the RIAA and the MPAA need to make. They need to stop acting like they are entitled to success. They have to act like they are willing to work for it. This goes equally for AMC that thinks it can get away with showing commercials for some lame ass sitcom before Harry Potter 5.
The RIAA simply needs to stop being an ass. Admittedly, this may be impossible for them to do. They've been doing it for so long.
As I like to say: When it comes to ripping off artists, consumers really are amateurs compared to the labels.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Are you disputing the fact that a system can become broken?
What you have said so far is that anyone who refuses to work with the system is helping it to break, and if you think the system is broken, there is no reason to try to work with it.
So what should someone who believes the system is broken do? I can't do nothing because that makes me a fascist, and I can't work within the system for to try and improve it because that makes me a hypocrite. The only options left, that I can see, are working outside the system by manipulating the vote, or a second revolution, which I am hesitant to initiate until all other options have been tried.
Is there another option I've missed? Or are you just argueing to argue now?
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
Listen, both the Democrats and Republicans are bought and paid for by special interest groups. You are only kidding yourself if you think otherwise.