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PRO-IP and PIRATE Acts Fused Into New Bill
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) have just sponsored a new bill, the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008, which would combine the worst parts of the PRO-IP Act and the PIRATE Act. The basic idea is pretty simple: expand the Federal government to create something like the Department of Homeland Security for IP. The Copyright Czar then polices the internet and clogs the courts with thousands of civil lawsuits against individual infringers so the RIAA doesn't have to. Feel free to contact your representatives with your feelings about this bill. Right now, they believe the bill (PDF) will 'protect jobs.'"
Honestly, why do we need this? Everyone talks about how music is dying, and how movies are dying. But a quick search on MySpace or YouTube gives thousands of indie bands and a lot are as good or somewhat better than the ones signed with a record company. There are lots of low-budget films circulating YouTube, now while a lot aren't as good as the ones that take millions to make, a lot are really entertaining, something that a lot of Hollywood films aren't.
Just because not everyone wants fast food doesn't give the fast foot industry the right to in a way punish previously legal activities for the goal of getting more people to eat fast food. In any other industry, a bill like this would be laughed at even by the idiots that are in our congress, but it seems that any trade group with the word America is enough to throw both republicans and democrats into passing a bill. Idiots.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
In any other industry, the core problem would be addressed.
... not hollywood crap, and extremely high prices for garbage.
for auto manufacturers, the problem is nafta, not poor quality domestic vehicles.
for food prices, the problem is biofuel, not subsidized farming.
for power generation (and shortfalls), the problem is canada and mexico, not insufficient production.
for job loss, the problem is immigration, not high wages.
for the recession? the problem is terrorism!!!, not the trillions of dollars borrowed and spent on the war, subprime mortgages, and the bush administration's economic policies...
And for piracy? the problem is canada, china, and piracy
I think that if there wasn't so much high priced garbage, people would start paying for their movies and music again. I'm 100% against paying for something (like a cd), finding out it is crap, and being stuck with something I don't want... almost every other industry, I can return unwanted goods. When music/movies are like that, I'll stop pirating.
Exactly. I just bought Bioshock and the thing keeps crashing on my computer. I should have pirated it first, but I was trying to be honest and had waited for it to hit an acceptable price point (which it did on steam this weekend). Now I'm being punished for being honest. At least when I get viruses from pirating shit, I know what I'm getting in to.
Now I'm stuck with a couple of gigs of worthless data on my hard drive that I feel like I should keep around in case they patch it. And I'm convinced more than ever that when spore comes out, that shit is coming off the pirate bay. I'm not going to pay for another 60 dollar doorstop.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
how can the ELECTED senators in your country can easily move against the wishes of the people, so blatantly, so fearlessly, so hypocritically ? unbelievable.
Read radical news here
its a battle between selfishness, self centeredness and will of the people.
you think that by protesting, talking to them, you will have them change their mind ? or by working IN the system, you will be able to compete ? how many stuff you have failed to prevent in the last 10 years by doing that ?
they DONT CARE what you think. they get their votes by doing greasy campaigns that run by donation money from whomever has the cash, and they just do as they or their masters please. thats the gist of it.
you better draw them off, and start thinking what you can do WITHOUT them being on board, because they wont be.
basically your senators have become your enemies.
THEY DONT SERVE YOU
Read radical news here
No-one in their right mind would elect him to public office.
Fantastically gifted coder he may be, a founder of open source he most certainly is, but another thing he is, is a zealot. That type of person rarely does well in a job where compromise is the order of the day.
Not that its a bad thing he's so single minded. Open source wouldn't have its most important tool chain were it not for him, and the philosophy would have got nowhere but for his bull headedness on the issue.
That said, I'd never vote to put him in public office, never in a million gazillion years.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
i wonder when will people start killing these american senators who are doing things that people dont want. in democracy thats treason.
As the great Votaire put it:
"An ideal form of government is democracy, tempered with assassination."
Clever guy.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Combine this with FISA, and suddenly the only obstacle left is encryption. We all know what's coming next... The "No encryption for potential terrorists act", the "mandatory back-door act", or the "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear act".
...so instead of posting about how we're all so insightful for foreseeing it, or just whining about the government (as though our congressman might read Slashdot), let's do what we do best and solve this problem, except this time before it even happens.
It seems to me that the solution to censorship is to route around it. How about if we code up some steganography tool to hide encrypted messages, and give them the back-door to a bunch of worthless garbage? (i.e. SSH over Nigerian scam mail.) Perhaps they'll notice that all the geeks are communicating with variations of Nigerian spam emails, but the only way they could stop us would be to solve the SPAM problem. Good luck legislating that away.
You know, if people wouldn't take out loans they can't afford, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
You know, that's something you hear ALL OVER the place, and yet an enormous number of people had acted in this way which is so spat-upon by most of the smarty-smart forums I frequent. The thing is, though, that if there is such a large amount of similar sentiment or action, there is probably something worth examining there. I would say it has something to do with incredibly smart (well, that's debatable. let's say "good with words") people who write insanely convoluted contracts that everybody and their cousin just signs off the bat without reading (EULA much?) and it's understood that that's how that's done. Added to that, growing up as many of us probably have in a culture that prizes "credit history" (I understand it's being tied to insurance costs, now) which can ONLY be gotten from debt, then I can sympathize with the consumer in these cases (especially after having finally rid myself of debt, probably 10 years later and thousands upon thousands of dollars in interest, and mine's a pretty light case, there are people dealing with mountains of cascading debt). All our choices, all our own fault. But with SO many people in that situation, it's more interesting to look at "why" than just somehow blame them for being wrong. (see: "public misunderstanding" around the release of KDE4.0)
It will "protect 'jobs'". Put that last little word through your Noam Chomsky filter, and it translates:
"protect profits".
but that does not envoke the same emotion in the masses as "Jobs" do.
Which your congress spokesperson might have a hard time trying to disagree with this bill.
It seems to me that the only thing worse than the incessant squabbling between Democrats and Republicans is when they arrive at a consensus on a piece of "important" legislation.
People who are old like me and remember the famous battles between Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan remember when Republicans really were conservative and Democrats really were liberal. Now we just have two parties of triangulating whores selling out to try and grab the middle and flipping sides on every issue at the earliest possible opportunity.
This is my sig.
The truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country.... People shouldn't be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people.
The rights of artists to their works came way before the rights of others to trample them.
The "rights" of artists to their works came in the last few centuries. The right to share other people's stories came when Ugh first told a story about how he tackled a dinosaur.
I guess this is the sometimes slow process of revisionism taking place, ready to wipe out any memory of all the positive effects of copyrights.
To be fair, the *AA + gov is making it difficult to remember the positive side of copyright.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
the theory goes that if intellectual property can be protected totally, then money will be made in large amounts.
Of course, as intellectual 'property' usually doesn't involve actually making money (unless you're the mint), it's more appropriate to say that protecting intellectual 'property' means more money will be transferred to corporate accounts.
As that money would otherwise have been spent on other things in the economy, it's most likely that the transfer of money into highly wasteful monopolistic corporations result in a net loss of jobs for the economy (not to mention a net loss of wealth for the economy as a whole).
"If everyone would quite buying the RIAA music, quite pirating it even. Quit buying the damn DVD's, quite going to see the movies, quit pirating movies. ..."
[Newsflash!]
Chairman Mao got it wrong. Religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, "entertainment" is, and like any other opiate it's addictive and addling.
So don't hold out any hope that sheeple will "see the light" and cease ingesting shite music, gawdaful movies, or infotainment any time soon.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
How many friends do you have that aren't in or above your social class?
Ok, so you only have friends at or above your social class. Explain your friends then, or do that not count as actual people?
They have friends below their social class, so either their slumming it cause they feel bad about you, or they, like many more americans than you care to admit are different than you, don't see social class as noteworthy.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Oh for fsk's sake why don't they just openly come out and make it illegal to actually _own_ anything so that we all have to rent things from large corporations.
I mean that's what they really want here. At least if they came out openly and said it we'd know where we stand.
And the worst part is that it's unlikely to change until the majority of couch potato people are affected by it.
Which if the-powers-that-be are as clever as they have appeared to be so far will never happen. The last thing they want is people actually _looking_ at what they are doing - especially Joe Public - so they'll do anything to keep them fat and happy.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Yep, protect jobs. Time to become a copyright lawyer...
Or a Jail Warden..
It's gonna be shitty to be an artist though ..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Way to use a stereotype as an argument. -fail #1
No, we just recognize better than most that "intellectual property" is not property at all. Property exists because of limited resources. I can't magically create a new house/car/yard for my friend just because I have one. Therefore, it can only belong to one party. Knowledge or "intellectual property" can be copied at will. So, trying to restrict it is putting a monopoly where there is none.
Like you...
Do away with our corrupt tax code. Support the Fair Tax
No, they don't. What part of "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" (which is, very clearly and distinctly, not like "to give an entitlement to artists") do you not understand?
The sole legitimate purpose of copyright is to maximize the number of works entering the Public Domain. Nothing more, nothing less!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This statement perfectly illustrates the problem we have here: the two sides of the debate are arguing from incompatible assumptions. Right there, you just implicitly assumed that this concept of "IP" exists and was valid. However, people like me disagree on that very point! Therefore, everything you say based on that is useless.
The fundamental question we have to answer here is "does authorship of a work create a property right?" John Locke says yes. Thomas Jefferson says no. But Jefferson wrote the Constitution, so he wins. QED.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
and allows widespread theft of our #1 economic output.
this is bull.
If you lumped the entire movie and music industry together, google could buy it up with the rounding errors in their revenue calculations.
The truth is that consumer electronics and technology in general dwarf hollywood and IP in the GDP calculations. Think about it for a second. How much do you pay for cellphones, mobile broadband, home broadband, computers, etc vs hollywood trash?
Even in my uncle's household, where they receive more than they could possibly spend, their expenditures on technology outpace intellectual property 4 to 1. And no, he doesn't download anything because he doesn't know how.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!