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President Signs Law Creating Copyright Czar
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "President Bush has signed the EIPRA (AKA the PRO-IP Act) and created a cabinet-level post of 'Copyright Czar,' on par with the current 'Drug Czar,' in spite of prior misgivings about the bill. They did at least get rid of provisions that would have had the DOJ take over the RIAA's unpopular litigation campaign. Still, the final legislation (PDF) creates new classes of felony criminal copyright infringement, adds civil forfeiture provisions that incorporate by reference parts of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, and directs the Copyright Czar to lobby foreign governments to adopt stronger IP laws. At this point, our best hope would appear to be to hope that someone sensible like Laurence Lessig or William Patry gets appointed."
1. Countries without extradition treaties to the US, as the act makes pirating a criminal offense - one that you can be extradited for.
2. Countries without friendly relations with the US, as part of this act involves convincing other nations to join.
That's about it on requirements, I think...
On a serious note, it's nice to know that with the economy in the crapper, rather than trying to correct problems with the US banking system, they've instead decided that the US's biggest concern is people downloading MP3s.
Uh, no. The US probably wants to forget that the industrial revolution started in the US thanks to one massive effort in corporate espionage. Cracking down heavily on IP actually harms the economy.
The US has signed its death warrant, again. This act can only hurt the economy, and it really doesn't need to be kicked while its down.
Don't worry, look how successful the Drugs Czar is. Money well spent.
Ones that don't have extradition agreements with the United States.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
I'll bet he thinks so while he's driving around in his car(s).
-- arstchnca
--
Ok, outside the copyright debate, am I the only one that is extremely skeptical when someone is the "czar" of something? What the hell does that actually mean, and what can they actually do?
If it doesn't sound like an utterly useless, powerless post, it sounds like we should be running for our lives from this all powerful czar - neither is particularly good, from my perspective.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
They are successful. So long as you remember that the goal is to make the police force so big that a dictator can rely on them to keep the population in check.
BTW, if we weren't all criminals yesterday, and we're aren't all criminals now, you can be sure we will all be criminals soon.
How we know is more important than what we know.
All those who have already spent the large amounts of money placed conveniently on their doorsteps from an "Anonymous DonoRIAA" last week, say "Aye" -- any opposed? The Ayes have it. Send it to the president!
It's easy to start a grassroots campaign to get a new bill instated that will have this one eclipsed or overturned. We just need everyone we know to write letters to their congressmen -- Letters written on hundred dollar bills.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
I thought the goal of the police force was to make money?
Does that mean copyrights will now be available on every street corner?
Whaddaya mean the wasn't the goal?
They are successful. So long as you remember that the goal is to make the police force so big that a dictator can rely on them to keep the population in check.
BTW, if we weren't all criminals yesterday, and we're aren't all criminals now, you can be sure we will all be criminals soon.
We've all been criminals for a long, long time. It's just that nobody has bothered to prosecute us yet.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
any country you moved to that they could extradite you from is going to be more of a hell hole than just staying in the USA.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
... DMCA, pro-IP and others american bullshits laws means nothing on my country
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Your government is out of control. Perfect timing. This will get zero media attention.
In the subject, you name Bush.
In your post, you name "your government"
Guess what, they are not one and the same.
Bush has issued 12 vetoes during 8 years.
4 of those vetoes were overridden.
The blame for this rests on the Senators and Congressmen who allowed themselves to be lobbied into passing such industry serving legislation.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Said the geek who has rarely left his mother's basement, let alone the USA.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
How many copyright cases are at criminal court standards?
jury trial.
Just having a ip is weak evidence as they are many was for the ISP mess it up and tieing it people who don't have HSI but do have cable / digital cable and the CO may of some how tied to some one who was on the same node just like how you can see / pay for other people VOD / PPV.
As of a few weeks ago my country's future is tied to China and India, not the USA. Been nice knowing you guys. Have fun with the copyright stuff.
http://fear.org/
Assets should only be forfeited when the owner of said assets has lost a case (civil or preferably criminal).
Cases such as "County of X against $10,000" are just wrong and evil, and should be in violation of the 4th Amendment.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Great. Now they'll be able to seize your house for copyright infringement. Keep in mind that there are much lower thresholds in place now thanks to the drug laws put in place since the 80s.
With the war on drugs, the war on sex, the war on common sense, and now the war on "IP theft", the risk of raising a child in the US skyrocketing. :(
Young people often fundamentally don't understand the economic incentives, implications and justifications for copyright (regardless of whether or not they are still valid today). Couple that with very low purchasing power, and this new war-on-sharing is a disaster waiting to happen.
Mark my words. A lot of families will suffer terribly because of this.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
No, let's be fair. The blame is with those who voted them in.
Fellow people of the United States of America: You do a horrible job of voting. I don't expect clairvoyance, but I do expect you to see past the fit of the suit and the quality of the dentistry.
And when you make a wrong choice, I do expect you to take responsibility for having voted in the evil-doers.
Why, do a single P2P transfer of even part of a movie that is copyright by a member of the MPAA OR a song that is copyrihgt by a member of the RIAA.
You are still free to trade the movies or songs of small, independent labels.
This czar ONLY deals with IP of company's with a market cap of over $500 million.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Bush is like Ronald McDonald.
When I get a bad Cheesburger, I don't blame the Server, I dont blame the Cook, I don't blame the store manager. No I blame Ronald. He is the figurehead that represents everthing about McDonalds so he is to blame. Also, when I get nice tasty fresh fries, he gets my high-five.
When the Government is out of control, the President is accountable. Just like Ronald.
In criminal cases they send the police to kick down the door of the accused, and they present such evidence as "we caught him red handed".
They get the name and address of the accused, not by an absentee discovery order, but by a search warrant. Or, with new legislation that is likely to follow, by just looking up the data that ISPs are required to retain without even the need for a warrant.
This is what happens when you appoint a Czar.. a fuckin' WAR is declared and any allusions that people have about their rights go quickly out the window.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Hello mr. Constitution, my name was Paul. However, I was sued by the RIAA for infringing on their copyright of the letter "P" and now I'm known as inmate 5675. Unfortunately, God-King Bush said I also violated his copyright on free speech with my first letter so they took my Kidneys since I don't have anything left after my legs were taken for speaking against the media's word.
Posting to remove accidental mis-mod.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
its been known for a while
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29523
is your neighbor a pirateist? call the department of copyright infringement today!
We prefer Piratologists.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Leave the bill in place, much as the amendment for Abolition was left in place, but supersede it. We already have an Internet Czar position (currently vacant). If said Czar were to regulate those who do the monitoring (the RIAA/MPAA and lackeys thereof), say by banning their access to the Internet, the bill can remain in place and harm no-one.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Mod Parent up! Love the analogy.
I'll never misunderestimate Ronald again.
As the USA continues its bi-polar swing between Fascism and Marxism, I'm wondering if a country exists whose governments better balances the rights of the individual with the need of the population? I think I might need to move before they start setting up internment camps here.
The world: America, you've got a corrupt lunatic for a president. You suck!
America: Actually, half the stupid stuff we do is because our senators and congressmen are corrupt lunatics too.
The world: Uhh...
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
Why, do a single P2P transfer of even part of a movie that is copyright by a member of the MPAA OR a song that is copyrihgt by a member of the RIAA.
I'm not sure I understand. Was the comma supposed to be there?
You're asking why I would download a movie that was MPAA or song that was RIAA? Well, I don't download music or movies, that's for people who have personal time. So we're not talking about me.
If I did have time, I wouldn't be interested in indie movies or songs mostly because I wouldn't know of them unless I went searching for them, which sounds like a lot of work to go through to be entertained. Even then, I would hear songs or hear about movies I would like that are owned by the MPAA or RIAA. I can't change my tastes based on who owns what, that's ridiculous.
The intention: Since very little is manufactured in the USA any more, one of the few things we have to sell to the outside world is our IP, so we have to protect it.
The Unintended Consequences: As Lawrence Lessig has pointed out, draconian copyright and patent laws are a strong disincentive to building on the works of others, so there will be less IP to sell.
I guess we're sunk.
The Russian czar was eventually replaced by communists who believed in free stuff for all.
Open source advocates believe in free software for all, and will likely try to destroy the position of Copyright Czar.
This isn't just money wasting legislation, someone has actually set up a very elaborate experiment to test if history repeats itself under controlled conditions.
For it to be considered "criminal", they would most likely have to show you are making a profit on your pirating, such as selling burned copies of IronMan at a streetcorner stand or something like that on a larger scale.
Most IP infringement occurs between groups such as those on piratebay, none of which make any money (profit) from the infringement. I wonder where we can find some actual real numbers that tell what percentage of copyright violation is for profit or not, or honest numbers as to what the cost of 'casual piracy' is? (specifically, numbers that don't automatically assume every copy made costs the artists 100% of the retail cost of the item)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Are they going to make a fast food czar?
How about an SUV czar?
I mean, people are buying less SUVs than ever before, so we must have a cabinet level position to figure out how to get people to buy more SUVs right?
And people need to buy more fast food too. Let's create a cabinet position for that.
This is not unprecented. I mean, there's already a banking czar who is taking over the banks now.
Next will come the porn czar. "Sir, put your hands up and your penis back in your pants!"
Bush certainly is tying up the loose ends in the fascism loop ins't he?
They're using their grammar skills there.
Bush is like Ronald McDonald.
When I get a bad Cheesburger, I don't blame the Server, I dont blame the Cook, I don't blame the store manager. No I blame Ronald. He is the figurehead that represents everthing about McDonalds so he is to blame. Also, when I get nice tasty fresh fries, he gets my high-five.
When the Government is out of control, the President is accountable. Just like Ronald.
So instead of faulting anyone who had a hand in the making of your cheeseburger, you place the blame solely on a fictional clown that was invented by marketing people? That's an interesting philosophy you have.
America: No really! We didn't vote them! It was all Diebold! Honest injun!
the world: Damn. You guys need to lay off the drugs. Seriously.
My blog
Young people often fundamentally don't understand the economic incentives
A public hanging of Santa Claus will teach the little bastards a thing or tw0.
The blame for this rests on the Senators and Congressmen who allowed themselves to be lobbied into passing such industry serving legislation.
Probably going to provoke some outrage here, but while I agree this legislation is problematic and don't believe it should have been passed, I can understand what a lot of congresspeople would have been thinking.
Let's be honest here: our country has lost its manufacturing base. Our financial base took a huge hit, and even a lot of those companies had already evolved from American corporations to international ones. The eternal optimists here and other places predict a glorious service-based economy, but on a global level that's self-destructive; you can't have a sustainable economy where people just sell hamburgers to each other without actually producing something worthwhile.
The only thing we're really still successful at in terms of exports is entertainment. Widespread illegal copying can kill that. In a lot of countries it's already killed that.
It means anything George the 2nd wants it to. You can't tell b/c that's how they want it, the subject, amongst all the 'whereas not withstandings' and 'subsection A redesignated as subsection b', 'striking x/whatever/whoever and inserting y/whoever' so that you don't know what it means unless you read ALL it's predecessors, the word 'felony' seems to be the active change in wording from 'offense' to 'is a felony offense', aka anything they decide to pursue will be a felony. (a) IN GENERAL.--Section 503(a) of title 17, United 15 States Code, is amended to read as follows: 16 ''(a)(1) At any time while an action under this title 17 is pending, the court may order the impounding, on such 18 terms as it may deem reasonable-- 19 ''(A) of all copies or phonorecords claimed to 20 have been made or used in violation of the exclusive 21 right of the copyright owner; 22 ''(B) of all plates, molds, matrices, masters, 23 tapes, film negatives, or other articles by means of 24 which such copies of phonorecords may be repro25 duced; and 6 O:\GRA\GRA08B64.xml S.L.C. 1 ''(C) of records documenting the manufacture, 2 sale, or receipt of things involved in any such viola3 tion, provided that any records seized under this 4 subparagraph shall be taken into the custody of the 5 court." Which means they can impound your computer AND all your discs anytime the MPAA and RIAA feel like coming after you, though it'll prolly only be if you attract major attention to yourself by putting your entire music & video library on YouTube for everyone to download, or more likely Only If the label in question is targeting copies of specific albums or movies, they don't have time to chase down every Joe & Jane mp3er that rips a cd (Notice, for example, how WB DRM encodes every DVD & CD it presses, while most others don't even bother. Though, with WMP 11's spyware, that could change....) "For purposes of this title, the term ''intellectual prop11 erty enforcement'' means matters relating to the enforce12 ment of laws protecting copyrights, patents, trademarks, 13 other forms of intellectual property, and trade secrets, 14 both in the United States and abroad, including in par15 ticular matters relating to combating counterfeit and in16 fringed goods." Which, especially while it's so new a thing to the beaureaucracy, it can mean what whomever is making the decisions wants it to mean. Just as it always has. Lawyers wrote it, and lawyers will decide who gets gone after. Though, except for changing 'offense' to 'felony offense' and adding the undefined 'intellectual property' to the general category of more substantial (aka actual material goods), it doesn't seem to do anything except satisfy the lawyers so that they can go and satisfy their clients that they're on top of things. The only substantial section in this refers to: " ''The Secretary of Homeland Security shall issue regula23 tions by which any performer may, upon payment of a 24 specified fee, be entitled to notification by United States 25 Customs and Border Protection of the importation of cop14 O:\GRA\GRA08B64.xml S.L.C. 1 ies or phonorecords that appear to consist of unauthorized 2 fixations of the sounds or sounds and images of a live mu3 sical performance.''. Importation? That would be difficult to apply, at best. And Customs has bigger fish to fry than GI Joe coming home with bootleg tapes (or now CDs) he bought from a music store in Dubai or Qatar while on liberty during a deployment overseas; back when cassettes were the preferred media, EVERY copy you could lay your hands on over there was an illegal copy. I don't know of any occurrence where Customs officials actually went through the belongings of an entire troop or ship's company and confiscated every tape or disc that was clearly not pressed by the label. In sum, it's just more legalese to make conditions mean whatever they want when the time is right. Cuz there are far too many little fish in the sea to even begin to take them all on and deprive everyone of our PCs, MP3 players, and all our files and copies.
.
The production budget for WALL-E was $180 million.
If you know a congressman who doesn't like to see hundreds of millions of dollars being invested in clean industry, skilled labor and high-paying jobs in his home district, I would very much like to meet him.
I doubt you are going to find him in California, New York, or Florida - not in this election and not in an economy where every export dollar matters.
In case you haven't noticed, Immigration and Customs enforcement have also been delegated to handle all of the child porn black-ops as well. We're talking nationwide, interstate trojans-on-your-computer enforcement and not just border searches. They are the sixth reich.
No, let's be fair. The blame is with those who voted them in.
I didn't vote for Bush in 2004, nor did I vote for Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) in 2006. What should I have done, other than vote for other candidates and encourage friends and family members to do the same?
This is what happens when you appoint a Czar.. a fuckin' WAR is declared and any allusions that people have about their rights go quickly out the window.
Well, the only saving grace here is that the Justice Department (who, after all will be responsible for prosecuting these "cases") is dead set against it. As they said in their rather concise letter to Congress, they have better things to do with their time and our money.
... music lovers?! Huh. Just wait until all the voting public using P2P realize that they're now subject to criminal prosecution. It's gonna get ugly: they're making yet another run at Prohibition, and it didn't work the first time.
... but this is going to be different. It will have to be higher profile if it is going to have the desired effect: keeping it out of the public's eye won't do any good at all.
All in all, I have the feeling this probably won't go anywhere. If they start successfully screwing over too many people it's going to be political dynamite. Most likely this is just a step up in the RIAA's terror campaign, "Okay, so maybe you weren't afraid of us, but we're betting that you're just terrified of the United States Federal Government, so there!" This is one of those things for which you're not going to find much popular support. Drug dealers? Sure, why not: nobody likes them (even if they are supposed to have the same civil liberties as everyone else.) But
So, they'd better play this very carefully. Not too many people are aware of the DMCA, or it's implications
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
At this point, our best hope would appear to be to hope that someone sensible like Laurence Lessig or William Patry gets appointed
I hope you're kidding. In case you've been asleep for 8 years, the US has gone further and further towards Big Brother to the point where having our rights suspended in a city where there's a Republican National Convention is no longer shocking. Whoever is appointed to this post will be as dumb, vicious, and bloodthirsty as possible. I mean, really, do you think for a second that Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are going to appoint someone like Lessig?
No, they'll pick someone who is about law enforcement and headlines. Somebody who probably works or worked as a lawyer for the MPAA or RIAA. It's going to be a real shitstorm. Expect to see new, harsher mandatory sentence laws passed soon. There's money in prisons and fines!
I don't respond to AC's.
I think it's time we all go to our local Congressman's house, ring the doorbell ... and piss on his foot.
They've sure been dumping on us lately.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The problem is that both sides are equally bad.
No matter who they vote for, they are screwed.
Oh well. Doesnt affect Australia *too* much. :D
Man that's a lot of trouble to go through just because I downloaded Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On".
Can I bum a sig?
Sad but true.
There's no better proof that both major parties are in the pocket of business than the Wall Street bail out. They'll dick around forever discussing education or health care or public safety, or any other bullshit. But try getting an extra billion dollars for education. Never happen. It'd take the better part of a decade, and you'd be lucky to come away with $100 million.
But suddenly their lobbiest funding is at risk, and they can't throw money at the problem fast enough. $850 billion, backed by both parties, in less than a week. Amazing.
That's why it's so important to keep the government as small as possible.
Maybe not
btw, all, sorry about the format, just copied and pasted the pertinent sections w/o editing.
Don't worry, look how successful the Drugs Czar is. Money well spent.
The lesson I've learned is to become a Copyright Blackwater - aka overpriced civilian contractor raking in taxpayer bucks in a fashion that just perpetuates the conflict and guarantees me a steady income.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
There is no damage.
In what jurisdiction? This article is about the United States, whose copyright statute assumes damages of at least $750 for even unwillful infringement. See 17 USC 504(c), even the version in effect before this act was signed.
HAH! That is funny. The rest of government has plenty of smart people in it. And the rest of the world has plenty of corrupt lunatics in it too. I will not argue that corrupt lunies never make it into government. You might say the same of your country but you'd likely be knowingly fabricating or somewhat naive.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Was the suffering endured by those who fought the British for the freedom of this great land we now call The United States of America acceptable?
Because we're not finding ourselves in a position where we must, once again, fight for the freedom of this great land.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Or are we going to keep complaining that copyright law gets worse each passing year?
Nerds are going to have to start running for office to get this fixed. I'd rather not have to do it myself, but as my sig indicates, I've got the spare time.
Damn typo, I need to slow down.
Because we're now finding ourselves in a position where we must, once again, fight for the freedom of this great land.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Well, Abe, this shows that our government is clearly now of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.
The lovely bill was signed by what is likely the most corrupt president since Andrew Jackson. Ironically, he is from your party, the Republicans (you were the first elected Republican president). And the republicans were formed by former members of the Whig party, which existed to fight the tyranny of Jackson.
What would you say if you were here today, Abe? Is this what America has been fighting for?
I can't change my tastes based on who owns what
You've just described one reason why Linux has failed to gain wide deployment on home PCs.
How much worse can it be than this, where an artist was detained for her pen and ink drawings [slashdot.org]? It's like they trained up the border patrol for the inevitable rubber stamp.
You really don't want to know the answer to that question. Trust me.
My blog
Open source advocates believe in free software for all
But who believes in free works other than software for all? Entertainment works under Creative Commons licenses haven't got nearly the publicity that computer programs under a free software license have.
It ALSO rests with Bush.
This has been the pattern: One party (President or Congress) proposes something controversial. The other party says "No". The first party modifies the proposal to include even more garbage, as a stipulation to the other party. Second party relents and passes it.
It is a recipe for disaster, and I have been saying that for 12 years now.
Will schools start having Copyright people come to schools and talk to students about the wrongs of copyright violation?
Can I bum a sig?
We've all been criminals for a long, long time. It's just that nobody has bothered to prosecute us yet.
Oh, yeah, way to go! You just go right ahead and give them a reason to put the hammer down!
My blog
Extradition is not a magic teleportation to another country, it must be justified.
Two standards must be met before someone may be extradited.
There must be enough evidence against the accused so that its likely a conviction could be reached, and most importantly in this case;
Condition number two.
It must be shown that extraditing the accused serves justice.
This one is most notably brought up for people being extradited for capital crimes. If its likely you will receive the death penalty if extradited and the country your currently in does not have one. They will not extradite you, because it does not serve justice.
The same applies for any crime, but becomes harder to demonstrate by the defence as the crimes become lesser.
But it's important here because while the EU is slowly reforming its IP laws to more sane standards in this age, the US seems to be regressing them. And if the country your in doesn't think its a crime you ain't going anywhere.
Whats going to happen now is that the US and the EU will move further and further apart on this and sooner or later US patents won't automatically be valid anywhere, the country will get a reputation for foolhardy IP laws and they'll make coporations go through local application processes before they recognize their copyright/patent.
Gods damn it, I wish that was funny. :-(
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
So instead of faulting anyone who had a hand in the making of your cheeseburger, you place the blame solely on a fictional clown that was invented by marketing people?
The difference being...?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
See this post, defending Obama's vote for telecom immunity: http://www.lessig.org/blog/2008/07/the_immunity_hysteria.html Furthermore, he supports enforcement of copyright law (always has, although is concerned about its reach and absolutely against its retroactive extension).
Just think of how powerful the prison guards' union will be...
"How long are you in for, comrade?"
"Eight years."
"What are you in for?"
"Nothing, nothing at all."
"Lies. The penalty for nothing is ten years!"
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
So who exactly are we SUPPOSED to vote for? Rich corporate asskisser A or B? You see that is what the problem is. With a two party system either choice has been bought and paid before you ever get to the booth. Would it be better with a multi party system? Hell if I know. All I do know is it really couldn't get much worse.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
...to abolish "civil forfeiture". It's bad enough when it happens to someone falsely accused in a drug case, or even acquitted. Expansion of CF? Absolute oppression. No other way to put it. I understand that you probably need to have *some* civil law apart from criminal law; but I think that if the founders knew that impoverishment was being used as "the next best thing" to imprisonment, they'd be turning in their graves.
At a time when the decline of property values has caused so much trouble; expansion of CF makes no sense at all. I know that as I've considered investing in property, the possibility of CF has given me serious pause. I don't do drugs; but what if my tenant does? And then they come along and, without the stricter standards of a criminal case, they deprive me of the property. Now I have to worry if the tenant is a warez guy? Maybe there's a way to insure against CF, but then that's just one more thing that cuts into the bottom line for an investor.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
.
The criminal trial won't be based on a single download.
It will be based on behavior that exposed a lot of traffic in movies and music that could be traced to your account.
Traffic that could - let us say - be monitored more closely and with more sophisticated tools under a warrant.
The standard for conviction is guilt beyond a "reasonable" doubt.
The danger for the geek lies in over-confidence and a tendency to spin out theories that are increasingly implausible - as if every argument had equal value.
I think at this point I only read /. to depress myself thinking about the affairs of government.
Well, President Bush did sign it into law....BUT remember, the President makes NO laws whatsoever. He only signs them in.
If you really don't like this, and I don't either...look to your state's representatives and senators in congress up there.
They came up with the law...debated it and still passed it on to the president to sign.
I'm guessing BOTH of our lovely parties had people voting for this.
Any idea which way our presidential candidates voted? If I had to take a guess...I'd guess both McCain and Obama voted yea.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And an interesting metaphorical comment on US politics.
Let's be honest here: our country has lost its manufacturing base.
No. As a percentage of GDP, goods production has gone up.
The US manufacturing base is huge. Really unfathomably large. You could cut out half its output (measured in dollars) and it'd still be in the number one position for industrial output (assuming you don't combine the EU nations together).
Not a typewriter
You know what? I'm actually happy now. The government did something for me, for once.
They listened when I said we need to mass-educate the population about the DMCA and just how bad it is; now they're implementing a program to do it.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
In case there are any more Pollyannas out there...
Reading all of the gloom and doom in the comments, I began to think that there's no way this act could be so bad. I mean, wouldn't this provide the government with more knowledge and power to defend my fair use if I referenced a Disney movie on Slashdot and big brother wanted to sue the everloving snot out of me for it? If it's my tax money paying for this, shouldn't I get some protection out of it? IANAL, but a quick search of the act for 'fair use', 'public domain', and 'commons' soundly tells me no.
I would like to remind everyone that EFF donations are tax deductible.
America: Uh, heard of the War on Drugs?
The World: Y'know, on second thought, maybe you need to just get some better weed and chill out a little.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
reasonable doubt just link to the list of mess ups of where they got the wrong guy. Some times the cable can't even get the right channels that you are paying to work on your cable box. Some you get channels that you are not paying for and some times you don't get the ones you are paying for.
Cable boxes have build cable modems and they do get a IP as well.
It is logical it is the top down approach. First you tackle those at the top as your priority, then you extend that down. The opposite direction, plainly doesn't work, as those at the top just get more minions to take the blame and the punishment. The genuine contempt the US government is treating the general public with is beyond all reason, confiscation of assets for copyright infringement, so threaten families with eviction if the children copy a music track, a music track that is more often than not of absolutely no moral value to society.
It is disgusting they now choose to equate the value of people homes, with some thing that some drunken drugged up minstrel has tossed up after a weekend of excesses. The whole industry is parasitical, it adds nothing to society, it neither, houses nor feeds nor clothes, nor contributes to the positives worthwhile values of society. As for the idea that somehow recorded dead music, somehow equals live music that people share, when they say sing around a fire or, share in a dance hall with family and friends. Sure, when it is targeted a readily manipulated children it can bleed their families of money they can ill afford to spend on something of no real value in these harsh economic times, oh that's right, who gives a fuck.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
That, and to remind myself that there are other people out there who are as depressed as me about the affairs of government.
Police make money by busting criminals. If the laws are such that everyone is a criminal, the police have an easy job.
Ca Ching!
What? ®
You know what? I'm actually happy now. The government did something for me, for once.
They listened when I said we need to mass-educate the population about the DMCA and just how bad it is; now they're implementing a program to do it.
That they have. Of course, it's going to be one expensive damn program, and like your sig says ... I hope we survive the experience.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It's all the property they have left, so they defend it to the teeth.
We've all been criminals for a long, long time. It's just that nobody has bothered to prosecute us yet.
Sure they did. Our British government tried its best to prosecute us. We shot at them. That used to be feasible.
I think that our only hope now is to fission into "Jesusland" and "The United States of Canada" (aka the 13th province).
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
"unfortunately, we're talking about an unelected bureaucrat, not a real Czar."
The real Czars weren't elected either...
Cue the "In (pre) soviet Russia " jokes..
I believe the term Czar (later spelt Tsar) comes from the name Caesar - which orriginally was the given name of the first Roman emperor (Gaius Julius), and only became a 'Title' when adopted by his Nephew (Gaius Octavius - AKA Augustus)
"Mark my words. A lot of families will suffer terribly because of this."
But somehow, not enough to cause an uproar. They learned a valuable lesson from Prohibition: Don't have too many high-profile raids.
And a corollary: People who think they can "buy" other people's stuff for way less than it's worth probably won't protest reason too much.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
We've all been criminals for a long, long time. It's just that nobody has bothered to prosecute us yet.
Sure they did. Our British government tried its best to prosecute us. We shot at them. That used to be feasible.
I think that our only hope now is to fission into "Jesusland" and "The United States of Canada" (aka the 13th province).
Hm ... Jesusland sounds like a Bible-belt amusement park (which isn't, perhaps, so far from the truth.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Hmm. The fact that you seem to think that getting informed about things that you do not know is "too much work to go through" to be entertained makes a rather painful image of you... :/
The alternative was worse. Go read about the Great Depression. The US government had no choice once it got thi.
The idiocy is that they let it get this bad in the first place - and THERE I agree with your statement about lobbyist funding.
voting Republican doesn't stop this anymore
You make it sound like it used to in the past. The very teatrical progression of events which ended in the present situation was carried put to the rhythm of your periodical voting...
This failure happened before the voting. The candidates for public office that don't support this are filtered out before the elections. To reverse this within the system would take a huge grass roots effort to keep these people off the ballot in the first place, or to support the ones who oppose this nonsense, despite their stands on other issues. Unfortunately those other issues do matter too and this isn't enough of a hot button issue to get a rational stance built into a plank of one of the major parties.
In short, it isn't in us. We have lost this one. We lose several other important issues this way.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Hmm, interesting, I was going by the drop in manufacturing jobs over the past decade.
Before the "war on drugs" we had a "war on poverty". They both had czars, and each was as effective as the other. Allow me to predict that the copyright czar will rise to unprecedented levels of negative success. I think something was lost in translation here. In the original russian I don't believe the word "czar" means "ineffectual idiot tasked with the impossible". I could be wrong about that.
Any russian linguists in the house?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Sorry, I just got finished reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and am feeling overly paranoid. I used to laugh at the idea of having copyright cops who would go around and arrest kids who had pirated music on their iPods, but it seems that day is growing ever nearer. Am I the only one who feels helpless against this growing insanity of the *AA controlled congress?
Prohibition I: Alcohol. Failed.
Prohibition II: Every other drug not already immensely profitable, like cigarettes. Civil law suspended, Constitution suspended permanently.
Prohibition III: Possessing imaginary property. Direct takeover of Federal and local law enforcement by corporations. Now government directly monitors home activity of the citizenry for the corporations. You know, all those processor ID's and MAC addresses that people laughed at the paranoid for going on about? The future is here.
That's an excellent way to describe the president: "a fictional clown that was invented by marketing people".
And a "-1, bashing twitter for no good reason" moderation. I'm all for nuking his karma further into oblivion, but it simply adds nothing for ACs to troll him... especially when he doesn't actually say anything particularly stupid or abusive (like the post above).
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Ask yourself if he wasn't right: Does your local department store not stock blank DVD's and CD's in bare pallets of 100 packs because they move too fast to put on the shelves? Do you know anybody who doesn't have an MP3 player large enough to store more music than they can afford to buy? Is there not a vast network of servers from which any copyrighted work extant can be received without compensation for the creator, available in nearly every home?
By making stupid laws that should not and will not be obeyed and cannot be enforced we train the citizen from his youth to scoff at the law. That is far more damage than even the most egregious piracy can cause - it's promotion of anarchy. It would be better to do away with copyright entirely than to do further damage to social order.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Saint Nick has to be the biggest damn infringer of all. Where does he get the IP rights to make all those cool toys without license fees? I wonder when Disney will do a flick to "fix" this perceptions... and Disney does do stuff like this quite a bit.
Man that's a lot of trouble to go through just because I downloaded Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On".
There can be no punishment that is worse than the crime itself. Surely you must be allowed to go free.
I nominate RMS... the payback would be a bitch!
Oh yeah, it's a living hell here in Australia.
Can't stop to talk more, the weather's heating up and we're all off to the beach now, then maybe a barbeque later. We'll throw a prawn on for you.
It's more or less "one dying by revolt".
See Caesar.
Which means that the US is producing more with fewer people. What you're seeing is industry becoming more efficient, not that there's less of it.
Not a typewriter
I emailed the guy running against my representative (who voted for this), asking about his stance on this act, intellectual property issues in general, and net neutrality, because none of this was covered on his website. So far no response, but I'll be voting for him anyhow - if he were to respond favorably, I'd even put up a sign for him, b/c god knows he needs all the help he can get.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Metaphorical fail.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Not necessarily a good thing. A foreign-owned company operating a manufacturing plant with a skeleton crew means a lot of the money is leaving the country, and isn't even partially slowed down by the wages paid to a full workforce.
That's an excellent way to describe the president: "a fictional clown that was invented by marketing people".
Only they call them "handlers" and "Campaign Managers" in the President's case.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I wonder how many people will have their computers stolen by the RIAA before someone tapes a cellphone bomb inside one. Maybe they would think twice when a van full of "copyright enforcement agents" was exploded in a public place :\
A lot of countries do that sort of thing. Ireland for example rarely extradites to the US, and Brazil won't extradite criminals to the US unless the death penalty is off the table.
That's all well and good for citizens of those nations, but when we're talking about our citizens it's our prerogative to punish them however we see fit. It's bad when we interfere in the justice system in other countries, but somehow when the situation is reversed suddenly it becomes OK to meddle.
Your post is harder to read than the damn law.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
People need to think logically, and vote their hearts. They need to stop voting for the popular candidates, and look at all the choices individually. And this means eliminating someone as a possible voting choice when they see them do something foolish.
Which of course won't stop the Alphabet Agencies from kidnapping you from said non-extradition treaty country if they deem it a Good Thing. Remember Panama? Sure, Noriega was a scumbag that the United States put in power, but sending armed men across borders to forcibly remove him at gunpoint wasn't the height of diplomacy, it was outright invasion.
Outside of the UK, Afghanistan ('friendly' government installed at gunpoint by the US), and Iraq (see 'Afghanistan'), that's just about everywhere on the planet.
No, this is just a bait and switch from the Powers That Be to draw attention away from the fact that we're in a depression. It gives said Powers That Be the excuse to squeeze yet more taxes, spend more money, and do nothing but make examples of people who do not have the means to fight back without the ancillary effect of making a certain class of criminals ('drug dealers') rich in the process.
And of course, it has the Seal of Approval from the Senator from Disney.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
One is a made up amusement park quality attraction and the other one is a corporate mascot.
All I do know is it really couldn't get much worse.
Please don't tempt fate.
And for a modest fee, we can check your Pirate level with our P-Meter.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Let's be honest here: our country has lost its manufacturing base.
No. As a percentage of GDP, goods production has gone up.
The US manufacturing base is huge. Really unfathomably large. You could cut out half its output (measured in dollars) and it'd still be in the number one position for industrial output (assuming you don't combine the EU nations together).
What goods are you referring to? Certainly not electronics. All that got air-mailed to China more than a decade ago.
Output? of what? The only thing we seem to export is good paying jobs. Shuttered plants litter the landscape. Layoff announcements and plant closings dominate news. Increased productivity? Efficiency? To what end? The unemployed and underemployed can't afford the low, low prices.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I'm old enough to remember when this would have been assumed to be a Russian joke. Now it's an American joke.
/.is against patents.
The US government had no choice once it got thi.
Damn you've been hit hard! Can't even afford a whole sentence!
Here: [s bad]
No, don't mention it. Glad to help.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
The source of America's problems are not the voting habits of election voters, its the voting habits of PRIMARY voters. Nuts in both parties pick the Greg Stillsons of the world over and over and over. The kind of people *COUGH* CHENEY-PELOSI-MCCAIN-REID-BUSH-..........*COUGH* who would beat a dog to death after pepper spraying it if no one was looking.
Which is exactly how I am left without anyone to vote for in the presidential election. No McCain (Military Commissiona Act of 2006), No Obama (FISA Amendments Act of 2008), No Bob Barr (*shudder*).
Rep. Souder isn't responsible for this bill making it out of committee. He is not a member of the majority.
It is time for people to learn that we had a Republican majority in the recent past for a reason. The reason is that Democrats were colossal failures at leadership too.
By all means, though. Elect Obama, and keep Pelosi in power. Just don't delude yourself into thinking this will change anything.
It's not good enough to vote for "other candidates". You need to encourage intelligent, strong-willed, highly ethical people to leave their otherwise profitable and rewarding day jobs and run. Then you have to convince the sheep that watch 80 hours of reality television and CNN to vote for them even if their platform doesn't rhyme. Either that or pick up a Bible and start a'thumpin.
Wait a minute........
FTFB: "Copyright infringement is a felony"
If I steal a CD from a store that is a misdemeanor....
If I download a song...THAT IS A FELONY?!?!?!?!?
WTF?!!?!?!?!?
Don't worry. They are already have massive surveillance in place. It won't be hard to pick out the offenders. I think we need to start looking at the RIAA under RICO statutes.
Aren't the jails already full of non-violent drug offenders???
Disgusting. How much longer before we can convince the nation to pick up some rifles and march to DC?
zosxavius photography
So by making copyright infringement a felony they can remove the right to vote (and own guns) from any one who is convicted of copyright infringement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
There is an easy way to bring about a revolution in IP laws.
Make every copyright holder enforce their IP rights through the courts for
EVERY infringement that they become aware of, otherwise their claim to that
IP is null and void.
In essense, this would force the RIAA and MPAA etc, to sue for every breach
of copyright they know about (eg. the Senators daughter, the Fortune 500 CEOs son etc)
- to the point where the general public is forced to wake up to the faults of the
system and demand change.
At the moment, these bodies can selectively sue whoever they want as a show of
strength, but by and large leave the masses alone. As a result, they pick and
choose which infringements they want to fight for to ram home the message.
A case in point - under Australian law, it is still technically illegal to make a
copy of copyright content YOU OWN. As such EVERY iPod and MP3 player in Australia
(and probably every PC and laptop) contains illegal music. But are the music companies
enforcing this ?? No. Its not in their best interests to highlight the fact that you
can't legally copy a CD that you legally bought, to your MP3 player or a backup.
Actually add 'brutal' to inneffectual and it pretty much matches up. The Tsars were TERRIBLE rulers, with a few exceptions (and all of those exceptions have 'the Great' tacked onto their names, so they're hard to miss). The only people in history to have mismanaged their countries as bad as som of the Tsars would be Chairman Mao (50 million dead from starvation for no reason other than economic mismanagement), the Hapsburg rulers of Spain (how the hell did they manage to waste all the gold they brought back from the colonies on NOTHING), the Belgian colonial governments, and that's all I've got. I mean, the current administration will likely take the cake for worst American mismanagement, but unless things get a whole lot worse (which may very well happen) they aren't yet in the league of 'Worst Ever in the History of the World.'
Whoosh!
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
When i've voted i've seen lots of candidates; i've never voted Republican and i vote Democrat only when there is no other choice. Of course you only see two parties on the television but you have to do your research. I mean, Nader is running again. . . And Cynthia McKinney. . . Why don't you vote for any of them? They won't get elected?
Well, thus is the problem.
I think this is why in other countries you have publicly funded elections and laws that control how the media handles the elections.
....just like when the drug czar was appointed over the War On Drugs and now illegal drugs are impossible to find...
FreeBSD for the impatient.
So yes ths bill is awful. The Civil Forfeture provisions alone are foul let alone the Czar. While it may not roll things back overnight here is something simple that you can each do.
1) Find your senator/representative on the list of supporters (see below)
2) Call their office or contact them via the Senate and House websites.
3) Ask them why they voted for the bill. If their response does not convince you politely explain that this is an awful bill and one that has cost them your vote. Inform them politely that you will not vote for them or donate money to their campaigns again.
4) Repeat.
I would be shocked if any of them read this bill or have a reason for voting other than that they were in favor of good stuff. But the act of informing them that you will not support them because of it makes the point.
For those of you not in the U.S. I would recommend contacting your representatives with the message that you will not back them if they consider a stunt like this.
Now the Senators who voted in favor are here.
The house members in favor of the PRORIP act which became this are here
So leaving aside the existence of the Libertarian and green parties lets focus on who we are talking about. Yes it is a two-party system. Where I live it is just the Machine.
But that does not mean that there isn't choice. While the two parties have locked down the presidential race and most congressional races to a pathetic joke many many local positions, many of the positions that govern day-to-day things like taxes and education (most of which are due to state and local activities) are far more open.
And, in many states the presence or absence of third parties on larger races is based upon or at least influenced by the presence of third-party individuals in local positions.
Thus while you may not get a wide choice for president you can choose to vote for the green party candidate for school board or mayor or county official, etc. Supporting outsiders at this level is both tangible and a tractable motion towards wider choice at higher levels.
While you are at it you might push for wider ballot access laws in your area. Maryland's law is a nice model. My point being that while you are right about the corporate asskissers simply sitting back and noting that it is a two party system does not change it, making your votes contingent on changing things does.
"because the wrong lizard might get in" is not a good enough excuse to keep repeating a mistake. voting for bush once -- hey, everyone makes a mistake, right? voting for bush twice? as they say in texas: "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...-foo..ma...won't get fooled again."
what i'm saying is, why not try asskisser b? just for the variety?
FreeBSD for the impatient.
I've done some research and it appears that out of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John McCain and Sarah Palin none of them bothered to vote on it.
OK... Palin's my least favorite from that list. But blaming her for not voting on that bill is more than a little unfair.
You do realize that she's neither a senator nor a representative, right?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I'm pretty sure that's from Solzenitzen's The First Circle. I'm reading it now - a great work that is very relevant for our authoritarian/socialist times.
Whatever "lobbying" was being done previously, it seems to have been completely effective. Many countries have signed, without dispute, so-called "free" trade agreements which essentially codify every US-corporate-friendly dream that could be devised by the Bushites - including DMCA-ish and software patent provisions, to speak of 2 issues in the IT area. In non-IT areas, similar capitulations are even worse. Pharmaceuticals, agriculture, all get twisted into poisonous American corporatised pretzels, to pave the way for overpriced patent drugs and monstrosities such as GM products (which should be flat-out illegal anywhere). It's as if the "sovereign" countries didn't even read the agreements, let alone take heed of the public outry that always accompanies them.
It must be so easy for them, when the signatories are Bush-puppet governments such as the Howard government in Australia (thankfully rejected at last) and Harper (which malignancy we should pray is thrown out tomorrow, or at least held safely to a minority).
Let's be honest. "Globalisation" never meant anything more or less than "America buys your stuff cheap, you buy America's stuff dear". The world does not need Wal-Mart, Microsoft, McDonald's, or any other substandard, exploitative American brand. The height of absurdity is Wal-Mart selling rice to Indians. What do the Wal-Marts in China sell? Crappy plastic Chinese crap back to the Chinese? The whole concept is absurd. What is Wal-Mart even doing in Canada?
The ultimate irony is that those tilting the playing field towards the USA, and who would most vehemently deny the insuperable insult to sovereignty that these agreements represent, also claim to believe in a "free market" - the Bushites, the Reaganites, the Friedmanites, the corrupt fuckwads, the ignorant lying Sarah and Todd Palins, the criminal Cons and neo-Cons whose chickens, we hope, are coming home to roost at last. If you're wondering why you're having trouble competing - maybe it's because you're not competitive! Top example - Microsoft can't compete on merit. They have to be anti-competitive; and you betcha they love them some FTA help. Pity they got caught at it.
But perhaps as the world wises the hell up, we finally see some logic in Bush's response: More lobbying. "Bring it on", in the Texan moron's famous catchphrase: Just expect more pushback!
But we'd prefer if you'd just Bugger off.
you had me at #!
People need to think logically, and vote their hearts.
Impossible. They are usually at odds. For an example, try to fall in love with someone based on a rational argument of what positive qualities they possess. You will not succeed. You will instead fall in love with a total nutcase, nine times out of ten.
Them's the breaks. The heart does not submit to reason. Politicians know this, too. They're actors first and foremost. Each and every one.
And this means eliminating someone as a possible voting choice when they see them do something foolish.
Also impossible. It's been Red vs. Blue now for decades. Nobody thinks anymore. Politics has become a sporting match. Doesn't matter what anyone says or does - you just want your side to win.
Besides, you aren't allowed politically to pick and choose good ideas from either "side". If you're for gun control it's assumed you also think global warming is man-made. They are two entirely unrelated ideas, but the left-side claims them both, so someone from the right-side cannot claim either. They must say they are against gun control and they think global warming is nonsense.
A candidate that came along and actually spoke their mind rather than quote the party line would probably at this point make people's heads explode. They would see it as impossible. Like saying it's day and night at the same time.
In short, they have us trained. Pick a side and line up. And for God's sake don't reach any of your own conclusions. If you're on this side, your position on topic X is Y. If you're on the other side, your position on topic X must therefore be !Y.
It's hideous, really. Both major parties don't do jack for the people. Remember when everyone got all happy that the Democrats won Congress, and finally something would put a stop to W's free ride? What happened? First thing Congress did was roll over and take it up the tailpipe about warrentless wiretapping. "Oh sure, that's ok, especially since it was just this once. No problem W, carry on."
Same horseshit, different crew. Doesn't matter who gets voted in anymore. Big business lobbies to get what it wants, and both Red and Blue will bow before Green.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
In Soviet America, Russian joke become American joke.
Then things need to change completely. The current government needs a complete makeover. I know it's not an easy thing to do but the it's postponed the worse it will be when it happens.
ics
You forgot Mugabe.
-- Cheers!
As if we had a choice. I live in California, where both my senators and congressperson are in the pockets of the **AA. In the current election, my representative is running unopposed.
Even in races where there are two or more candidates, you can't always tell what their position is on copyright issues until after they've been in office, because it isn't one of the "popular" issues covered by the media. Even if their positions are covered, it's likely (especially in this state) that all of the candidates will have been bought (or indoctrinated) by the **AA. This year's presidential candidates are a good example of that.
What?! Oh, the old worn-out canard of "There Is No Alternative!", "We Must Attack Iraq ... err ... Iran ... err Bad Guys Before They Get Us!" etc and so on.
For your information, there were many alternatives, even within the "bailout" scheme itself - dealing with equity positions etc., and guess what? The absolute worst was picked: a scheme which throws away $850 billion to the very people who created the problem, without any meaningful supervision and with absolute guarantee of doing dick all to remedy the problem, which at the last count was estimated to be in the range of $45 Trillion (not Billion) dollars of Wall Street Gambling Debts, not to mention the entire Ponzi scheme of the eternally-expanding-credit funded US economy.
So would you kindly stop repeating us the crap from the ransom notes left behind by the dudes in balaclavas?
There's also another part of the analogy. Both Bush and clowns are evil.
This act is fucking stupid, and I'm quite sure it'll see as much success as the war on drugs has. In 30 years time we'll have a TV show like "The Wire" but instead of busting the heads of dealers, they'll be busting the heads of those trading music.
Fuck your country in it's stupid braindead ass. Seriously, my closest friend is American. She's awesome. It's also quite clear a lot of American's on here are sensible, rational individuals. I know they are out there and they do exist. But the majority of your country are fucking morons who base their entire vote on Republicans being anti-abortion (which they'll never actually ban because then they can't use it to drum up votes anymore) or some other equally asinine notion! Yes, who cares what this governments does to peoples rights, foreign policy, the debt of the country, so long as we get someone in who is against women having the right to choose.
I know I'm going to get modded as a troll, and I don't fucking care. I am SICK TO DEATH OF FUCKING IDIOT AMERICANS! It wouldn't be so bad if it was any other country. Like if Canada had come up with this PRO-IP crap. Yeah, it'd suck. But it would have no bearing on anything else outside the country. But the US has to wave their fucking cock around like they own the planet, and now they're going to have this Copyright Czar, bought and paid for by the MPAA, RIAA etc... Harassing OTHER SOVEREIGN NATIONS to bring in similarly asinine and uneven laws. But of course despite appointing themselves the world police, nobody outside the godforsaken country gets to vote, because they did, Bush would have been gone four years by this point and you'd all be watching President Kerry run for a second term right now. But no, you rattle your sabres and tell other nations what they can and can't do, but the other nations don't get to stand up and have a say in anything.
America isn't a nation to aspire too. America isn't a nation to admire. All you good people there, and please don't think this is aimed at you because my close friend and you all give me hope that the country isn't completely doomed, but you are clearly not enough to do any good. Your country is nothing more than a bully paid for by corporations and special interests.
Fuck America. You need another civil war and to start again. I would gladly come and fight by your side.
Criminalization of common activities just makes beautiful pretense for the ostracism/incarceration of political/social enemies. Piracy is now more popular than ever. Piracy is now more illegal than ever. How many freedoms has the war on drugs taken?
Well, that's pretty stupid: I just said I didn't have much free time. I used to download indie music, doing so involves sorting through a lot of crap that is indie only because it was too bad to get signed. Why subject myself to that?
I'd say donate to the EFF, but it's only a matter of time before you get your assets frozen for funding a terrorist organization.
So... with the Drug Czar we have a "War on Drugs". Does it mean we can safely label this new campaign a "War on Intellect"?
Once upon a time, it did. The last 'real' Republican president was Nixon. Since then, the Party has become more and more 'faith-based'. Why bother fixing anything when Jebus is coming?
Dude, where's my Party????????
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
While you may have a point, the American people general get to choose between Satan and the Devil. Gore was the last legitimate presidential candidate the country had available to them and the bitch of that was that he was too young and too arrogant. I personally blame him and his damn pride for much of what's happened over the past 8 years. If he could have just treated the average American (in other words frigging idiots) with a little more respect instead of insinuating that they were all morons, he would have taken office.
Then we had Kerry. Let's face it, Dukakis is the only person happy he ran since now the jokes about "Worst Presidential Candidate Ever" are no focused on Kerry instead of Dukakis.
The biggest problem is, for an intelligent candidate with morals to make it to the presidential ballad, they have to first be a vice president. The reason for this is that you have to be a pretty slimy kind of person to weasle your way up the political ladder and make it into a position of power strong enough to get on the ballad without having been carried up on someone elses coat tails.
People can say the two party system is flawed, but in reality, in a country the size of the US, the alternative systems would be just as bad if not considered ENTIRELY scandalous. In some countries, a candidate can win 45% of all the votes with the next runner up winning only 20%, but after the win, if enough competing parties can ally themselves to add up to 46% of the vote, then they can choose a new president or prime minister without consulting the people.
If the Americans had a system where this would work, it would probably result in constant presidential assassination attempts. Especially when you find the party you voted for grouping with the party you were in fact voting against and allowing that party to provide the executive leadership.
Here in Brazil we have a multi party system. And by multi party I mean, once we had 22 presidential candidates. I'm pretty sure all brazilians around will remember what happened: Fernando Color de Mello for elected, and ended up "borrowing" (according to him, other words would be "confiscating", "stealing" etc) almost all the money the people had on the banks. Savings accounts, investments, you name it.
Now ? We have a president that never even finished high school. A president that, while visiting a major city in Africa, said: "This city is so clean it doesn't even feel like I'm in Africa".
Need I go any further ? Quantity is not the key here. Quality is. And guess who gets picked, by the parties, to run for president ? Candidate the party think will win. So, in a nutshell, it is us, the populace, that pick the candidates. Do you see a pattern here ?
We have a bunch of uneducated, misinformed, brainwashed people "manning" the voting process. I'm not assigning blame here, just pointing some (obvious) facts.
We have a vicious circle.
How to break it ? I have no clue.
morcego
The world's full of presidents. And lots of /. readers aren't in the US, believe it or not. So can i suggest an improved title for this post?
How about
"US President Signs Law Creating Copyright Czar"
Since a lack of a vote is equivalent to a "No" vote, this makes Obama, McCain, and Biden about the only senators who don't deserve to get run out of office on a rail. I, for one, will not be voting for any Senator or Representative who voted for this bill come November, and I urge you all to do the same. Since our voices were not heard when we urged our reps and senators to vote against this bill, the only way remaining for our voices to be heard is via the ballot box.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Quoth TFS: Still, the final legislation [CC] (PDF) creates new classes of felony criminal copyright infringement, adds civil forfeiture provisions that incorporate by reference parts of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, and directs the Copyright Czar to lobby foreign governments to adopt stronger IP laws.
Sorry guys, but it's getting far enough for me to really hope that the USA as an economic superpower collapse on themselves, even if that means 300 million people end up in relative poverty. I don't see why the rest of the world should suffer from the broken American democracy any longer.
I mean, it's not like your politicians only ruin your own country, they use trade agreements to push their bullshit legislation onto other countries as well. I don't want legislation without representation. Give Europe a couple dozen seats in Congress and we can talk about a little legal exchange, but I'm not keen about you buying laws over here with nothing but the promise of worthless US$.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
http://www.fff.org/comment/ed0900e.asp "When Congress enacted a law in 1982 that created a drug czar, President Reagan scorned the provision: "The creation of another layer of bureaucracy within the Executive Branch would produce friction, disrupt effective law enforcement, and could threaten the integrity of criminal investigations and prosecutions.⦠The so-called "drug Czar" provision was enacted hastily without thoughtful debate and without benefit of any hearings." and... "In recent years, Americans have also been blessed with a "health-care czar" (Ira Magaziner in 1993), an "AIDS czar" (various political appointees since 1993), and endless local "zoning czars" and "land-use czars." But no matter how many czars are appointed, it is never enough. A government advisory panel in 1998 called for the appointment of a "food czar" to "oversee the patchwork of food safety regulations." Technology overpowered another corrupt industry. Give it up already.
Actually, Macfox hit the thumb on the head with the hammer with that one. The US government doesn't work, at least, not for the citizens. It hasn't in a long time, either. What it does work for is the corporations. And itself, of course ('PATRIOT USA Act', anyone? Such a marvelous tool for removing any political enemies...). Where Macfox dropped the ball is, he was assuming there were real candidates and real differences to vote on. That hasn't been true in quite awhile, either.
Hell, if voting could change anything other than which bunch of crooks were ripping off the public, they'd make it illegal. And none of this talk about the 'lesser of the two evils', either. The lesser evil is still evil, and there's no choice to be made to do away with either of them come election day. No third party candidates in sight or hearing range, nothing. Not even a 'None Of The Above' option on the ballots. I haven't even heard of any Socialist Workers Party candidates, for instance, in this election cycle. Why not?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
It is time for people to learn that we had a Republican majority in the recent past for a reason. The reason is that Democrats were colossal failures at leadership too.
ok,ok, failures sure. Colossal? I don't think so. Two wars costing over a trillion, 700 billion down the tubes, what could become the largest recession in recent history, a stolen election? I'd hardly call the lagging economy and .com burst that Clinton left "colossal."
Sure Pelosi sucks and Obama is mostly media hype, but they can't be any worse, And I mean that with all seriousness. Bush did damage no rational person who isn't guided by handlers who want to profit at any price and uncriticized ideology would do. If Obama was another lame duck like Carter, he would still be 10 fold a better president then Bush.
I do know one thing it will change, the powers that be will have to at least give a reach around while they rape out country, the Dems usually get that much done.
Nominate Richard Stallman as copyright czar! Let EFF win!
Facts:
1. Downloading copyrighted music is now a felony
2. Most citizens in California have downloaded 3+ mp3s.
3. The RIAA (and by extension the justice department) considers downloading music to be a serious crime.
Therefore it stands to reason that most Californians now fall under California's notorious Three Strikes Law.
Don't drop the soap!
Damn, andorra is gonna get full fast ;)
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
And the other is a big, dumb clown. But which is which?
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
So who exactly are we SUPPOSED to vote for?
Anyone not "approved" by the two big parties, simple as that.
And I would extend that beyond mere "Democrats" and "Republicans"... If in 50 years we see Greens vs Libertarians, they will most likely have grown just as bad as the current idiots in power. But as long as their candidates need to struggle for their slice of power, they act as an effective filter against the inbred* Harvard-vs-Yale sycophants we inexplicable keep voting into office.
* Yes, "inbred" - Look at the family trees of the most powerful thousand or so men in the US at any given time - A few dozen families appear over and over and over throughout history. The comparison with "crazy king George" goes much further than mere dislike for Bush's policies.
In fact, we're all criminals, If you have a bank account, own a car, ever used a water toilet, swatted a bug, picked your nose, looked at someone else's wife or imagined how cool it would be to be someone else you are a criminal in some sense. Everyone has done something that offends people. It always depends on what kind of dimwit makes the laws. What's legal here might be a crime somewhere else. Unfortunately the Americans have spend a huge portion of their country's history figuring out the most effective way of fucking each other out of money over pretentious unimportant bullshit. That's why they don't know smack about foreign relations or social stability because they're too busy screwing each other over. And yes, you did some great things for the world, but then you kept bragging about it until everybody hated you again.
Sure they're only about 250 years old but one still could assume that they would learn from their mistakes.
That one can learn from his actions, hold a person directly responsible for something and you might get the slightest chance of them looking out for mistakes in the future. Blame it on the corporate mascot and everyone will just go their way and not read the memo explaining why you should be even more cautious at work. Never worked. You need to pin down the people responsible and beat them (metaphorically speaking) into admitting their mistakes and working on a solution to the problem. Otherwise it will just keep going in an endless circle of ignorance.
But you'll not be allowed to talk about it since it's copyrighted ...
And Ronald McDonald's no better.
The reason they are doing all this to us with respect to copyrights, jails, etc, is money.
They want money, we need a better system, so how about combining those into a solution.
If we change the system so its profitable to change it, then
everybody can benefit.
How?
The land can be divided into independently operated economic regions.
All regions compete to offer you higher pay rates and the best lifestyle.
If a region doesnt keep up, then it goes out of business and the land becomes part of one of the more popular regions.
This kind of competition will quickly result in all regions
having to improve conditions for all of us people.
Some regions can be run by companies like JCPenney or Google,
because companies know how to compete and improve themselves
and offer you better service.
Companies would invest a lot of money into these regions, knowing they would get a return on their investment,
so we could get sustainable regions that use
only renewable nonpolluting energy.
Private companies are much more efficient at doing things
like this, compared with the bureaucracy we are suffering with today.
We are in a "race to the bottom" now,
where jobs often go to the third world where labor is cheaper.
Todays system doesnt seem to care much about human rights or lifestyle.
Regions could start a "race to the top", because regions must make living conditions as good as possible so the region can stay popular and stay in business.
Regions are primarily for the people,
since people choose which regions win.
Competition has already been proven to work, where it is used,
such as in stores.
Now we need to apply competition to all aspects of our lives,
so everything will work better.
There are a lot of important details that are left out of this
brief summary. Before you think this plan wont work, please read the details at the group listed below, that show how this will work.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/end_world_suffering
Because Nader is a socialist, and McKinney... I think she's genuinely certifiable. I take it you haven't lived in Atlanta while she's been around? She's kind of the laughing stock of Atlanta politics.
I would normally vote libertarian, since they come closer to my views than any other party, but I'm not too big a fan of Mr. Barr. I just want government to leave us the hell alone and stay out of peoples' bedrooms, wallets, and gun safes.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
... to finally emigrate to Sweden. The writing is so clearly on the wall, with both this and the Wall Street Bailout getting rammed through even an allegedly Democratic-controlled Congress. McCain is likely to be worse than Bush, and Obama isn't messianic and nowhere close to revolutionary enough to kick the money changers out of the damned temple. Kucinich would have done it, though. Hell, he's risked his career trying to drive stakes through the hearts of a couple of them (impeachment). Who else had the balls to do that?
This country is irrecoverably ruled by greed and dominated by stupidity now. We The People are too stupid to revolt again as they once did.
This is why the American Founders said, "Our worst disease is democracy." The average person on the street can't even locate the U.S. on a world map... how are they supposed to know all the intricate details about which Congressperson supports (or does not support) fair usage of artistic works?
I suspect most American voters simply pick the name that they recognize, thereby ensuring we get the same incumbent decade-after-decade, and have no clue how or what that person stands for. "Oh he has such a nice smile. He actually spoke to me! He gets my vote."
Take Obama for example. Most people are voting for him simply because "he's not Bush". Or "he sounds good". Back in 2000, that's how Bush got into office. People voted for him because he was "not Clinton" and "he sounded like he really cared about us". The American people vote these men into office, and they have no clue what they actually represent, and then they act disappointed with the results.
That's no way to choose the leader of the executive branch.
Originally the president was chosen by the State Legislatures via the electoral college. Perhaps we should return to that, because they chose better leaders (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe) than the current method of "he who smiles most, wins the vote".
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/ampu
:)
Contribute
P.S.
"Copyright Czar" and "Drug Czar" are appropriate terms. I can not think of a title more appropriate for describing our loss of freedom than the word "czar" who terrorized Russian serfs (slaves) for centuries, or the "ceasar" that killed the Roman Republic and turned it into a virtual dictatorship. These new "czar" positions within the U.S. government represent a gradual but definite loss of republicanism, liberty, and individual sovereignty.
My downloading of Star Wars Clone Wars harmed no one. (It was trash; I saved money by Not buying it.)
My smoking of weed while watching said movie also harms no one. It only harms me, and it's my body, therefore my choice how I treat it. Besides: If we can abort babies on the grounds that a woman controls her body, then surely that same woman has a right to inhale some smoke.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
One of the problem for European countries is that the ECHR views assisting in the death penalty (for instance, by extraditing somebody to face it), to be the same as if the country itself killed them.
This doesn't strike me as being a bad thing personally. And what if somebody renounces or surrenders their citizenship, does the US keep its prerogative to punish them however they see fit?
For whatever reason probably it's historical but the president of the US is not just a figurehead, he dominates American politics. It could be the other way round, with house and senate dominating, but they don't.
It's a great movie about how insane the drug-war is (And how to make a grow-up and marijuana in general). The police, the criminals and the prison-industry working together to steal common people's money, so that there can be drug-dealers in every corner and enormous amounts of people in prison.
It would be amazing if Sarah Palin voted for it, seeing as shes only a state governor and not a member of congress or the senate.
I feel like Johnny one-note this month, but this comes from the fact that the government is a couple decades behind in their grasp of copyright and patent law.
Having been sold the notion that what these laws protect is "property" rather than a government-originated monopoly, their critical thinking stops.
If you could convince 'em that abortion was a form of stealing, Roe v Wade would be overturned in a week.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Well, no, not exactly. They know it's a problem. They don't know what they're doing, but they know it's a problem. They also know people downloading MP3s that could have been bought and paid for is also a problem, a problem not entirely disconnected from the US economy.
How exactly do you figure that? If the overhead costs are kept low enough, then increased sales should make up the cost.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
On any bill, I count the lack of a vote as a vote on the side I disagree with the most. It shows a decision to allow a 'pass' on a controversial bill with the resulting effect of allowing them to be on both sides at once. I don't like it, so I count their abstaining vote as the worst case vote unless they have a very good excuse.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I'm sure there's at least one independent candidate hell bent on bringing down the multinational corporation based US economy. Don't despair!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Which of course won't stop the Alphabet Agencies from kidnapping you
Um ... I think they're a bit too busy installing dictators to worry about your P2P network.
Back in the 70s the FBI stated that 99.8% of the US population has committed some crime that is worthy of jail time....
With this new IP Czar, the powers that be apparently wanted to nab that last .2%.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
The word is derived from 'Caesar', which means 'emperor' in the medieval European sense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar
My blog
> 269 comments, and nobody has noticed that Lawrence Lessig's name is misspelled.
Who is John Galt?
oh, wait, we have a clear case of prior usage by the Romans...
never mind...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
In Soviet Russia, copyright benefits you!
So what you're saying is "In Soviet America the joke's on you"?
When you have reps stating "I know this will probably hose my chances of re-election, but I'm doing it anyways," and stats/polls showing that citizen opposition was well over half, and yet it got rammed through anyways.
Do you still really think that they're listening to you up on capitol hill?
The US has lots of natural resources (steel, coal, wood, etc.). You can't just export those jobs. Note that the second highest industrial power, Japan, is an island nation with very little natural resources of its own. Where do you think they get the stuff to build all those Priuses?
And it's not even true that there aren't US-born manufacturing anymore. A good chunk of Toyota's output comes from the US. The VQ35DE engine that goes in a lot of Nissans is built in TN.
Increased efficiency often means replacing a low-paying, labor intensive, and possibily dangerous job with a higher paying technical one. While unemployment might be high at the moment, we're talking about decades long trends. If people were really sitting unemployed from increased efficiency instead of moving to other jobs, unemployment would be held over 10% by now.
Not a typewriter
Fellow people of the United States of America: You do a horrible job of voting
Our media (owned by the same people who own the movie and music industries) tell us over and over again that if we vote for anyone but a Democrat or Republican, out vote is wasted. This putrid, disgusting, slimy legislation and its ilk (DMCA, Bono act, etc) gets passed by an overwhelming majority in both parties.
There isn't a lot I, as a voter, can do. The money trumps everything. The US is not a democracy, it is a plutocracy disguised as a Republic.
Money talks, bullshit walks. Whoever the rich want in office get elected, and there isn't jack shit the working man can do about it.
Free Martian Whores!
By I own the copyright on "Fuck this government."
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Well... Hmmm... Don't ask exactly *how* I know but assuming a 1 lb yield per plant, soil, with tending, peat, fish oil, blood worms, and done in "bulk" it works out to about $14 per plant. Some of those expenses could be lowered if it were to be on your lawn though. You wouldn't need the blood worms to keep the deer out of it and such, the soil might be better and not out in the middle of the woods in a clearing, but I don't think it'd get down to $1/plant unless you were growing on a very large (farm) scale. This, of course, assumes you're doing your own germination process and growth strain and not buying clones but, again, I don't know nuffin' about nuffin'.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
With the history of "Czars" in this country, I imagine we will see the words "Former RIAA head" or "Former MPAA Head.." in the near future.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
Not only that but this was a DEMOCRAT (Leahy) sponsored bill, co-sponsored by a bunch of your favorite DEMOCRATS, Clinton, Schumer, Boxer, Feinstein, Levin, other Dems, and some Republicans.
.
I can find no evidence that WALL-E was anything other than 100% American in casting and production. WALL-E
Pixar partners with Maximus to provide RenderMan Training in India [October 5, 2008]
While RenderMan is used in Asia this is the first certified Asian training program in RenderMan.
Roadside Romeo, the first big budget 3D feature in India from Disney/Yashraj has been entirely rendered on RenderMan at VCL. Many other studios are on the verge of adopting RenderMan as their rendering solution.
It's slashdot.org. Not slashdot.co.uk (or whoever).
i'll tell the girl at the campus bookstore that you were being culturally sensitive. But otherwise, it's a given that a site based in America referring to a president is referring to PotUS. The only time we should specify is if it WASN'T our president. If i say to my friend "add me on Facebook" and my friend is also American, i don't have to specify despite their being other national TLDs. i don't have "i'm going to our mailbox in front of our house", i say "i'm going to check the mail".
Don't take yourself so seriously.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Unless Obama wins, and appoints Lessig to the position of "Coyright Czar".
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
This is offtoic and redundant (so mod me down), but you're saying two things here that I've been trying to get across to people for a long time.
How can someone who is for the drug laws call themselves "pro-choice?" How can someone who is for the death penalty and the war in Afghanistan (let alone Iraq) call themselves "pro-life?" It's a symptom of what is wrong with the US and maybe the whole world - liars run everything.
My smoking of weed while watching said movie also harms no one. It only harms me
I've seen no evidence of it harming anyone. I'm sure that smoking anything isn't good for you, but you can get high eating it. Meanwhile tobacco kills almost every one of its addicts, whether the addict ingests his drug through smoking, snuff, or chew, and it is the most addictive substance on earth. More people die from alcohol overdose than all other drugs combined, and it, too is physically addictive (to the point that withdrawal can kill its addicts).
Nobody ever died from pot, and it is non-addictive. There are no withdrawal symptoms (addiction is a physical component of a drug, anything can be habituating, even orange juice, and I found when I quit cigarettes that the habit was as strong as the addiction). I smoked a bowl Saturday night; someone brought it over, but it was the first I had in a month. I've been smoking pot since 1971 and never had a problem giving it up when I couldn't afford it or when it was otherwise unavailable.
Meanwhile even rehab doesn't seem to help my alcoholic friend Amy, who keeps falling off the wagon. Chris and Robyn, the last two girlfriends I had, are both dying of chirosis.
I know several people who became addicted to crack cocaine thanks to the "war on (some) drugs". Their employers started urine-testing, and since pot stays in your system for over a month while cocaine is washed out in a matter of days, they switched to crack with horrible consequences which included finally losing their jobs anyway and losing everything they owned; cocaine is one very nasty habit.
The drug laws (and prostitution laws) cause the very problems they purport to solve. You can buy pot in any high school in America, but try buying beer in high school!
I predict the same will come from copyright laws; they will cause the very problems they are designed to prevent.
I'll burn a doob for you tonight, electrictoy.
Free Martian Whores!
Man that's a lot of trouble to go through just because I downloaded Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On".
There can be no punishment that is worse than the crime itself. Surely you must be allowed to go free.
Only if he used headphones otherwise if even one other person was forced to that song he deserves the chair.
I'm not fan of Palin, but how is she supposed to vote on this, being as she is neither Senator nor Representative?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I say this same thing in a different thread and get modded Troll, and he gets Insightful. Slashdot moderators never cease to amaze me.
Anyways keep him modded up. People need to learn why this keeps happening rather than complain when it does. The message is greater than the messenger as it were.
If the overhead costs are kept low enough, then increased sales should make up the cost.
How exactly do you figure that?
I'd like to see some numbers- even out-of-your-ass estimates, that suggest a few more CDs sold will help the economy more than the administrative cost of a crackdown will hurt.
Then show me something you didn't pull out of your ass that suggests sales will increase at all. No matter how loudly the *AA shouts otherwise, history hasn't exactly supported that viewpoint.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
By arresting and confiscating the property of people suspected of actual copyright violation without the need for actual evidence, you scare honest people away from legal fair use and creative reuse. And the more rebellious sort will figure they're screwed no matter what, and ignore copyright law completely.
What about McKinney or Nader? Not that I would vote for either of them, but don't think you don't have other options.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Everybody knows that it's the Dingos that eat babies.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
Don't vote then. Many people say it's your duty to vote, but when the choices are all bad, voting for anyone will send them a message it's okay to continue what they're doing. Refusing to vote doesn't give them that same satisfaction from you.
Let's see here - a few more CD's means a few more purchases, with little effort involved. Net gain for the economy. On the other hand, paying salaries to the Copyright Cops and the Copyright Czar to bust a woman in a wheelchair and her 10 year old daughter living on a meager income with little property... equals a net loss for the economy. If a net gain is a positive number, and a net loss is a negative number, isn't a positive number always larger than a negative number?
I didn't even pull this out of my ass... It's just simple Economics 101 and Math 101 for you... In fact, in a basic Macro Economics course, you are taught about the curves that represent the amount of goods sold for a given price, the cost of making a certain number of goods, etc. I don't recall these curves taking into account pirated copies of the copyrighted goods. In fact, those should ALWAYS be ignored except for the purposes of devising a way to turn the infringers into paying customers without the political spin.
Face it, if there's no profit in publishing songs, movies, tv shows, software, or books, then why are they in the business of doing so, and why do they need increased taxpayer subsidized "protection"?
Mod him up.
It is disheartening, but it is true. As Americans we have lost our way. How much does your average American even know of the founding of the country? Of the details of the Constitution?
The majority of people are just flat out ignorant of what it is supposed to mean to be American.
The whole point behind America was to secure liberty, freedom, for everyone. You do that by protecting the minority. You do that by putting individuals before corporations.
The entire point behind our election processes was to get your voice heard. But what has happened?
The number of Representatives has been capped. It is no longer 1 for every 30-50 thousand like it should be. Now it is only 472. Always. So as populations shift and grow, the number of seats change. Some States have one seat while others have 16. Where is their say?
Or even when you are voting for President it has been changed. The runner up no longer gets any position whereas before they would become the Vice President. So in close races a large portion of the population is shunted aside and grows sullen.
Over the years we've slowly legislated away our rights and its going to take years to straighten it out.
The biggest problem to me is that lately it seems people think the Law is the Law and cannot be changed.
The biggest point to America originally was that the Law could be changed.
I sincerely hope we never see another civil war. I sincerely hope we can straighten this shit out. But without people at least trying we never will, and many people seem apathetic because they're just "one guy."
Go read over your history books to your kids. Our schools don't seem to be doing a good enough job. I know I learned more about the founding of America and the Constitution thanks to the Internet than I ever did in school.
Drug Czar Toppled By Drug Bolsheviks
Thanks to the provision making copyright violations a felony, we won't have too many people left to vote for foolish shit like this.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
I can't believe I got modded up! Wow!
The apathy thing is right though. My wife knows this guy in the US. Early 20's. She asked him if he's voting for Obama. His reply? "Oh I'm not voting. Politics don't interest me." I'm sorry. Even in the past that's a pathetic statement. In todays political climate in the US that's a reprehensible attitude to have I think. "Oh it doesn't interest me." What's ironic is this guy is Korean, a legitimate US citizen who claims to be proud of being American and American freedoms etc... People like this sicken me.
Wake up and start giving a shit!
Time to stock up on ammunition.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Not necessarily a good thing. A foreign-owned company operating a manufacturing plant with a skeleton crew means a lot of the money is leaving the country, and isn't even partially slowed down by the wages paid to a full workforce.
So you keep a close watch on those manufacturing plants, and make sure that the heart of the manufacturing is never removed or sold off. In the end, if a foreign government tried to screw with the US by 'closing' factories, they would be left with a lot of worthless dollars, and the US would be left with the factory.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Ignoring the snide remark for the moment, perhaps there's more at stake here than just "a few CDs". Maybe there are actually hundreds of millions of CD and DVD sales that never happened, because people could subsist on pirated media? Perhaps even much, much more overseas? Perhaps there's enough to offset the costs. Think about it. If the vast array of entertainment were never to fall into the hands of avid pirates, imagine how much they would buy in order to fill the gap. Certain people can't afford to buy too much, but others can. If half the people in the US pirated, and they would have bought, on average, 2 CDs/DVDs over the course of the year, that's 350 million CDs. At about $15-20 a pop, well, you're looking at up to 7 billion per year from the US alone! All numbers directly from my ass, of course.
That makes sense. The unique problems of piracy are relatively new, so your education may not be up to date with present times.
Y'know, for all your inflammatory questions, either they don't make sense in the context, or they have an easy, direct answer. This is a case of the latter. Let me break it down for you: no protection = no profit, protection = profit. It's not normally profitable, which is unusual for something in such high demand, but thanks to protection, profits and incentives can actually more or less match demand and contribution to society.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Need another plan for Idaho. Larry Craig is probably used to his foot getting pissed on.
Conservatives would tell you to stop whining and become rich.
I don't buy the "marijuana causes no damage" argument. Even if its effects were as harmless as water, you're still breathing-in smoke & particulates, which over time will damage the lungs.
If you want to smoke, go ahead, because it's your body, but don't try to claim it's not harmful. To do that makes you as bad as the politicians (using lies to advance a cause).
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Profitable and rewarding day jobs to be eliminated from the economy in 3...2...1...
Two weeks before the election... is this something Obama could revoke (assuming he wins) ?
Frankly, I don't think anything should get passed within 3 months of an election. The strategic implications are too great to let fly..
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Nobody is saying its not harmful. What we say, is that its not the devil they have painted, that even sugar or the big mac poses more of a public safety risk than a state where pot is legal.
NO SIG
Are you saying you don't support the United Corporations of America?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I've seen a few posts knocking Bush, Cheney, Rove and Republicans in general because we seem to think that government control and fascism is just that, Republican. I take this moment to remind everyone that laws are made by the Legislative branch, not the Executive branch or the Judicial branch. Right now, the Democrats control half that and there is an even split in the other half (unless you consider the two independents ex-Democrats).
I say this not to point fingers at one party or the other but in hope that we might not put too much faith in either party to fix our problems. Right now I am not aware of anyone having a great track record on that front. Sooner or later we are going to have to recognize the problems for what they are and determine a way to fix them that goes beyond voting for our party or griping on slashdot.
My smoking of weed while watching said movie also harms no one. It only harms me, and it's my body, therefore my choice how I treat it.
WRONG!!! Because it makes people actually enjoy watching crap like Clone Wars, thus more crap is produced. Drugs are destroying the entertainment industry and I certainly hope this new Copyright Czar will join forces with the Drug Czar to save Hollywood and the poor record companies being plagued by this scourge.
No, let's be fair. The blame is with those who voted them in.
I didn't vote for Bush in 2004, nor did I vote for Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) in 2006. What should I have done, other than vote for other candidates and encourage friends and family members to do the same?
Which illustrates the fundamental problem with a simple democracy... In an autocracy, you essentially have a ruler or small ruling class that becomes the tyrant. With democracy, it's the tyranny of the majority.
I'm not arguing in favor of either. What we really need is a reform of the election process. Instead of everyone selecting just one candidate that they want with the one receiving the majority of votes winning, we need to have a forced ranking system. There, voters would rank all the candidates in the order of most preferred to least preferred. The highest (or lowest depending on the system) average of voter rankings would then be elected to office.
That really gets to the true issue that we have in the US, which is the tyranny of the 2 party system. The Democans and Republicrats have a duopoly on the system, which forces the winner to be either someone that you really want or someone that you really don't want.
Of course, it's all just another pipe dream since our voters can't even deal with basic ballots like the infamous "Butterfly Ballot."
ok big words. Who is going to organize this fighting? That is also illegal.
I just wonder when there will be a +5 Depressing mod for posts like this.
Can't stop to talk more, the weather's heating up and we're all off to the beach now, then maybe a barbeque later
Don't forget to check your shoes with a stick first.
Also, apart from that list, and as others have pointed out, there are countries with extradition treaties that still wouldn't extradite you due to the terms of their extradition treaties.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
"because the wrong lizard might get in" is not a good enough excuse to keep repeating a mistake. voting for bush once -- hey, everyone makes a mistake, right? voting for bush twice? as they say in texas: "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...-foo..ma...won't get fooled again."
what i'm saying is, why not try asskisser b? just for the variety?
You're right that "because the wrong lizard might get in" is not a good excuse to keep repeating a mistake, but you completely missed the point of the story when you recommended trying asskisser b. Asskisser b is another "lizard" as in, the parent hates both a and b for being asskissers. The moral of the story is the vote for a human (somebody you actually like), even if they have no chance of winning, instead of voting for a lizard just to make sure the lizard you dislike more doesn't win.
If everyone had that mindset, a human that "has no chance of winning" would actually win, because nobody likes the lizards. When you vote for the lesser evil, you elect evil.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
And, contrary to what two representatives of Mitsubishi told me in Tokyo in Dec 2004, my drawings are not a problem (at least in 2002/2003) with the US Navy. I don't design in-service, in-commission USN ships, nor do i care to. I design what i hope would in some aspects be BETTER than them.
Having served on a two and toured many more than that before, during and after service, and not as any bonafide naval architect (i hold NO degrees nor credible experience in officially designing modern naval (war)ships, though some people thought i *was* a naval architect, and one of the two men at Mitsubishi seemed to regard me as an industrial spy or someone trying to set them up for copyright law suit...), i set about to create fictional but nearly realistic ships for purposes of story telling. I need realistic equipment locations, fuel capacities, and berthing compartment dispersal, the way ***i*** would build a ship if ***i*** had $1B per copy. The USN's designs hardly interested me after the DDG-51, and i found it offensive that the CG-47 program was so sexy that political decisions were made to deprive the DDG-51 class of the twin hangar bays the FFG-7 class had from the start. Worse, today the DDG-51's hangars look more like an afterthought given the helos straddle the missile launcher aft.
But, i've incorporated into my drawings some features i NOW see are patented by marine engineering/ship construction firms. But, i don't play by those rules. I designed parts of my ideas without reference to some things that popped up after (but not related to my act of showing my works) i did things. Besides, patent all they want. I will just make sure that any detail drawings i make don't mimic the gantries or specific small parts.
But, at least the USN public affairs officer told me i was pretty much in the clear since the US TAXPAYER paid for the design and construction of the ships. But, nowadays, such a statement *might* be called into question, since marine designs sometimes are wholly outsourced and owners only give initial input, with some designers keeping total copyright in the design.
But, there are ONLY so many arrangements that can be conceived that make sense, and if foreign governments and designers are limited by physics or by space limitations, then so am i limited, and therefore, some aspects of copyright law will simply have to yield to common sense and simultaneous invention/design. As long as i'm not designing crypto, nuclear devices, targeting/delivery systems, they better (continue to) leave me alone. Especially since they've for all these years said nothing. Which is what i said in writing when i sold some copies: the USN can either say something or say nothing, and if they say something, they may validate some or many aspects of my work, and if they say nothing, then who knows what they think...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
In the subject, you name Bush.
In your post, you name "your government"
Guess what, they are not one and the same.
Bush has issued 12 vetoes during 8 years.
4 of those vetoes were overridden.
All 12 vetos were handed down after the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006. Bush is the only president *ever* to go 6 years without issuing a veto. Why is that? Because before then Congress was his bitch. The fact is that from 2000 to 2006 (particularly after 9/11/2001) the US government was essentially a wholly-owned subsidary of the Bush administration.
Even now the remaining Republicans are only "independent" of him in minor cosmetic ways (mostly centered around their desire to be re-elected somehow). They may not be able to push their agenda very well anymore, but there are still more than enough of them to stop anyone else from doing so. I suppose paralysis is an improvement over continuing to dig our gigantic hole deeper, but it's not much of one.
I call it "Digital Prohibition". I expect it to fail in a similar manner.
In Russian the word 'tsar' is not used to describe top command positions.
In fact, it's used pretty much only in its literal meaning (i.e. 'a historical ruler of Russia'). There are some exceptions ('Tsar Bomba', 'Tsar Bell', 'Tsar Cannon'), but they are rare.
PS: I'm a Russian and I know a bit of linguistics :)
What should I have done, other than vote for other candidates and encourage friends and family members to do the same?
Well, would you like a list?
I guarantee you the right-wing evangelical churches and wingnut homes are going to pour voluntters into their local GOP headquarters across this nation in the last week of the campaign, giving everything they have into the republican get-out-the-vote efforts. They will work with the dedication of the True Believers. Quite a few more will go into places where the uneducated or powerless hang out and try to trick or intimidate them into not voting.
If your only counter to that is to sit on your butt until election day, then go cast your one vote and hope magic happens, then you deserve to lose.
Well, would you like a list? [Canvassing, yard signs, marching in some parade, cash]
What should I have done to put that list into action when my preferred candidate was mathematically eliminated from the race several weeks before my state held its primary election?
Which is exactly how I am left without anyone to vote for in the presidential election. No McCain (Military Commissiona Act of 2006), No Obama (FISA Amendments Act of 2008), No Bob Barr (*shudder*).
There are other options:
http://www.politics1.com/p2008.htm
> I mean, really, do you think for a second that Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are going to appoint someone like Lessig?
Bush, Cheney & Rove vanish next January. Even if they have time to appoint someone, that person would get replaced by the next administration. There's a virtual guarantee that the next President will be Obama and he's thinking about how to put together his cabinet right now.
So this would be a good time to suggest reasonable people to head this thing. It's going to pump out all sorts of piracy studies. The industry wants it to create more BS economic damage numbers that it can spin. That's why it's VERY important that it have an honest and competent leader, whoever it might be.
I can administer a test with the NP-meter as well, but we aren't sure yet if they're actually the same thing.
By what name do you wish to be mourned?
All I do know is it really couldn't get much worse.
Please don't tempt fate.
Yeah, back in 2000 I could see that 1) things had to get worse before they would get better, and 2) Bush was just what the Dr. ordered for that. What I didn't realize is just how much worse things have to get, and that they still haven't reached that point. That was clear when in 2004 Bush was reelected-- the realization that 50% of those who voted still thought that moron was something other than a complete screwup accident looking for a place to happen. And now the Republicans have essentially trashed the economy in the process-- but just wait, the Dems about to get elected are going to get their screwups in too. What's unfortunate is they may not mess up quite as bad as Bush has, and unless they DO mess up at least as bad, the general voting public is still going to be playing red-team or blue-team next time around.
What may be more interesting is to what extent these screwups will actually frustrate corporate leaders-- since they're the actual rulers of the state, it'll be interesting to see what they do if the economy gets so screwed that they can't make the big money they've become accustomed to. THEN we may actually see some changes, but I'm skeptical that such changes would be for the better...
God is an American.
I second this, which is why you only ever see me dismantling his posts when he either:
a) Says something abnormally stupid, or
b) Shills himself to oblivion.
Accusing random people of being twitter and flaming him when he actually has a point are not kosher.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
What frustrates me as a voter/citizen. Is that I'm basically a libertarian, and I see the republicans representing, pushing, and courting the religious right and democrats wanting to "help me" by spending (my?) money on stuff I have virtually no say over.
Fair enough, but IMHO, being out on the campaign trail and unable to go back to D.C. to cast your vote would also be a good excuse.... :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
dude, it's technically looney.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Perhaps it's time to start a petition for the Range Voting method to become the standard for all US voting that will put a person into a political office? Perhaps then we would see a more honest accounting of the opinions of those in the USA.
If we were to be able to actually vote for our top preferences, instead of just one option, then I'd finally be able to vote my real opinion, and not have to have my top vote be either a red or a blue. Instead of "throwing away" my vote, I could vote my conscience, giving highest marks to my preferred candidate, but still having the option of giving high marks to a good enough alternative. What this would mean is that I can give my preferred candidate a score of 100, a good alternate candidate a score of 85, score my two next favorites that I equally prefer over all others as scores of 50 for both, and score those I vehemently disagree with a score of zero. This system truly gives me my real vote (no wasted votes either), and gives me a better chance at being truly represented. The current system forces me to choose the lesser of two evils and only truly gives me 2 real choices.
<soapbox>
I want my true representation! How long will we continue down this road of taxation without representation. 35% of my income goes to the government, and the system does not truly give me a way to be represented (in fact, it most often only gives 35-45% of voters representation by their chosen candidate. The rest of us are not represented).
</soapbox>
Sorry for the rant, but I feel like it's time for the "tree of liberty" to be refreshed, so to speak, "by the blood of patriots and tyrants." Thomas Jefferson had better insight that he could ever have imagined.
We've gone stale as a nation, and we are now like a rotting corpse.
Before commenting on the Bible, please read it first
So long as it doesn't devolve into The OSS socialist union
I mean, stalMin's purges could be much worse.. for malware.
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It doesn't matter when, it will still get zero NEGATIVE media attention.
The media is in direct conflict of interest with the public at large on this issue.
They will never give it fair coverage.
Civil disobedience is the only way forward for any nation without a large, state run media organization.
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The bill was quite clear.
he has no access to any government enforcement branches in his "enforcement efforts"
He is only allowed to formulate and suggest policy.
In other words, his department is a redundant second US copyright office.
Additionally, I believe it was wired who looked at the fine print and noted it would be just as much a threat to use the forfeiture clauses on this bill to seize a P2P user's computer as it was under previous law.
All we have here is yet another tax payer funded lobbying firm, which may or may not listen only to the alphabet orgs, just like the US copyright office, or (as a worst case) the USTR.
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and democrats wanting to "help me" by spending (my?) money
And the Bush Administration plus the Republican-controlled Congress that we had from 2001-2007 proved that the Republicans just want to "help you" too, but in an even *bigger* way. [Sigh]
The sad fact is that fiscal conservatives are no longer in control of the Republican party, nor are they even in a position of influence, and since they've never held much influence in the Democratic party, all I can say is "God help us all".
All in favor of a campaign of terror against the **AA? Seriously, blow their offices the fuck up.
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
The intention: Since very little is manufactured in the USA any more, one of the few things we have to sell to the outside world is our IP, so we have to protect it.
The Unintended Consequences: As Lawrence Lessig has pointed out, draconian copyright and patent laws are a strong disincentive to building on the works of others, so there will be less IP to sell.
I guess we're sunk.
Watch doctorow's talk on youtube.
Basically, the US is the final dot-com company.
They adopted this strategy during the "irrational exuberance" in the mid-90's when some morons kept saying the "information age" is about "selling bits".
They went about signing FTA's to push our copyright laws overseas while selling out our industrial/manufacturing sectors and opening us up to massive offshoring.
Now we are hemorrhaging wealth at an alarming rate, and we are depending on our already over-extended military budgets to keep a standing army large and advanced enough to invade most nations who scoff at IP.
Of course, this doesn't deter the larger ones unfriendly to us, and we have yet to go to war over this. I predict our bluff will be called in the near future, and IP value over seas will drop significantly.
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Without civil forfeiture, the few lawsuits which do go forward against the obscenely wealthy and corporations will yield no damages.
They will simply place all their assets into (insert whatever possession is easy liquidated later on here).
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I'm sure there's at least one independent candidate hell bent on bringing down the multinational corporation based US economy. Don't despair!
Given the relative average stupidity of our population (they seem to have been very well trained by our corporate-controlled media), I don't see 51% of them willing to vote for someone other than a 'D' or an 'R' anytime soon (especially not all the way down a ballot which is what we really need), so realistically, despair, along with stagnant wages, a falling quality of life, and recession, are the only things we have to look forward to.
But have a nice day anyway!
arguably this is what helped Bush the Lesser win the first time. Nader is still called a spoiler by many.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
So you keep a close watch on those manufacturing plants
When was the last time we had a government that was good at keeping a close watch on anything?
Hell, if those manufacturing plants are owned by a large multinational with a US subsidary, then the ranking chairmen of all congressional committees with jurisdiction over said manufacturing plants will, through generous campaign contributions, just get paid to look the other way.
Welcome to the United Corporations of America.
It was illegal back in 1776 too, but that didn't stop George Washington and friends from doing it. Now, those people are considered heroes, even though at the time they were both terrorists and traitors, in the eyes of the government.
However, I have to question whether it's worth fighting any more, for this "great land". Yes, the land is still great, but I'm not so sure about the people on it. Americans used to be interested in liberty, freedom, and all that. Not any more. Americans are happy to vote for a candidate who will strip them of their rights, whether it's the guy who votes for every gun-control measure offered, or the guy who supports warrantless wiretaps. Whenever a candidate comes up who really does support freedom and liberty, he's dismissed as crazy or somesuch.
So count me out of any plans for revolution. Americans had their chance at the ballot box, and they blew it. In fact, they elected the absolute two worst Presidential candidates of all those who ran. That just tells me that if anyone really did get any ideas about a revolution, it wouldn't have any popular support at all. The American people may be unhappy with the way things are being run now, but they're just too stupid to pick better leaders. In the end, we have the government we deserve.
Laws don't emerge from nothing. Most human behavior is regulated by norms, not laws. When norms are insufficient, we create formal laws. To be legitimate, a law must be supported by norms. The two must evolve together. If the law accords with norms, little enforcement will be needed because people will regulate themselves. We don't need to enforce anti-theft laws against most people because most people are not thieves. We seldom need to enforce laws against murder because most people are not murderers.
If the law is detached from social norms and it cannot be enforced, then it is an unjust law. A few scapegoats are punished while the vast majority get off scott-free. The few who obey the law may be effectively disadvantaged because everyone else is breaking it. Worse, the injustice brings into question the rule of law. The result is an atmosphere of fear, of lawlessness, a breakdown of norms.
That is the situation we have with the attempt to apply copyright to the private activities of individuals. Many (I suspect most) of those who believe they respect a reasonable law in fact break it - and would in fact be astonished to learn its true scope. Think of the politicians who use news clips without permission, or the contractors who listen to the radio while working on a house, or an entire generation who made mix tapes for their friends.
The fact that the penalties for copyright infringement are now so far out of line with the harm done is proof that enforcement is failing. What we have is an attempt by a narrow sector of interests to forcibly overturn existing social norms by crafting unjust laws and applying unreasonable penalties to a few scapegoats. It isn't working. It didn't work when 17th-century France tortured and executed upwards of 1600 people to prevent the import of machine-printed fabric. It didn't work when laborers were declared outlaws for asking for higher wages following the Black Death. It didn't work for Prohibition in the 1920s. It's not working now.
Passed and enforced by whom? If the people don't want them, then pray tell who gets to decide we're going to get them anyway? If we really want these luxuries, then we can decide what we're willing to do to ensure the supply. We can adjust our norms and craft laws so the two are in agreement. The supply we get will be the result of the choices we make. It is absurd dictatorial logic to suggest that people's desires should be paramount, and then turn around and use that as a justification for forcing them to accept what they don't want. (Yes, sometimes we solve collective action problems by passing a law obliging individuals to make a sacrifice. Knowing others will do the same and all will benefit, we accept such laws as reasonable and we obey them. They are supported by norms. Paying taxes, for example. That is clearly not the case here.)
Incidentally, we don't know if or how well copyright works. It seems reasonable that some level of copyright would be encourage creativity, but amazingly we have little or no research to tell us what that level might be (though we do know there's such a thing as too much). I submit this is because those pushing for the law don't care: if they wanted to know, they would find out. They don't want to know. They don't care about promoting creativity or serving consumers. And in fact they aren't.
Americans used to be interested in liberty, freedom, and all that.
Those who are not will not be fighting. They will be sitting still, easy targets for both sides. They will be the first to be eliminated.
So count me out of any plans for revolution.
Don't worry, I'll be sure to count you out very early in the war.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
arguably this is what helped Bush the Lesser win the first time. Nader is still called a spoiler by many.
I don't understand that reasoning. I thought being a "spoiler" was the whole point of third parties. Once the democrats see that they lost the election because their potential voters went third-party, that encourages them to change the focus of their issues to try to get those voters back. I mean, no Nader voter thought that Nader was going to actually win, so the whole point was to accumulate a sufficient number of votes to bring attention to the issues they cared about, right?
Being a spoiler is what you're aiming for. Only way to make the major parties take notice.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Call me a dewey eyed optimist, but I think that both the democrats and republicans will do something for the recession. It won't stop it, it won't save people from a lot of pain, but it will save people from a lot more pain than they normally would under a candidate who did nothing, or under a candidate who took the time to pass some anti-corporate legislature that, while admirably promoting the rights of the citizen, will in effect encourage multinationals to take their business elsewhere, which sinks the economy even deeper into its hole.
(Wow, long sentence!)
You too, if possible! :)
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Sometimes laws aren't passed to completely outlaw the thing named.
Well, all laws are passed to completely outlaw something, in the idealized world that politicians seem to live in. In normal reality, the degree to which they are obeyed is a function of how much people wish to disobey that law (i.e., want what the law purports to deny them) with the resources devoted to enforcing compliance as a secondary factor.
I agree with you to a point: as I commented in another post this is largely an extension of the RIAA's mission to frighten people into toeing the line. The problem is, people want music, they don't want to pay what the music industry is asking, and technology has offered a means to do an end-run around previously iron-clad distribution channels. What people want, they will get, unless you devote such vast resources to enforcement that the government agencies tasked with such enforcement take on a life of their own. And, as the War on Drugs has proven rather conclusively, even that is no guarantee of success.
Hell, the music industry, in particular, has already spent an enormous sum in a completely ineffective terror campaign. What the media companies are hoping is that the people sharing content will be more afraid of the Feds than they will be of a bunch of RIAA lawyers. I think they're going to be seriously disappointed in that regard. For the government to achieve significant success in eliminating copyright infringement, they're going to have to do things that will be political suicide for any politician supporting them.
Besides, in this case, the organization who will be in charge of prosecuting copyright offenders (the Department of Justice) wants none of it. Have you read their letter to Congress? They were dead set against this law, having correctly determined that there are far better uses for their resources than prosecuting people who listen to music and watch TV.
Suppose that were not the case, that the JoD was gung-ho about putting these heinous criminals away. Look at the mediocre "success" of our succession of Drug Czars in combating illicit drug distribution: I can't believe this effort will do any better.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yet, this of course assumes that your country is one the US is friendly with, and thay the Czar does his job, and convinces your country to pass a similar law.
Call me a dewey eyed optimist
I was that once, but it was so long ago.... :)
or under a candidate who took the time to pass some anti-corporate legislature
What do you mean by "anti-corporate"? I'd just settle for them requiring the banks and financial institutions to abide by the laws already on the books (but not enforced), and putting back the regulatory controls they've stripped away over the last 10 years (which would have prevented most of the excesses we are suffering from now).
"Oh, but we don't need government oversight, because the 'Market' is Self-Correcting(TM), just get government out of their way and everything will be hunky-dory!"
Yea, that self-correction seems to have worked out real well for all of us, don't you think? :)
Whose asking for anti-corporate? I'm just asking for Common Sense(TM). Greed is NOT inheriently good, it has to be regulated just like any other disruptive, base human emotion/tendency is.
will in effect encourage multinationals to take their business elsewhere
They're already taking their jobs elsewhere (to any place where the labor market is even more exploitable then it is here), so their "business" is actually costing us more in the long run anyway (a net negative as wealth is leaving our country and NOT returning).
How long can the middle class go on buying their widgets without a middle-class level of income? So how long?
Our middle class is shrinking, wages have been stagnant for more than a decade while the cost of living skyrockets, but the government keeps spending money (to bailout the rich from their own greedy excesses, no less!) as if it were still the 1950's and our middle-class (and economy as a whole) was still in the post-WW2 boom cycle. So how long before the rest of the world stops buying up our debt, because they've lost faith in our ability to pay back the 10 trillion we already owe them? Try this if big numbers don't depress you (3.5 BILLION USD PER FSCKING DAY! - Just Incredible).
They're starting to fear we can no longer recognize Common Sense(TM) anymore even if it came up and bit us on the nose. We are ALL living a lifestyle paid for with *borrowed* money, a gravy train that can't last forever (its under severe stress now). So how long?
> Americans used to be interested in liberty, freedom, and all that.
Those who are not will not be fighting. They will be sitting still, easy targets for both sides. They will be the first to be eliminated.
You're going to eliminate 90% of the population? Good luck with that.
Sorry, any uprising is going to be quickly slaughtered by the army. And the population isn't going to rise up against them either.
As I said, smoking anything at all can't be good for you. But you don't have to smoke pot to get high on it. You can get just as stoned eating it. Eating pot does NOT cause harm, and I'll posit that setting fire to a pile of leaves, or standing over a charcoal fire to cook your steak is as harmful as smoking pot.
It is far, far safer than smoking, chewing, of dipping tobacco. It is far, far safer than drinking alcohol (one of life's better pleasures if you ask me). Yet these two drugs, both of which are deadly, are legal while the completely safe (if you eat it) drug marijuana isn't.
And even if it were the horrible thing government makes it out to be, your smoking it doesn't affect me at all. It should not be government's business, except that government should regulate it, making sure there are no harmful contaminents like pesticides or PCP. But you can't regulate an illegal substance or activity.
Free Martian Whores!
Noriega was a scumbag as are the Taliban and Osama
bin Laden but the US has seen fit for a very long time to support scumbags when it suited their purposes.
Capitol Hill is full of bible thumpers who apparently never bothered to read the Book of Hosea - "For they have sown the wind, and shall reap the whirlwind"
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Palin's vote would not have mattered as she is not part of Congress, but the others didn't vote so they can say they had nothing to do with it/can't take the blame for it.
Thanks for telling me about Little Brother. I'm glued to my monitor reading it. It's so real it makes me nervous. I love it.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
You stock up on ammunition if you want to ... as for me, I'm stocking up on soapboxes.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The senate bill is S3325.
Posted the wrong links to the votes.
The final house vote as I read it is this one: Number 664.
While with the senate the result is reported by the Thomas.loc.gov history as:
The cosponsors are:
IOf you're offended by this consider this. There are a number of other issues they do not address, vis education, taxation, etc. But somehow in two months the House and Senate went from introducing this bill to passing it.
Incidentally, according to the CBO this bill is estimated to lead to spending up to $429 million over the next four years. So much to budget control.
Oh yeah, it's a living hell here in Australia.
Can't stop to talk more, the weather's heating up and we're all off to the beach now, then maybe a barbeque later. We'll throw a prawn on for you.
We have beaches and nice weather here in the States, too. Surely you can come up with a more substantive reason than that. (I mean, please do - I think some folks around here might appreciate a detailed list of reasons to move out of the US, and where to move to instead...)
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Thanks. That'll teach me not to edit after my first preview - it didn't show up until I hit submit.