PROTECT IP Renamed To the E-PARASITE Act

bs0d3 writes "The U.S. House has drafted their version of Protect IP today. They have renamed the bill to 'the Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation Act' or the E-PARASITE Act. The new house version of Protect IP is far worse than the Senate bill s.968 and it massively expands the sites that will be covered by the law. While the Senate bill limited its focus to sites that were 'dedicated to infringing activities,' the house bill targets 'foreign infringing sites' and 'has only limited purpose or use other than infringement.' They're also including an 'inducement' claim, any foreign site declared by the Attorney General to be 'inducing' infringement, can now be censored by the US. With no adversarial hearing. The bill can be read here."

Comments

American rights?

[Bucky24]

I guess they're really going all the way with "Corporations are people".

Re:American rights?

[elashish14]

The only people, from the sound of it. Copyright harms far more real people than it helps.

Re:American rights?

[the linux geek]

Corporations have been considered legal persons for hundreds of years in jurisdictions based on British law. I don't understand why there's this meme that the Citizens United decision created that...

Re:American rights?

[Nimey]

That's not even wrong. Nobody said that CU caused that.

They're saying that CU gave corporations more rights to pour money into politics, thereby giving them more "speech" than natural people. This happens to be true.

Re:American rights?

[andresa]

It's a good sign of a failing country. US fucked up their economy and many Asian countries took advantage of that by providing real, actual goods to people. The only thing US still has is entertainment industry, so it's not a surprise they're trying to protect that. But eventually it's a lost game, just because people got lazy and spend a lot more than they can, while other people (banks) tried to sell sell sell all those people loans. In the process many people got really rich, but it's not something you can do endlessly.

Re:American rights?

[neonv]

Without copyright, any material can be copied without repercussion. Very few authors could write full time if all their books are copied and they receive no compensation for their time. They would have to find a paying job to survive, maybe write as a hobby. The result would be a drastic decrease in new books. That's bad for everyone. I like reading anything I can, I'm willing to compensate writers a reasonable fee for their time. You may not like not those that over impose the law (like the RIAA or MPAA), but the alternative is worse. Changes in copyright law are warranted, but not removal of copyright law.

Re:American rights?

[Catbeller]

No. They have not. The Supreme Court decision happened in 1892, IIANM, when a former railroad lobbyist turned clerk of a Supreme Court Justice inserted it into an unrelated decision. The corporate lawyers ran with it, and it became impossible to call back. The trusts and tycoons had been try, without success, for decades to have the SCOTUS declare corporations people. One pro-corp lobbyist in a powerful position did the trick when law and reason wouldn't.

In 1992, the SCOTUS declared money to be speech.

In 2010, the SCOTUS removed all limits to corporate spending on lobbying, citing 1992.

Result: corps, government licensed creatures, now have become the government, cuckoo-like, replacing the substance while the shell remains.

Re:American rights?

[Catbeller]

Fine, if the copyright expires. That was the deal, back in the 1780's. But the deal was unilaterally reneged on when copyrights became eternal. You want copyrights? Put a limit on them. Right now, the art and stories of the world are set to be owned by corporations until the end of time. And we are building a world-wide surveillance state to enforce that "property". There will be nowhere you can go, electronically, without the government, thru corporate proxies, looking over your shoulder and logging what you are looking at, what you are reading, what you are copying. Forever.

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

And why can't we pay authors to write, instead of paying them after they write for copies? There's no reason we should have to stick with the current system, which involves telling everyone exactly what they are permitted and not permitted to do, backed up by the force of the government. Getting rid of the current model doesn't mean books can't be funded, and eliminates the need for huge bureaucracies and legal battles.

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

I sort of agree. As long as money is required to live in society, copyright (or another system, if one exists) will probably be necessary (if you want to increase the amount of works that are produced). Too bad it's not so easy to scrap this money-driven society.

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporations have been considered legal persons for hundreds of years in jurisdictions based on British law. I don't understand why there's this meme that the Citizens United decision created that...

Read up on the case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad to see how the modern concept of corporate personhood got started. Prior to that, there was a long standing concept of "natural person" and "artificial person".

Re:American rights?

[click2005]

I propose changing it's name again, this time to the

Worldwide Enforcing and Restrictively Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft, Exploitation and Solicitation Act

WE-R-PARASITES Act

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the corporatocracy. It looks a lot like the oligarchies that were thrown out in revolutions in the 1700s and 1800s in the Americas and in Europe (like the French Revolution). The only difference is that the "official government" is a sham, while the "real government" - the corporate plutocrats - are holding on to power by telling a bunch of deluded fucking rednecks called "tea partiers" that anyone wise to the corporatocracy is a "socialist" or a "communist."

Re:American rights?

[WorBlux]

There are very though and well supported analysises that contradict your assertion if you care to look for them (Against Intellectual Monopoly) http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm is one

95% of rents for 95% of the works are extracted within the first 5 years. Also the vast majority of authors don't see a penny for their work unless sponsored by the publisher (and only the mega-authors are). Royalties are first applied to cover production setup costs. Most publishers require authors to transfer copyright to them, which prevents the authors from making derivatives of their own works without permission. In addition there are alternative models for such authors. If anyone can copy the work the value of the first goes up considerably and the main competition comes from being able to publish first. In addition there are alternative publishing and revenue models that have been successfully used. One such alternative is the maker endorsed mark

Lastly the historical examples do not show that literature languished without copyrights. At the very least copyright should be reduced to a term less than ten years.

Re:American rights?

[inviolet]

No. They have not. The Supreme Court decision happened in 1892, IIANM, when a former railroad lobbyist turned clerk of a Supreme Court Justice inserted it into an unrelated decision. The corporate lawyers ran with it, and it became impossible to call back. The trusts and tycoons had been try, without success, for decades to have the SCOTUS declare corporations people. One pro-corp lobbyist in a powerful position did the trick when law and reason wouldn't.

Looks like it happened in 1886, in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific. The skullduggery occurred in the case's headnote as published in subsequent law journals. It was perpetrated by former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company, J.C. Bancroft Davis.

Re:American rights?

[Zontar The Mindless]

And why can't we pay authors to write, instead of paying them after they write for copies?

It's working out heaps better for me than freelancing ever did.

Or maybe I just like knowing this month that I'll be able to make next month's house payment.

Re:American rights?

[istartedi]

A copyright system based on the number of copies encourages popular works. A patronage system where authors seek a wealthy sponsor tends to be more elitist. With a copyright system, works that are popular but not appealing to the elites at least have a chance. The patronage system has benefits too; but by its very nature it can coexist with a copyright system (there will always be wealthy patrons), whereas a patronage-only system would make it difficult to produce works that didn't comport with the values of the elites.

Most people (even on Slashdot) probably don't want to abolish the copyright system entirely since things like the GPL are actually based on copyright law. Most of us would probably rather just see shorter terms, and less severe penalties for infringement.

Re:American rights?

[Grishnakh]

B.S. Copyright is a good thing overall, I think. Countless authors over the centuries owe their livelihoods to the existence of copyright. The problem, however, is that copyright law has taken things much, much too far, with effectively perpetual copyright terms, and lately with criminalizing copyright infringement. Copyright needs to be returned to something much more like what it used to be back in the 17-1800s, with relatively short terms, after which materials fall into the public domain. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater: just because copyright law has morphed into a horrible and barely-recognizable version of its former self doesn't mean the whole concept should be thrown out. I'd like to see a system where copyright terms are variable, depending on how much you pay; this would let companies like Disney "protect" their Steamboat Willies for as long as they want, within reason, by paying ever-increasing renewal fees, which of course could help finance government. Copyrighted works that are no longer profitable or the owners no longer want to pay the ever-increasing renewal fees, would more quickly fall into public domain. So perhaps 5 years protection for free, 5 more years for $1000, 5 more years for $10,000, 5 more for $100k, $1m gets you to 25 years, $10m for 30 years, then $100m for every 5 years after that.

Patents are another matter altogether, however, and these days I fail to see how they're at all useful.

Re:American rights?

[Grishnakh]

US fucked up their economy and many Asian countries took advantage of that by providing real, actual goods to people.

I think you're missing something. What have these Asian countries gotten in return for their real, actual goods? A bunch of green-tinted paper IOUs from us Americans. What have they been doing with these things? Buying up U.S. treasury bonds. Guess what happens to those bonds if the US goes belly-up?

Re:American rights?

[Idbar]

OH, wait, they didn't change the name to better represent the ones passing the bill? My mistake.

By the way, who comes up with those folkloric names?

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I just got here. This is the onion right?

Re:American rights?

[moj0joj0]

Please allow me to expand upon this a little bit:

As early as the mid-1800's the trusts and tycoons had been trying, without success, for decades to have the SCOTUS declare corporations people. In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886), the Supreme Court recognized corporations as persons for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In 2003, the SCOTUS declared corporate funding cannot be limited under the First Amendment, in 2010 SCOTUS declared money to be speech and removed all limits to corporate spending on lobbying.

The corporate person-hood aspect of the campaign finance debate turns on Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and Citizens United (2010): Buckley ruled that political spending is protected by the First Amendment right to free speech, while Citizens United ruled that corporate political spending is protected, holding that corporations have a First Amendment right to free speech.

Result: corporations, government licensed creatures, now have become the government, by using their wealth to "unfairly influence elections." This lead to the first stirrings of unrest in the civil populous, most notably the 'Occupy Wall Street' demonstrations, citing no faith in their elected officials because of the undue power wielded by corporations and special interest groups to influence law makers.

Now, protected by the very institutions that had been in place to protect people, citizens of the United States are denied at least two of the traditional corner stones of a democracy. Those foundations stones being the Ballot and Jury box.

Timeline: -Tillman Act of 1907, banned corporate political contributions to national campaigns. -Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, landmark campaign financing legislation. -Buckley v. Valeo (1976) upheld limits on campaign contributions, but held that spending money to influence elections is protected speech as in the first amendment. -First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978) upheld the rights of corporations to spend money in non-candidate elections (i.e. ballot initiatives and referendums). -Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990) upheld the right of the state of Michigan to prohibit corporations from using money from their corporate treasuries to support or oppose candidates in elections, noting that "[c]orporate wealth can unfairly influence elections." -Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (McCain–Feingold), banned corporate funding of issue advocacy ads that mentioned candidates close to an election. -McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003), substantially upheld McCain–Feingold. -Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. (2007) weakened McCain–Feingold, but upheld core of McConnell. -Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) the Supreme Court of the United States held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment, overruling Austin (1990) and partly overruling McConnell (2003).

Re:American rights?

[TubeSteak]

But the deal was unilaterally reneged on when copyrights became eternal. You want copyrights? Put a limit on them.

"forever, minus a day" would technically satisfy the letter of the Constitution with regards to "for a limited time."

That's what the **AAs really wanted when the Mickey Mouse Protection Act of 1998 was passed.

Re:American rights?

[Grishnakh]

There's a little more to it than that. The corporate plutocrats have effectively used the old maxim "divide and conquer", by having a system where there's only two parties, and there's really no difference between them (when you look at their actions, not their words). They get popular support by pandering to different groups; one panders to religious extremists and "deluded fucking rednecks" as you call them, the other panders to "liberals", "progressives", etc. They tell their target groups what they want to hear, whether it's "hope and change!", or "we need to ban contraception", or "we need to eliminate income taxes" or whatever. Then when they get elected, they simply continue the same policies with little or no change, while distracting the voters with "terrorists", or "the other party is being obstructionist", or "we can't allow this big corporations to fail or else the economy will be destroyed, so we're going to give them a no-strings bailout package", or any other excuse they can come up with.

Re:American rights?

[liquidweaver]

I guess they're really going all the way with "Corporations are the people".
Fixed that for you.

Re:American rights?

[lgw]

Books sell well for a long time, and often take years before becoming popular - it's a different pattern than movies and popular music. There were very few authors (even per capita) under patronage - we moved to copyright because it did a much better job at encouraging writers, and as self-publishing becomes much more practical with modern technology, this will be even more true, as we leave the "Borders only stocks 100 titles" effect behind.

We certainly need copyright, and the current term is certainly too long, but where's the happy medium?

Re:American rights?

[hjf]

technically

And that, my friend, is the problem with the US justice system. Stupid technicalities AND judges that rule based on the absolute literal meaning of the words on paper. And of course, lawyers exploiting that.

Let me give you an example:

If you have a shop and put a sign that says "CAUTION: Wet Floor. We won't be responsible if you get hurt while walking on the wet floor". Sooner or later, you'll get someone RUNNING on the wet floor, falling, and suing you. And a judge is going to rule in his favor, because a lawyer will say "then the sign also means WE WILL be responsible if you get hurt while NOT WALKING on the wet floor", and since "the guy was running, which, TECHNICALLY is not walking, then you are responsible". Or if he falls while walking on the DRY floor...

Re:American rights?

[Fned]

B.S. Copyright is a good thing overall, I think. Countless authors over the centuries owe their livelihoods to the existence of copyright.

...and then the computer was invented, with which it is entirely incompatible, as it renders copies valueless.

Re:American rights?

[lexsird]

I have been pondering how to remove the SCOTUS without just putting a noose around their necks and giving them a good stretch. I think a Constitutional Amendment would do the trick just fine. Is there any other way to eject these seriously deluded people out of these positions of demigods of our State? There has to be a way to remove one if they go bad. If not then our founding fathers seriously dropped the ball on this one.

Those two acts, one of of declaring money speech and removing all limits to corporate spending to lobbying, are blatant acts of treason against the State. Our founding fathers are spinning in their graves like gyroscopes on that. Hasn't it been said, that once the law becomes unlawful, the people themselves will become a law of their own? Or something like that?

Effectively with the SCOTUS declaring this, has effectively removed all voice from the people in their government. Only the corporations will be served, and our country as we known it has been rendered extinct. You no longer have representation, because those elected will serve those who can dump mountains of cash in their pockets. Because it's free speech and corporations are free to speak because they are people.

Wow, that is so fucked in the head it's surreal. If you look at the history of corporations, you will see how they were only allowed with control, but they have been struggling to gain more and more power until at last they have it all. Sweet Jesus, we are seriously fucked. Someone tell the OWS people to pack it in and go home, the SCOTUS has sold us out, we can't change the laws now even if we wanted to.

Lets consider this big shit sandwich for a second before we all have to take a bite. Corporations are multinational entities. This means that we now have unknown foreign entities with unlimited influence upon our State. Do you think we will now have a prayer of stopping our labor/industry from being exported to whatever third world country that works for next to nothing? Nope, so give a big kiss and a wave goodbye to American jobs. Without American jobs, the 99% become quickly vagrants, no home, no vote.

This is now the land of the corporations. They will thin the herd. They don't need us any more. They are setting on their money, just waiting for us to starve out, die off, while their political lackeys will cut off any help to the bottom end. They will then proceed to shove everyone not in their service down through the meat grinder, no safety nets, just whirling blades of homelessness, no medical, no food, no voice. Say hello to the American Gulags, the concentration camps, and if you are lucky prison. If you are extra special, you can have the treat to serve in their jackbooted enforcement corps or as a thug putting their thumbscrews on the last of the free world.

The sad thing is, we deserve it. We have been stupid enough to just let them get by with creeping up on us. We watch "sports" when we should be watching these criminals against humanity and beating their asses down when they stick they heads out of whatever hole from Hell they crawl out of. We have fucked around with our own indulgences, while our slavery chains have been forged loudly right on our hands and feet. Forget "Bread and Circuses", we are mesmerized by Hollywood, fast food, cable TV, all the indulgences of the Internet. We have been reduced to gutless, spineless cowards who will just bow down and take whatever our Overlords decide for us.

Watch now as these foolish protestors who are a decade too late, are made examples of. They will be crushed, and you will set on your fat asses and make excuses for those who destroy them or why "you can't get involved". That sickly feeling you will experience in your gut, that is the soul of your once great nation dying, and the shame will be overbearing. How ironic! The great American, taken down, not with an epic fight or struggle, but handed over by a bunch of simpering, ignorant pussies, not worthy of being the descendents of the forefathers who bled and sacrificed, only so that their heirs could just piss their freedoms away.

R.I.P America

You deserved going out a more glorious and dignified way.

Re:American rights?

[Cwix]

Infinity - 1 day = Infinity

Re:American rights?

[marcroelofs]

They can claim ownership of the goods, like in any default.

Re:American rights?

[WorBlux]

" we moved to copyright because it did a much better job at encouraging writers" That's entirely false. Such was the hope, but there never was any through cost-benefit analysis given to copyright, and it originated as a method of censorship. Less than 1% of titles published ever become popular. 99% get one production run and that's it. Yes, there are a few books with a long tail, but it's very unusual on a per-title basis, though not on a per-sale basis (a large chunk (> 1/4 of book-sales are for books without copyright). Don't you think copyright should be adjusted for the norm, rather than the exception?

BTW cheap publishing + distribution is an argument against long copyright. If the cost of publishing is lower, you need less of a reward to get someone to risk publishing a work.

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

The development seems so bizarre when looked upon from a country which have had several constitutions since and the case-law and the law of the 19th century quite obsoleted. Does the legislative process ever produce results conflicting with the case-law of the supreme court in the US?

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

> a system where there's only two parties, and there's really no difference between them

Let's not confuse natural cause and effect with sinister plans here. In a democracy, any party that grows over a certain size has to do so by appealing to an ever broader slice of the general population. That automatically leads to the biggest players being close on many issues (while still being different on others).

(And really, anyone still saying "bah, they're all the same!" hasn't been paying any attention. Reality looks more like the Republicans are tearing themselves apart under the strain of a dozen loud and contradictory factions. The Democrats aren't exactly one big happy monolithic family either, aside from being socially liberal. But I guess if the "they're all the same!" shouters can convince enough moderates that they're all the same, those moderates will stay home on voting day, and then all the other groups will have proportionately more pull?)

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it isn't, because before the rise of corporations in the 20th century, there were big businesses owned by big businessmen, who had more money than most natural persons and thus had "more 'speech'" than most persons -- but it's patently ridiculous to say they had more speech than natural persons, when they were natural persons themselves. They have largely been replaced by corporations, but there are still some very rich people around -- and they can have way more political influence than you or I (on the order of corporations) because they have the money to spend.

If you won't/can't limit the ability of wealthy natural persons to pour money into politics, it's hard to argue juristic persons should be limited on the basis of equality with (little) people. OTOH, as creatures of law, it's naturally at the discretion of the legislature to choose which rights to extend to them, even on mere utilitarian grounds -- all that is needed is a clarification that the 14th amendment doesn't apply (at this point, this probably means a constitutional amendment).

Re:American rights?

[swalve]

No, copyright protections are fine for *good* people, but not *bad* people. Typical authoritarian, "if I was king" kind of thinking.

Re:American rights?

[PopeRatzo]

It's a good sign of a failing country.

Judging from the news out of Australia, the EU, and other developed countries who are allowing themselves to be bullied by corporations the way the US has, it's not just the sign of a failing country, but a failing economic system.

Since industry lobbyists are the ones who actually write the laws, we should not be surprised when they turn out to be incredibly unfair to most people.

Re:American rights?

[Doc Ruby]

The US still has the largest manufacturing industry of any country in the world, including China. Something like 20% of the US economy is still manufacturing. The "US doesn't make anything anymore" lie is stupid.

But it is true that the banks have totally taken over. They crashed the US economy and the world's with it, stole $TRILLIONS to get back in business, and are crashing it again and again. The copyright industry is just the same kind of monopolistic fake economy for content that the banks have set up for money.

Re:American rights?

[Grishnakh]

The Democrats aren't exactly one big happy monolithic family either, aside from being socially liberal.

I don't see much social liberalism from the Democrats these days. Just look at Obama: he's pushing marijuana enforcement even harder than Bush did.

But I guess if the "they're all the same!" shouters can convince enough moderates that they're all the same, those moderates will stay home on voting day,

When you have the pro-corporate Republicans running against Obama who's already proven himself to be a corporate lackey, I don't see the point in voting, except to vote a write-in candidate as a protest.

However, what I'd like to see happen is for the Democrat voters to grow a brain and elect someone else. Obama still has to win the Democrat primaries, and this isn't guaranteed--4 other presidents in US history did not win the nomination of their own party and thus did not run for re-election. (A 5th one dropped out early on because he was so unpopular: Lyndon B. Johnson.) This is what needs to happen to Obama. Dems, elect a different Democrat, ANY democrat. Even Hilary would probably be better than Obama (but not by much).

Re:American rights?

[Archangel Michael]

Copyright is a right of a citizen, not a corporation. The legal definition of "legal entity", not withstanding, corporations should NEVER have rights of a citizen, because that diminishes the natural rights of people.

The problem is, that a Corporation has usurped rights of the people, and applied them to themselves, and are sponsoring laws to revoke those rights completely from the people.

The ONLY recourse we have is to revoke Copyright charter completely, as it no longer serves the will of the people.

Re:American rights?

[Grishnakh]

Um, I don't think so. I mean, they could, but collecting them would be a different matter. The resources they'd expend to send people around collecting inexpensive consumer junk isn't going to be worth it. Collecting goods in default (such as collecting collateral that backs a loan, for instance) only works if that collateral is worth something, and worth enough to offset the acquisition costs. This is why collateral items are always valuable things, like vehicles, expensive factory equipment, real estate, etc. Many of these things you could say have a high "value density": the dollar value per unit volume of the item is high. The Chinese haven't been supplying us with vehicles, they've been making low-cost consumer goods, with a very low "value density" (esp. after they've been used). Just looking around my desk for things made in China, I see 1) a bathroom mat that my cat likes to lie on. I doubt anyone would give me $0.50 for this thing with the cat hair on it. 2) A Harbor Freight tape measure, which probably cost less than $5 new, maybe $1 used? 3) A coffee mug. Definitely not a high-value item. 4) A set of 4" electronic calipers from Harbor Freight, cost about $10 new. This actually works extremely well compared to the much more expensive Japanese calipers out there at a tiny fraction of the cost, but again, it's worth less than $10 now. 5) Various computer equipment like a Logitech mouse, and a couple of 24" monitors. These are easily the most valuable Chinese-made items here (the monitors, not the mouse though it is a G5 which many claim is the best mouse they ever made and that newer models are lesser in quality), but still, you might get a couple hundred on Ebay for the whole lot. Sending agents around to collect all these low-value items, and then trying to liquidate them, is going to cost more money than you'll get back in liquidation profits. Now, contrast this with, for instance, Germany. If Germany was able to run around collecting German-made goods because of default, they'd do quite well, as they'd be collecting a bunch of BMWs and Mercedes luxury cars, plus a ton of super-expensive industrial machinery (think $100k - $1 million per machine).

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, they're people when it's beneficial for them, and not people when it would not be good for them. If they're people, why don't they pay income taxes at the same rate? If they're people, why can't we give them the proverbial death penalty when they endanger or kill people in the name of protecting profits?

I used to believe that the US was a place where we genuinely believed in equality for all, human rights, where the best people were voted into office because they were the best for the job. Where, if you worked hard, you were rewarded accordingly, and where criminals were punished according to their crime and not by how much money they have or who they knew. This was in elementary school, and I remember looking out the windows over the valley and thinking that we were so right, and that we were so much better than the Soviets and that our technology and principles would keep us safe forever.

Today, I wake up every day believing I'm watching the end of civilisation, and that the true problem is not financial in nature but that there simply aren't enough resources to back up the promises that have been made or to feed 7 billion hungry people. The rat universe experiment was prophecy, because humans, like rats, are unable to solve the fundamental problem of limited resources versus exponential growth. I believe that it's only a matter of time until the dollar's only value is the heat it gives off when it burns. I see what's going on in Egypt, Libya, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Iceland, etc., and think that the OWS movement is the proverbial smoke on the horizon. The really sad thing is that when I see things like this coming out of Washington, it doesn't even bother me any-more, because I don't believe the government as we know it will last. I only hope that when the US defaults, that I don't have to watch the people I love starve because stores can't get food onto the shelves, or watch neighbours kill neighbours for food, or fuel, or water.

I bought a gun as a contingency plan. I have plenty of rounds for it, but the truth is that when they can't kick the can any further down the road and widespread unrest leads to chaos in the streets, I'm only going to need one. :(

Re:American rights?

[belg4mit]

Yes, Congress can pass laws to fix judicial fuck-ups; and especially the constituion can be ammended.
No prominent examples come to mind, but then IANAL.

An attempt to rewrite the constiution like France does would be doomed to fail before it began;
not the reason why, but oh noes1! lawyers would have to learn something new.

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry it will all get legal at next years constitutional convention...."We the corporations in order to form more profitable monopolies...." blah blah blah. The rest is really unimportant it's all about delineated rights so it should be real short.

Re:American rights?

[musicalmicah]

A copyright system based on the number of copies encourages popular works. A patronage system where authors seek a wealthy sponsor tends to be more elitist.

That was certainly true when both the cost of distribution and the cost of soliciting funds were high, but between the web/YouTube and Kickstarter, both are getting much cheaper. The patronage/gift economy is driving some pretty quality work from some of my friends. Moreover, the social status of creating a popular work is often more of a driver for new pop art than monetary reward (which, even in popular art forms such as rock music, ends up to be pretty low, even for successful artists).

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seen on a whiteboard today: I will only believe that Corporations are People once Texas has executed one!

Re:American rights?

[westlake]

No. They have not. The Supreme Court decision happened in 1892, IIANM, when a former railroad lobbyist turned clerk of a Supreme Court Justice inserted it into an unrelated decision. The corporate lawyers ran with it, and it became impossible to call back.

American law has treated the corporation as a person from the beginning.

Seven years after the Dartmouth College opinion the Supreme Court decided Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts v. Town of Pawlet, (1823) ...Justice Joseph Story, writing for the court, explicitly extended the same protections to corporate-owned property as it would have to property owned by natural persons. Seven years later, Chief Justice Marshall stated that, "The great object of an incorporation is to bestow the character and properties of individuality on a collective and changing body of men."

Corporate personhood.

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) is of interest only for its headnote:

The court reporter, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company, J.C. Bancroft Davis, wrote the following as part of the headnote for the case:

"The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."

In other words, the headnote indicated that corporations enjoyed the same rights under the Fourteenth Amendment as did natural persons. However, this issue was not decided by the Court.

Before publication in United States Reports, Davis wrote a letter to Chief Justice Morrison Waite, dated May 26, 1886, to make sure his headnote was correct:

Dear Chief Justice, I have a memorandum in the California Cases Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific &c As follows. In opening the Court stated that it did not wish to hear argument on the question whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to such corporations as are parties in these suits. All the Judges were of the opinion that it does.

Waite replied:

I think your mem. in the California Railroad Tax cases expresses with sufficient accuracy what was said before the argument began. I leave it with you to determine whether anything need be said about it in the report in as much as we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision.

And that is that.

Davis was 64 years old in 1886, a retired judge and career diplomat. He was not a clerk and he was not a lobbyist.

It is dishonest to try to demonize him.

The Reporter of Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States is the official charged with editing and publishing the Court's opinions both when announced and when they are published in permanent bound volumes of the United States Reports.

Reporter of Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States

Newburgh is on the Hudson River 60 miles north of New York City.

Population 17,000 in 1870.

The rail line was surveyed around 1866 and there is really nothing more to say about it.

Davis was twice Assistant Secretary of State and perhaps best known for having presented the US case against the Confederate commerce raider Alabama at Geneva in 1871.

Re:American rights?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Those two acts, one of of declaring money speech and removing all limits to corporate spending to lobbying, are blatant acts of treason against the State.

Or not.

Treason is very carefully defined in the Constitution. Neither of those acts, nor both together, qualify as treason.

Re:American rights?

[dgatwood]

Less than 1% of titles published ever become popular. 99% get one production run and that's it. Yes, there are a few books with a long tail, but it's very unusual on a per-title basis, though not on a per-sale basis (a large chunk (> 1/4 of book-sales are for books without copyright). Don't you think copyright should be adjusted for the norm, rather than the exception?

Except that this is only true because printing was historically done up front. With modern print-on-demand, the number of printings becomes a non-issue. I think you'll find that a much higher percentage of books will have a long tail in the eBook publishing world.

BTW cheap publishing + distribution is an argument against long copyright. If the cost of publishing is lower, you need less of a reward to get someone to risk publishing a work.

No, actually it's the reverse.

• Because people know that the cost is less, they will be willing to pay less. We're already seeing a lot of this with eBooks on Kindle (a staggering 20% of the top-selling books are under a buck apiece).
• Those high production costs represented a barrier to entry that kept the number of authors down. The cheaper it becomes to produce and distribute, the more people will decide to produce and distribute a work, and thus the more diluted the pool of content will become. As a result, there will be orders of magnitude more pieces of content competing for the same dollars.

Combine those two factors, and I think you'll find that the cheaper your production and distribution costs, the longer it takes to make any significant amount of money on a work. And although it would technically fulfill the first part of copyright's purpose—encouraging people to create and to make those creations available—it would fail to fulfill the second part—providing a limited monopoly for a sufficient amount of time to monetize the work so that its creators do not starve to death.

Re:American rights?

[dgatwood]

Untrue. It makes copies trivial to make. That does not mean that the copies have no inherent value. Canned spaghetti and meatballs is trivial to make for dinner. That doesn't mean someone who is starving won't be grateful for it.

Essentially, what you're arguing is that the supply is infinite, and therefore the value is zero. That's only true if everyone ignores copyright to provide that infinite supply. Among people who actually respect the rights of creators to profit from their works, the supply is not infinite—the legitimate supply is very much finite—and thus copies of the content still have value.

More precisely, your argument can be logically reduced to saying that because some percentage of people break the law anyway, the law isn't serving any purpose and should be abolished so that everyone can violate it. That's a pretty big stretch.

Re:American rights?

[The Master Control P]

Somewhere among my first executive orders would be "Anyone who believes this shall be forced to sit through math classes narrated by the most boring person on earth until they can write out and explain in detail why it is wrong, and be pimp-slapped by MC Hawking every time they fail."

Re:American rights?

[hitmark]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_economy is what USA leadership have bet the farm on, and finding the horse coming up short.

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't deny that some excellent "low budget" works have been produced. That said, there is also a quality to "high budget", "highly produced" and "labor intensive" works that is unique. It's that class of works that would be restricted to those who either already had the money, or who could find the money from a wealthy patron.

The ability to grab a camera and shoot a vid with your friends is great; but sometimes you've gotta clear a street with permits, choreograph 100 dancers, track down the best session musicians you can find, and put it all together. The difference is noticeable.

The fact that artists don't always get their fair share isn't a copyright issue. It's an issue with the way the industry is structured. Some artists respond to that by setting up their own labels. It's tough for artists to say "no" to a contract; but some do that too. The ability to go with a small label that will give you a better deal, or to self-produce, it's all available under the current system. Taking away copyright won't fix bad contracts from big labels. Regulating music contracts might fix the problem. Where is the musician's union on this? I know somebody who could tell you a thing or two about unionized music, what it was good for, and what it wasn't good for. Plainly, it didn't do much about these recording contracts...

Re:American rights?

[jez9999]

If money is speech, why are you not free to donate it to Wikileaks?

Re:American rights?

[lexsird]

Of course, but what else do you call selling out your country to the corporations to this degree? They have wrecked our representative system, opening it up to corruption run hog wild, not to mention the influence of foreign entities. This is a lethal dose of poison to democracy. It may not be "treason according to Hoyle" but it damn sure is the highest of treason in spirit and effect.

It will take a Constitutional Amendment to undo this damage, and good luck with that. The politicians are already loaded against us versus passing one. It's a brilliant end game move. Consider if you will the implications of this action they have taken carefully. All the wars we have ever fought, none of them could have damaged us like this. No foreign enemy could have altered the very "genetic make up" of this nation like this. They could have beat us into the ground, or nuked us until we glowed in the dark, but they couldn't have twisted us into this. So you are right, this isn't treason. It goes beyond that garden variety of evil. Words to describe it escape me.

Re:American rights?

[w_dragon]

So far as I know you are. You can't use Mastercard or Visa to do it, but those are proprietary networks for moving money around, they get to say who is allowed to use their network. Is there anything stopping you from sending a cheque, or a money order, or any other form of money that doesn't rely on a third party?

Re:American rights?

[biodata]

I would argue that the copies do have value, but their worth relates to the effort it takes to make them. When industries were needed to make the copies, they made them expensively. Now we can all make the copies, they are worth much less. The whole thrust from the rights holders is to make the copies harder to make, hence more valuable, but they are guaranteed to lose. We all have the technology now and we aren't giving it back.

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo!

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish people would quit using made up words like corporatocracy. Lets call it what is really is FASCISM!. These people are not corporate plutocrats they are FASCIST! Words like corporatocracy that rime with democracy make it all sounds nicer than it is. We have a fascist government now. Lets call it what it really is and maybe it will help wake people up. The world does still remember when fascism ruined it and is still scare of the word.

By using the word corporatocracy you are supporting the corporate media line. Hell corporatocracy doesn't even spell check!

Re:American rights?

[Frangible]

The same thing happened to Japan's economy years before ours and everyone else's. Do you think Greece would be doing just great if the housing bubble had never burst in the US?

And no, the only thing the US still has left is a DEFENSE industry. IP is easily/cheaply made by anyone anywhere and it is a foolish notion to think Americans are somehow more innovative or creative than anyone else. After all, our "Sputnik moment" was Dr. Wernher von Braun, so I guess Obama was asking us to steal a bunch of scientists from "zee Germans" again?

At this point you're probably thinking, "defense industry? What's the F-22 got to do with anything?" Here's a little example for you: Siri. Siri was a spin-off corporation from SRI acquired by Apple, and SRI was a contractor on DARPA's PAL (personal assistant that learns) project, part of the largest AI project in history. Like so many times before, a corporation took publicly funded defense research as their "innovative" "IP". Oh yeah, they really need protections for "borrowing" the work of DARPA scientists.

Apparently, it's not actually IP until a corporation gets done copying it from DARPA. Then, holy shit! Must be protected at all costs! Oh and here China, build some DARPA technology for us while we wonder where all our jobs went and why we can't seem to stay ahead very long these days. Wait, I know, let's blame China!

Re:American rights?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Of course, but what else do you call selling out your country to the corporations to this degree?

Well, I call it the First Amendment.

Note that once the government starts restricting who can spend what in politics, it's not long before they're restricting YOU.

It should also be noted that those two decisions basically ratified what had been going on anyway - it's not like you can PREVENT corporate money from getting into politics - there's too much money at stake when you have a large, pervasive government. Which we do...

And where there's money to be had, spending a few million to buy a few billion is a no-brainer. Corporations WILL find a way to make sure their friends in Washington vote in ways favorably to them...

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

So when does the violent revolution start and where do we sign-up? Will there be a boot camp to at least teach all the US citizens who think guns are scary to handle them properly?

Your comment sounds like a manifesto and has more than likely been noted by the shadows you are terrified of. Hopefully you have enough tinfoil in stock.

Re:American rights?

[thejynxed]

Actually, yes. Cheques from US-based institutions, etc have all been blocked, just like the credit processors.

This is part of the reason that Assange and crew have multiple lawsuits pending in the US, EU, etc over this.

The US Government has forbidden financial institutions (the ones that have any US presence or license to operate in the US) from honoring any payments to Wikileaks or its known associates.

Re:American rights?

[yuhong]

Now, protected by the very institutions that had been in place to protect people, citizens of the United States are denied at least two of the traditional corner stones of a democracy. Those foundations stones being the Ballot and Jury box.

Not completely. The only reason campaign donations work is that the citizens are stupid. I wonder if this will change with Occupy Wall Street.

Re:American rights?

[Catbeller]

I just read Terry Pratchett's novel "Snuff". In it, Commander Sam Vimes of the Watch says, roughly thus, "First comes the crime, then you make the law." Some things are too big and new for laws to cover them. We never defined "treason" as "defining gobs of money as 'speech' and letting giant antinational corporate entities spend as much as they like to buy the government in whatever way they like". So, no, it's not currently treason, the way chaining Africans wasn't kidnapping and murder at the time. But it still was kidnapping and murder. And it still is treason.

Re:American rights?

[Jason Levine]

Corporations are people. All people are equal. Some (corporation "people") are just more equal than others (individuals).

Re:American rights?

[Coren22]

How is patronage any different from the way it works currently. Replace elite with distributors/editors/publishing houses. The way it works now is that an author is given money up front to produce a work that then the publishing house has rights to publish and distribute. If you aren't known in the industry, it is very hard to get your work published, and you have to instead look at other ways to get your work out, such as eBook retailers.

Re:American rights?

[westlake]

Copyright is a right of a citizen, not a corporation. The legal definition of "legal entity", not withstanding, corporations should NEVER have rights of a citizen, because that diminishes the natural rights of people.

This is stupid.

The corporation is an organization. People in action.

It is flexible. It is powerful. It is damn near impossible to be politically or ecomically effective without such tools.

Which is why the geek loses these battles.

Re:American rights?

[scot4875]

They're saying that CU gave corporations more rights to pour money into politics,

You left out "anonymously".

--Jeremy

Re:American rights?

[scot4875]

Note that once the government starts restricting who can spend what in politics, it's not long before they're restricting YOU.

Let's apply some "anti-gay-marriage" logic to this; if the government starts allowing non-people to spend money to influence politics, how long until it lets cows and sheep and other animals spend money to influence politics?

--Jeremy

Re:American rights?

[Jawnn]

Because, for the first time, corporations are now allowed to spend as much as they want to influence our electoral process. That is a profound change, it's impact, even more so.

Re:American rights?

[dgatwood]

No, that does not make them worth less, because you can't (legally) make the copies. Besides, it was always pretty darn easy to make copies. They were lower quality copies, but that didn't mean that folks weren't passing around analog copies of stuff on tape decades ago.

The people who were going to copy content from others have always done so. The only thing computers did is make it so that one purchaser can fan out directly to a million people instead of most of the purchasers each fanning out to three or four, who in turn fanned out to three or four more, eventually fanning out to a million people. That and perfect copies instead of adding a little generation-loss noise. The net effect is still basically the same.

If anything makes digital content worth less, it's the fact that the creators can make and distribute those copies for less (the eBook vs. print problem). More precisely, if we perceive that we are getting less for our money (no physical product), we expect it to cost much less because we know that it isn't costing them anything to produce each copy.

Re:American rights?

[lgw]

Traditionally, almost no one could self-publish, so copyright would be licensed/contracted between author and publisher. The copyright originated from the author, even if a corporation (with the capital to publish) held it. That's becoming less of an issue over time, of course.

The other model is that an employee writes something, and under some license/contract transfers copyright to his employer - again, the copyright originated from the author.

I'm not seeing the problem here, just another "waa corporations are evil" rant. Doing large-scale work requires pooling of capital, there's no inherent injustice in that.

Re:American rights?

[WorBlux]

" (a staggering 20% of the top-selling books are under a buck apiece)."

And not one of them looks like it could become a classic. Even on the high paying side, perhaps the Hunger Games.The amount of money you can make on something is the difference between cost and price. E-books, even at 99 cents have a large difference between price and cost. If your work is so poor that you can't get 2500 people to buy your book a month when it's priced at a dollar, you really ought to think about a different profession. Besides there is a cost to popular culture and consumers generally when holding copyrights for a long term, and are a few more authors or questionable talent worth that? Writing is a competitive trade, and a reduced cost of entry will make it more competitive. Yes this means more authors will fail numerically speaking, but not necessarily proportionally speaking (and there is nothing wrong with that), but it also means that it is easier for authors of great talent to make a go of it. But seriously even without copyright you can make money, look up the studies for yourself, the reference I gave is a good place to start.

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand how money can be speech and at the same time financing terrorists is illegal. Talking to terrorists (while repugnant) is not illegal, but financing them is -- so, clearly, money is not the same as speech. Unless SCOTUS in their 2010 decision suddenly makes financing terrorists legal, it seems money isn't speech.

Re:American rights?

[jwhitener]

I forget his name, but a guest on the Rachael Maddow show made a pretty good case for a way out of this situation. It is generally easier to effect change at the State level. If enough States had elected officials critical of the CU SCOTUS ruling, they could call for a constitutional convention and amend the constitution to either declare that corporations are not people, or that money is not free speech, or various other combinations that would revoke corporate influence in politics.

Re:American rights?

[hacksoncode]

Gah! If you're going to use the Constitution as justification for something, please *read* the damn thing.

Point 1: Supreme Court Justices can be impeached the same was as presidents.

Point 2: "Treason" has a very specific definition in the Constitution that doesn't include making bad decisions.

Re:American rights?

[lexsird]

Ok, thanks. I read the entire thing from top to bottom about 20 years ago. It seems that might have slipped through the cracks. Do I look like a damn lawyer?

Well. you got me then. Woohoo, thank God. I will bite the bullet on that one and take the "Retard of the Month" award.

With that aside lets get that show started. Where to we start the process? It's that or we put in a new Constitutional clause to up end this shit. We can poke fun of me after this shit is settled, I will buy the first round of drinks, and probably the last.

Seriously people, we have to get back to Industrialist Capitalism and put this Slash N Burn Capitalism to pasture. Too many people in finance playing it like a gambling hall. A poster on /. set it right. They play it like Vegas with better cloths. It's in the short term, nano second fast, in a day traders, the "quick flips", driving a "fire a bunch of people" right before a quarter market. Watch the stock go up, and play it like a lotto ticket. That is all fine and dandy, but when it becomes the only game in town, and you cook the golden goose, the entire house falls apart around you and the natives are on the drums, it's time to GET A JOB.

That means it time to produce, and in order to produce HERE, you have to have some brains. You have to be able to deal with labor, and deal with regulations. Which means you can't be a goof or a crook, or a crooked goof about how you do things. You have to be smarter than the door knob. One big thing, if you let Education become some ego contest, and drive the price out of sight, or worse, be corporately "bottom line" driven about it, education turns into the unachievable that our "challenged" kids aren't going to get. You seriously want these modern kids to make Ivy League or even a facsimile? One thing we shouldn't be last in is smart, we don't have the numbers for it.

In order to do that, we have to reset the rules of the game back to the house. Literally.

Re:American rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're ignoring Teddy Roosevelt, who didn't get the nomination from his party and so ran under a different party (and won).

Re:American rights?

[Grishnakh]

I'm not sure if he's one of those four or not.

However, I'm quite sure that there's zero chance that Obama would win if he switched over to the Republican ticket. Which is funny since he's been championing Republican policies ever since he took office, but the Republican voters are so utterly stupid they still think he's a socialist, communist, etc. even though he's been helping out the big corporations every chance he's gotten. I have to wait until the Democratic Primaries are over before I can determine whether the Democrat voters are stupider than the Republican voters though; if they re-nominate Obama, I'll be forced to conclude that the Democrat voters are the stupider of the two. Fool me once, and all that.

Re:American rights?

[ScrewMaster]

I would argue that the copies do have value, but their worth relates to the effort it takes to make them.

Their worth (especially in an era where the manufacture of copies is effectively costless) is related to how much the market will pay for them. That may or may not have anything to do with how much was invested in their production. Many popular (and profitable) works were made on minimal budgets, where other much more expensive efforts failed to earn the expected revenue. The buying public is fickle at best.

Re:American rights?

[Grishnakh]

Nope. The whole reason "copyright" was invented was because copying became easy with the invention of the printing press. Before that, copying a book was an arduous chore that required teams of monks. The printing press changed all of that and made copying cheap and fast (relatively speaking), so they came up with laws giving limited monopolies to authors so that they would keep writing.

Remember, copies of software (or books) are not cheap or free. The first copy is very expensive. It's only the subsequent copies that are cheap. If you make it legal to copy works without paying the authors, then not very many people are going to bother being authors or software writers; you'll only have books written by authors funded by rich patrons (along with some written by hobbyists and posted online), and you'll only have Free software and custom in-house software (software funded by or written by a company for its own internal use). Thanks to the wealth of Free software, such a change probably wouldn't be quite as bad for the software world as it would for the book world. Sorry, but not that many people are going to bother writing popular fiction or nonfiction titles if they have to work a day job and won't get any money for their efforts; just think of all the computer reference books, like O'Reilly's, out there that Slashdotters probably use on a daily basis. But even the software world would experience some dramatic changes (aside from Microsoft collapsing); there's a lot of "enterprise" software out there which costs a fortune and pays the salaries for programmers at places like Oracle, Peoplesoft, etc. Yes, I know, "enterprise" seems to be a synonym for "crap" in this context many times, but many companies still experience a giant boost in productivity with this crap software, versus not having any software at all, and "enterprise" software is usually something that Free software people don't bother much with (though this is changing, such as with the open-source ERP software suites now available, where the software is OSS but you pay for support and other services).

Personally, I'd prefer copyright to remain in effect, but with drastic changes. Copyrights should be different for different media, and all should be drastically shortened. However, to please the corporate overlords, companies that want to protect things like Steamboat Willy should be able to do so, in perpetuity, simply by paying more fees, which can help fund the government. So, for instance, the first 5 years should be free, but after that you need to pay a $1000 fee to keep your work copyrighted for another 5 years. Every 5 years after that, you have to pay another fee or else it falls into the public domain. However, the catch is that the fee goes up geometrically: perhaps $5k at 10 years, $10k at 15, $50k at 20, $100k at 25, $500k at 30, $1m at 35, etc. Pretty soon it's in the billions, but Disney might just pay that for some things. For most things, of course, the authors/owners will simply let it lapse at some point because they're no longer making enough profit to justify the fee, and then we can have stuff in the public domain after only a couple of decades, depending on its popularity and profitability.

Land of the free?

[Anonymous Coward]

Enjoy your police state.

Re:Land of the free?

[kbg]

It seems USA is becoming more and more a police state with total disregard for human rights and law. People are being tortured and locked up indefinitely with no trial or jury and no one seems to think there is anything wrong with that, including the president or congress.

Re:Land of the free?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best part is the obvious Newspeak.
I ask you, when an oligopoly
- gets people to sign an exclusive service contract
- where they themselves can act like they resell the service an endless times,
- even though they did not do a single bit of work because all they made is free copies,
- and keep 97% of the money,
then who's the exploitative parasite and thief who rapes American rights here?

All based on the lie that you could "own" information, even though they themselves know (and take that side every time they have to defend themselves) that that is ludicrous nonsense, because how do you "own" something, whose distribution and usage is physically impossible to control, unless you put a chip in everyone's head to make it impossible to pass it on? Simple: You don't. And you don't even need to.
And based on the second lie that that passing on would have anything to do with them being harmed. When all small companies actually had a boom in profits because their stuff got more popular because of this.

Look at the biggest 3 industrial branches: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL2FOrx41N0
They don't have a problem with others copying their ideas. They thrive nicely. So it's clear, all the media industry (does not include artists) is, is a Mafia (yes, with one "a").

Re:Land of the free?

[EdgeCreeper]

Pick up that can.

Re:Land of the free?

[EdgeCreeper]

I apologize for this comment. I was enormously tired.

inducement?

[click2005]

Wouldn't that cover any site that ever mentions copyright infringement in a non-negative light?

Copy movies, games & music!!!!!

bye slashdot!

Re:inducement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess you are going to get a few FBI agents at your doorstep now. Perhaps they can hold interesting conversations?

Re:inducement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Need to set forests on fire in the shape of that phrase, Google Earth placed ad :) . I want to see them censor the land.

Re:inducement?

[GNious]

I'm thinking that combining Microsoft's statements that Linux infringes on their IP with the /. crowd's love of OSS, will get /. taken down for inducement .... and quite a few other sites as well!

Re:inducement?

[X0563511]

No worries, I'll leave some donuts in the fridge.

As a foreigner...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wipe my ass with your redundant constitution!

Re:As a foreigner...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all the resume you need to run for office in the US.

Re:As a foreigner...

[evil_aaronm]

Not "redundant", but ignored.

Re:As a foreigner...

[AK Marc]

Redundant outside the US often means "unused". A person who is "unused" is redundant. And when fired for such is "made redundant." Sure, that isn't the usual definition in the US, but he at least prefaced it with "as a foreigner..."

Re:As a foreigner...

[lennier1]

Just don't mention any birth certificates.

Re:As a foreigner...

[X0563511]

That doesn't excuse you from completely ignoring the denotative definition of a word. The issue is that the "unused" and ignored is done so BECAUSE it is redundant. It's a causal relationship. The words are not synonyms.

Re:As a foreigner...

[AK Marc]

They are synonyms in common use in some foreign locations. Your adherence to proscriptive definitions for a descriptive language doesn't work in the real world. Go learn French or something.

House v Senate

[damn_registrars]

The conservative democrats in charge of the senate drafted a scary but not terrifying bill. The conservative republicans in charge of the house responded by making a terrifying bill to rectify it with. That is what we get when we keep pushing all of our politicians further to the right. Next, President Lawnchair will proclaim this bill to be a great victory for the American people and sign it into law to show how he can work with his fellow conservative politicians in Washington DC.

Re:House v Senate

[Charliemopps]

This has nothing to do with left and right. It has to do with the inevitable road to subservience that government control of social policy always leads to.

Re:House v Senate

[damn_registrars]

This has nothing to do with left and right. It has to do with the inevitable road to subservience that government control of social policy always leads to.

Sure looks like another case of government selling out to corporate interests to me. The government has shown for some time that they care very little what the people have to say, as long as their sponsors are happy. This bill is yet another act aimed at pleasing the sponsors.

If we elected politicians from more than one party in this country we might have less of this and more governance of substance.

Re:House v Senate

[Darinbob]

This is not really a right/left issue. It's a pro/anti mass media issue. Trying to divide the entire complicated scope of politics into a simple left vs right is just one of the many stupid things messed up in the US.

Basically the politicians don't understand this stuff. They are just believing what they're told by high powered lobbyists from the movie and music industries. Some may be swayed because of some nice cash perks, some may be swayed because they're pro-corporations, some may be swayed because they want to be tough on piracy, etc. But ultimately politicians don't do their own research and they don't write their own bills.

Re:House v Senate

[7-Vodka]

Government ALWAYS turns into a tool of oppression for those with power, be they corporatti, clergy, royalty, gangsters or ambitious politicians.

This is why the american constitution was written explicitly to make sure that the government is granted limited powers by the people; not that the people are granted rights by the government.

Re:House v Senate

[serveto]

If you can't see whose pocket your government is in then you're beyond help.

Re:House v Senate

[Charliemopps]

Exactly, we limit the powers of the government control over everyone... including those we wish to control (in this case, corporations) because eventually those with wealth and power will turn that control against us.

Re:House v Senate

[Charliemopps]

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for. --Friedrich Hayek

The problem isn't that the government is controlling money in the wrong way... or in the wrong interest... the problem is that the government is trying to control money in the first place.

Re:House v Senate

[Jason Levine]

Unfortunately, it has now become "The government is granted limited powers by the corporations considered to be people."

chill out, guys

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a House bill. The President can always veto it, and that's assuming it gets past the Senate. Call your Congressman, call your Senators, write the White House. There's still a chance for the people to lobby against this.

Re:chill out, guys

[click2005]

Veto it? With a media-cartel funded puppet as the V.P?

Re:chill out, guys

[Nimey]

Yes, but Obama's a moderate Republican and the Senate Dems are either useless, in the corps' pockets themselves, or both.

There's always a chance, but in this case it's probably not a good one.

Re:chill out, guys

[nurb432]

You also have to keep in mind that with stuff like this they ask for the entire universe so they have room for 'negotiation', and they only wanted the moon in the first place...

Still bad tho

Re:chill out, guys

[Bucky24]

What does the vice president have to do with veto? Veto is the president's decision.

Re:chill out, guys

[Lotana]

So what is your solution? Just roll over and take it up the ass?

At least we can TRY to do something.

Re:chill out, guys

[Nimey]

I don't know. I've done the usual things of writing my congressweasels but 90% of the time they'll do the opposite of what I asked.

I suppose the logical next step is to link up with the Occupy protesters.

Re:chill out, guys

[DigiShaman]

You sir, are a choking hazard. WTF! Berry has got to be the most left-wing radical POTUS our nation has ever had. Period. PERIOD!!! He surpassed Carter. And you, for all your folly want to spin him as a "moderate Republican". If the amount of spin you're making was in the form of a machine, you would have no problem enriching uranium what-so-ever.

Re:chill out, guys

[Lotana]

Very true. Writing to congressmen never worked for me in the past either. All I was getting back are the generic thank you replies. Still, there must be something productive we can do.

Occupy movement is camping out in front of Wall Street while this issue is with the government. I guess we can try protesting at capitol hill, but I doubt that enough people understand what this act is about or what it intails to make enough of the showing.

Re:chill out, guys

[malilo]

BZZZ! You would be wrong, but thanks for playing. Turn off talk-radio for a minute and listen. Obama is center-right, and no socialist unless you could the "socialism for the elites" that is wall-street bailouts (including the unauthorized stealth bailouts going on through the Fed). He is practically aligned with the republicans when it comes to fiscal policy (which is to continue the taxes != expenses that both parties have been running for a while), and has proved himself the opposite of a progressive in social policy as well, up to and including MURDERING an American citizen without trial (or did you miss that?). He has not done anything to overturn the civil-liberties murdering patriot act, nor has he called back the illegal wire-tapping program. His administration has prosecuted more people for "treason" in revealing secret information than ever before. He has not increased taxes (talking about it doesn't count), and he has essentially held back prosecutors from going after the massive fraud on wall street.

All this is immaterial, because the real truth is he's a massive sell-out, in the pockets of the monied interests, and full of lies and rhetoric like 99% of pliticians out there... and now we know.

-- Love, a pinko commie liberal that WISHES we had a real progressive, or any, left candidate for president

Re:chill out, guys

[SuricouRaven]

Fight it with technology. If the law censors sites, invent ways to decensor them, or refocus piracy in a way less reliant on the web.

Re:chill out, guys

[am 2k]

Occupy movement is camping out in front of Wall Street while this issue is with the government.

Yes, so they're right there where the laws are made nowadays.

Re:chill out, guys

[maxwell demon]

Well, I think for the laws in question here, Hollywood would be the correct place.

First thing I thought:

[zugmeister]

Whoah! This has GOT to be an April 1st thing!

Time machine.

[TehNoobTrumpet]

Right back to 1984!

Re:Time machine.

[mikerubin]

the only thing Orwell had wrong was the year

You know you've given up on the government when...

[orphiuchus]

When you're response to garbage like this changes from outrage, and a motivation to act, to a sigh and a slump of the shoulders.

You know what? Fuck it. The majority in this country doesn't understand or care whats going on in Washington, and the corporations now run both political parties, but at least I get to keep my guns. Well, I cant use them in self defense anymore, but they sure do look neat.

It's a parasite, alright

[Anonymous Coward]

and it's feeding off of our freedoms and liberties. Fuck you, Congress.

I welcome them...

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one, welcome our Censoring Overlords.

All the US would needs to censor the web from anything it doesn't like is to pass this bill.

Wait, WHICH country is going to pass this?

[Anonymous Coward]

China or the U.S.?

I'd like to give a big fat F-YOU to all the lovelies up on Capitol Hill, but especially my "friends" who moved on to government positions in D.C. from High School/college and aren't doing anything at all to stop this.
You made me sick 10 years ago, and you make me sick now, I wonder what kind of world you think you're getting you pretentious douchebags.

Re:Wait, WHICH country is going to pass this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what kind of world you think you're getting you pretentious douchebags.

I think it's pretty obvious what kind of world they think they're getting: one that benefits them.

regulation regardless of neutrality

[ejtttje]

For all those who argued against net neutrality as promoting "regulation", see how little help that was, they will try to regulate anyway. We might as well get the useful consumer protections against corporate manipulations while they are/were available, otherwise we'll just get stuck with regulation at both gov't and corporate levels.

Re:You know you've given up on the government when

[Nimey]

We sure manage to make western Europe look good, don't we?

The end of the internet

[Catbeller]

The internet is becoming cable TV, monitored by the most complete surveillance state imaginable. Congrats. Told you so ten years ago.

Re:The end of the internet

[QuasiSteve]

So you like to remind us every once in a while (earlier today?), not counting all the other things that happened 10 years ago or the general notion in other posts that the shape of the internet is changing into something used for surveillance and stifling in freedom.
( Though your comment record doesn't go back 10 years.. curse you, Slashdot :) )

There's two observations to be made there, though...
1. You don't need to be a prophet to reach that conclusion.
Information (and money) is power. Governments want power. ergo, governments want information. How do you get information from use of the internet? By monitoring it.

Freedom, ultimately, means the wild wild west - a term that was used for the internet for a long, long time. However, as much as many people might enjoy that aspect, I don't often see a "First they came for the company selling our private data to the highest bidder..." defense popping up.. so clearly there is some desire to have some level of regulation of what takes place on the internet. ( I specifically didn't use a "think of the children" example - but I think most of us agree that it is even more likely to elicit responses stating that regulation there is desired. ) So yes, freedoms are stifled.. from things we all agree on is illegal, to things that we like to think should be perfectly legal but corporations disagree and tend to have the law on their side.

And, of course, that's where the 'money is power' bit comes into play. Unfortunately the masses don't seem to be very keen on getting themselves organized and building their own 'buy-a-politician/law' fund.. which could certainly be done but most people really can't be bothered.

Which is basically the second observation...
2. People can't be bothered.
People, in general, don't really care much if they can no longer download state secrets (just look at how many people condemn wikileaks for 'putting lives at danger' while nothing seems to have happened - yet praise the quran-burning pastor for exercising his freedom of speech.. even though that directly lead to deaths), nor do they care if they can no longer download some random movie. They're already appeased by Netflix despite its dismal offering and iTunes despite its own share of issues. They also don't care much about the monitoring.. they know they're being monitored and many believe that in the interest of e.g. 'catching terrorists' that's a-ok.. the whole "nothing to hide" argument usually pops up.

( The following might seem ad hominem, but it's intended as an example. )

We can't really blame those masses either. If somebody appears to be very vocal protestor on these issues, and states among other that "Private entities are [the scary actors], and anyway they are part of the state de facto", but then goes and requests a Google+ invite complete with e-mail address posted, then what should those masses be making of the apparently mixed signals?

We Salute Our New Media Overlords

[Anonymous Coward]

Infringing on (RIAA's) Copyright & Profitability - Pirate Bay
Infringing on (RIAA's) Copyright & Profitability - Weird Al, cover tunes on YouTube, fair use, time shifting (all unlicensed DVRs)
Infringing on (Microsoft's) Patents & Profitability - Ubuntu & Android (and All Linux)
Infringing on (Apple's) Patents & Profitability - RIM (darned Canadians Eh?)
Infringing on (Fox New's) 'Truth' & Profitability - BBC, CBC, Al Jezeera
Infringing on (Catholic Church's) 'Truth' & Profitability - Scientific Publications, Tax-Free Status (and, well, reality)
Infringing on (Corporate 1%) 'Truth' & Profitability - Government Regulation, Democrats, 'Occupy Everywhere'
Infringing on (Government & Corporate) 'Truth' & Profitability - Anonymous, Occupy Everywhere, 'Free Thinkers'
Infringing on (Corporate) 'Truth' & Profitability - Google (by providing access to views that challenge 'Everything is fine')

Expect some harsh censorship in this 'Land of Free' (copyright used without permission)

Re:We Salute Our New Media Overlords

[Cheerio Boy]

Infringing on (RIAA's) Copyright & Profitability - Pirate Bay Infringing on (RIAA's) Copyright & Profitability - Weird Al, cover tunes on YouTube, fair use, time shifting (all unlicensed DVRs) Infringing on (Microsoft's) Patents & Profitability - Ubuntu & Android (and All Linux) Infringing on (Apple's) Patents & Profitability - RIM (darned Canadians Eh?) Infringing on (Fox New's) 'Truth' & Profitability - BBC, CBC, Al Jezeera Infringing on (Catholic Church's) 'Truth' & Profitability - Scientific Publications, Tax-Free Status (and, well, reality) Infringing on (Corporate 1%) 'Truth' & Profitability - Government Regulation, Democrats, 'Occupy Everywhere' Infringing on (Government & Corporate) 'Truth' & Profitability - Anonymous, Occupy Everywhere, 'Free Thinkers' Infringing on (Corporate) 'Truth' & Profitability - Google (by providing access to views that challenge 'Everything is fine')

Expect some harsh censorship in this 'Land of Free' (copyright used without permission)

My kingdom for a mod point.

Re:We Salute Our New Media Overlords

[Grishnakh]

Infringing on (Corporate 1%) 'Truth' & Profitability - Government Regulation, Democrats, 'Occupy Everywhere'

Sorry, the Dems are just in favor of protecting the "Corporate 1%"'s profitability as the Reps.

Infringing on (Apple's) Patents & Profitability - RIM (darned Canadians Eh?)

RIM's products are crap, and no one who wants an iPhone ever looks twice at a Crackberry, it's a totally different market. I think you're thinking of Samsung here.

Re:We Salute Our New Media Overlords

[Fluffeh]

Indeed. The mark of a good post is when you can't help but smirk because it is so spot on right, but also wince because it is so spot on right.

Re:We Salute Our New Media Overlords

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice how Google and Google products appeared on the "good guy" side of his equation three times while overlooked all the bad shit they do? I guess we can see what stock dominates HIS portfolio...

Re:We Salute Our New Media Overlords

[Anonymous Coward]

Expect some harsh censorship in this 'Land of Free' (copyright used without permission)

I think you just hit it right there. That's what all of this IP bullshit is leading to: a country in which the executive branch may arrest, try, and convict you for anything they want. Why? Because every word or phrase that comes from your mouth, pen, or fingers-on-keyboard has been used before.

We're just on the first step to unilateralism. Again.

Bring it on

[nurb432]

The internet will go darknet so fast it will make their heads spin.

Re:Bring it on

[countertrolling]

Yeah? How well do you think that's gonna work with deep packet inspection? And please, save your breath about encryption. That too, will be restricted...

Re:Bring it on

[GameboyRMH]

I was just doing some darknet browsing and there is a healthy amount of stuff on there. About half of it is child porn, but still, the number of sites is encouraging.

Re:Bring it on

[Bucky24]

I imagine someone clever will find a way to do encryption without being apparent that it's encryption.

Re:Bring it on

[Anonymous Coward]

How? They can forbid it in law, but they won't be very successful enforcing it. An encrypted file is not really distinguishable from an unencrypted but unknown file. And for someone who's already pirating stuff, breaking an extra law or two won't really matter, will it?

Re:Bring it on

[ravenshrike]

Besides which, encryption would ultimately fall under freedom of speech.

Re:Bring it on

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. My first thought was "Yes! Please!"

Draconian copyright law is like blowing up asteroids. It takes one big isolated problem and splinters it in to buckshot.

Considering the bullshit that has been going on with domain seizures I say the time has more than come to go I2P/TOR on this bitch.

Re:Bring it on

[EdIII]

I can't wait for it.

Right now with Social Media and all the bullshit you have less privacy and anonymity than ever before. People don't understand the danger.

Anything that motivates people to participate heavily in darknets is a good thing in the long run for freedom.

Re:Bring it on

[am 2k]

An encrypted file is not really distinguishable from an unencrypted but unknown file.

They can simply block all unknown files.

Re:Bring it on

[Anonymous Coward]

How long before you ban "harmful unlicensed packet obfuscation" to combat "the rising threat of online theft on dark networks"? This will fly pretty easilly past the heads of the same zombies that let the likes of PATRIOT and MMPA through.

Re:Bring it on

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography#Example_from_modern_practice

Ban all lossy compression too?

Re:Bring it on

[ImprovOmega]

And then 90 million bank accounts are immediately hijacked. Concurrently, 200 million credit cards are scammed. The country goes into bankruptcy from identity theft losses. Russia becomes the new world superpower on the backs of countless mafia scams. The apocalypse dawns.

Thanks PARASITE, you really did us a solid there.

Re:Bring it on

[am 2k]

SSL doesn't have to be abandoned. The US government can already generate a certificate for any domain they want due to the brokenness of the CA trust system, and it's accepted in every major OS without any warning. Then they can check the decrypted stream for any undesirable content.

Re:Bring it on

[Anonymous Coward]

And only two people will use it.

Will be hard to do

[Hentes]

Implementing a nationwide Internet filter is not an easy task. I'm not sure they are serious about actually enforcing the bill. But if they do, it will be funny watching Google and Facebook and the like move out.

Re:Will be hard to do

[nurb432]

Not hard at all to do since there are so few ISP's left in the country, and they all feed back to the same backbone anyway.

Sure, hard core people can get around it, but not 99% of the citizens who can barely turn their PC on. And besides, if you don't know its out there, they wont even look for it. ( assuming that search engines will be soon forced to remove any search results or be faced with blockage themselves )

Re:Will be hard to do

[Dynedain]

Hmmm.... convince AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, TimeWarner, Cox, Covad, Sprint, and TMobile to all participate in "voluntary" filtering on all their services (including backhauls and wholesale services) and you've effectively implemented censorship for 90%+ of US consumer internent access.

Once you consider the vested interest those same major ISPs have in content generation or delivery (TV service offerings, production studios, etc) it's pretty obvious why they'd get on board with this kind of plan.

Re:Will be hard to do

[Joe U]

So, make it accessible.

Find some way to build a program that people want and bury in the terms of agreement that you are a node on a vpn darknet.

Re:Will be hard to do

[Bucky24]

Hmmmm use the corporations own weapon, obfuscation of the EULA, against them. Clever, very clever.

I fucking hate...

[hipp5]

E-PARASITE? Really? I fucking hate forced acronyms. At my undergrad university there was a group called DREAM - Discovering the Reality of Educating All Minds. Their goal was good (building schools in developing countries) but I refused to ever donate to them because I hated their acronym.

Re:I fucking hate...

[mattventura]

I think its a great acronym. The RIAA, MPAA, and the other groups behind this bill are complete parasites, and I think they deserve to have a bill named after them.

Re:I fucking hate...

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes me wonder how much time they spend to come up with these stupid names.
Or do they have companies that specialize in thinking of this crap?

Re:I fucking hate...

[evil_aaronm]

When I worked at a company that sounded like Rotomola, our group had this "team building" thing involving plastic fish. You came to meetings with a plastic fish. You went to team lunches carrying a plastic fish. Shades of Sneetches. That all stopped pretty quick when I circulated a department email promoting an "underground" group known as PAIN - People Against Ichthyoid Nonsense. H/t to Calvin & Hobbes.

Re:I fucking hate...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Their goal was good (building schools in developing countries) but I refused to ever donate to them because I hated their acronym.

So, do you have any nose left or are you still angry at your face?

Re:I fucking hate...

[MysteriousPreacher]

"Clever" acronyms and overly dramatic names are what I like about American bills. It's like they're being named by over-excited twelve year old kids. Patriot Act and The Defence of Marriage Act are among the best.

Re:I fucking hate...

[Grog6]

That's the best our politicians can do; all that's left are morons.

Have you seen the debates? 12-year-olds is a stretch...

Re:I fucking hate...

[Grishnakh]

Um, I don't get it. Yes, PATRIOT ACT was one of those "clever acronyms", but the Defense of Marriage Act's acronym was "DOMA", which doesn't mean anything that I'm aware of.

Re:I fucking hate...

[AK Marc]

Much like CAN-SPAM made it so they Can Spam you (superseded state laws blocking Spam making Spam more prevalent than before, and made it clear what was and wasn't allowed so they could more easily skirt the line).

Re:I fucking hate...

[Lanteran]

Indeed... I thought it was something the FSF had named it, hilarious that it's official. Sad though, Really sad.

Re:I fucking hate...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think its a great acronym. The RIAA, MPAA, and the other groups behind this bill are complete parasites, and I think they deserve to have a bill named after them.

Parasites are fought by diet. Starve them out. Find all theirs revenue avenues and just refuse to walk them. Boycott, encourage others to boycott, and tell them you are boycotting them. Don't give them your attention. No infringement, no fair use, no any use. A complete damnatio memorie. Boycott their trailers, commercials, broadcasts, prominent stars, especially avoid their merchandise. Don't touch even their free handouts, it is all infused with poison for your liberty. If they try to give it to you, tell them where to put it. Don't even discuss their stuff. If anyone brings up a subject, tell them you don't want to know about it and why. Others' instant dreams became our shackles. We don't need them. We can and should and do have our own dreams.

Re:I fucking hate...

[MysteriousPreacher]

It's more the drama implied by the name, as if every married couple will be assigned a couple of marines for their own protection.

Re:I fucking hate...

[Ant P.]

And the new name is a truthful representation of what this law's sponsors intend to do with it, unlike the old one.

Re:I fucking hate...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Defense of Marriage Act, which "defends" marriage by fighting against it...

Re:I fucking hate...

[residieu]

Or that Marriage is in danger of collapsing and dieing if we let more people get married. (Defense of Marriage Act would be an ok name if it was actually aimed at helping marriage, preventing divorces, etc)

Re:I fucking hate...

[Grishnakh]

Except that the only thing I can think of offhand that government can do to actually help marriage (like preventing divorces), without wrongly intruding into peoples' lives (such as by making couples undergo marriage counseling with government counselors, like what some churches do), is to improve the economy. Bad economic times are hard on marriages and cause many to fall apart under the strain. But of course, the Democrats and Republicans don't care about helping regular people, they'd rather give no-strings bailouts to giant corporations so their CEOs can get huge bonuses.

Re:I fucking hate...

[Grog6]

Most people called it DOMASS.

Get it now? :)

LOL! American Freedom!

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL! American Freedom!

china copys us stuff and pass it off as there own

[Joe_Dragon]

china copys us stuff and pass it off as there own

What about the public rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright is supposed to be a double-sided sword:
- protect the authors for a limited time so that they can profit from their works
- protect the public from the authors by giving them free access to the works after the limited time

We've gone from "publishing date + 20 years" to "70 years after the author's death". What a joke.

Re:What about the public rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright is supposed to be a double-sided sword:
- protect the authors for a limited time so that they can profit from their works
- protect the public from the authors by giving them free access to the works after the limited time

We've gone from "publishing date + 20 years" to "70 years after the author's death". What a joke.

Coyright as intended doesn't exist anymore for all practical considerations.
Saying we want to change copyright to a more equilibrate system is akin to changing the orbit of the sun, its just not going to happen. Unless of course a revolution ensues, we chop the heads off of politicians, mpaa men, riaa men etc... A bloody purge that will be a new begining and hopefully with saner people and a saner system. But this is wishfull thinking.

Realisitically what needs to happen is something more difficult to achieve, and that is for Creative Commons licenses and other licenses like these to become accepted by the common man. The main street artist has to start adopting these new flexbiles licences that give him the same protection as copyright but also enough room so that fair use is actually fair use. Change has to come from the bottom. Expecting politicians in this corrupt system to hear the pleas of civil society is meaningless. What corporations fear is open culture. The culture we create has to be open, otherwise it will simply disappear within vaults or eternal copyright lengths never to be seen, used or enjoyed again.

Re:What about the public rights?

[AK Marc]

When the author is listed as a corporation and corporations never die, neither will copyrights.

A breakthrough!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I must say, rarely in the history of bullshit-acronymed bills do you see one so honestly named...

It's just the minor matter that the name refers to the bill's friends, and not to their enemies. A pity, that.

China copies U.S. Intellectual Property...

[Anonymous Coward]

My totally new concept:

China copies U.S. Intellectual Property and tries to pass it off as its own.

Sounds and spells better that way.

Re:China copies U.S. Intellectual Property...

[jd]

Indeed. Didn't the US do this for a longish while, signing up to the International treaties after they'd got the good stuff?

I'm not saying that China is "faultless" or the US is "all bad", but let's face facts - America would not have made the progress it has if it had respected European patent laws and European property rights. If it wants to claim China is in the wrong, then I have nothing against that provided it is NOT for the purpose of maintaining a hegemony obtained solely through the same practices. If China is guilty, then American corporations and the American government owe Europe a percentage of the profits secured through IP theft.

Sure, that might push the US into recession. Isolating China and closing down all counterfeit goods plus genuine goods based on stolen IP would not merely put China into recession, it would bankrupt it. If you're willing to do the latter, you should be man enough to accept the former.

The good news is that 100+ years of compound interest for some of the products and 60+ years of accumulated value in the case of property illegally confiscated from British and other Allied nations during WW2 should cover the combined debts of Italy, Greece, Spain and Ireland, and leave enough left over for the heads of State to put in advance orders for GTA 5.

Re:China copies U.S. Intellectual Property...

[Nimey]

I think you could make a strong argument that we paid Europe back with our involvement in the world wars and the Marshall Plan.

Re:China copies U.S. Intellectual Property...

[dryeo]

How so? WWI you joined very late in the game, after millions had been killed, leaving you as the only power who hadn't had pretty well a whole generation where the best had died.
WWII you had a choice of surrendering or getting involved after Germany declared war on you. It was easy to help as you had just about the only functioning industrial base at that time and couldn't very well continue selling stuff to Germany after they'd declared war on you and it was the Russians who made the real sacrifices to win the war.
The Marshall plan was probably guilt driven after the demands that you made on the English to dismantle their industry in return for loans combined with fear about the Russians who you had witnessed being willing to make sacrifices to win the war.
America did pretty well out of the wars, much better then any one else.

Re:China copies U.S. Intellectual Property...

[jd]

Not only that, the US has been demanding the payback of loans made during the wars (loans with interest, I might add) that would never have been required if the US hadn't initially sided with Germany and confiscated Allied property in the US. Hell, had the confiscations not happened, US involvement might never have been needed - Europe might have been able to afford an armed forces capable of resisting the Germans.

Re:China copies U.S. Intellectual Property...

[Hazel Bergeron]

WW2 was on the western front in the long term an industrial war between Britain and America, and America won.

The US remained neutral with tacit support toward the Nazis (in the usual US way - ever onward, IBM!), entered the war once Europe was sufficiently weakened, and used loan conditions and the Marshall plan to cripple Britain's already damaged industry. When the last repayment had been made by Thatcher (when was a bank last a charity?), she followed Reagan's bidding, inevitably finishing the job of destroying what was left of it.

Similarly, the Eurozone is Germany's fourth economic Reich. Following US practice, by encouaraging one sort of behaviour while acting far more sensibly herself, she has crippled the majority of the continent and made it dependent on her. Greece should do as Iceland: default and recover as an independent, responsible unit rather than enduring prolonged debt slavery. Remind the continent that things were moving along fine before the Euro experiment, when everyone didn't put all their eggs in the basket of a few well-to-do guys up north. But it won't because it's scared - like much of Europe has been scared for the past 70 years.

Re:China copies U.S. Intellectual Property...

[Frangible]

Germans came to WWII with experienced soldiers, were machine-gun heavy at a unit level, had panzers, and blitzkrieg. There's pretty much no amount of money you could spend at that time on short-term purchases to stop that juggernaut that was the Wehrmacht, any more than the Wehrmacht could stop the Red Army.

Re:China copies U.S. Intellectual Property...

[maxwell demon]

You're British, right?

Re:China copies U.S. Intellectual Property...

[orasio]

Good one. Whooosh to the other repliers!!
Anyhow, I don't see why some people think the Chinese can't do whatever they please, regarding patents and stuff.
Patents are an industrial decision, countries are soverreign and can treat them as they please, and better serves their interest.
Of course, if they sign treaties and fail to honour them, there might be consequences, but it's just a strategic decision they make, maybe it's worth not to honour them.

Ugh

[Jethro]

Does someone get paid specifically to come up with these names? I can't decide if they should be paid a lot more or be tarred and feathered.

Re:Ugh

[marcosdumay]

They should be paid way more. Thousands of times more.

And prohibited to work to any cause worth supporting.

Re:Ugh

[Fluffeh]

If this gets you in a pickle, you should really spend a moment reading some of the funnier astronomy acronyms for names although be warned. If you feel strongly about this title, you should be seated for the link.

Parasites?

[Anonymous Coward]

So far the only parasites involved in this law are the lobbyists who bought it, and the worthless politicians who were bought.

China is looking good....

[MeNeXT]

What is wrong with the US?

What ever happened to free speech and the land of the free?

Re:China is looking good....

[GameboyRMH]

What ever happened to free speech and the land of the free?

It was lacking some profit optimization.

Re:China is looking good....

[Bucky24]

As improbable as it may seem, the US is still not as bad as China. But we're headed there.

Re:China is looking good....

[GrahamCox]

What ever happened to free speech and the land of the free?

You sold it. Hope you got a good price, and it was worth it.

Re:China is looking good....

[Anonymous Coward]

What ever happened to free speech and the land of the free?

Apparently, anybody who listens to speech without paying for it is an electronic parasite.

You don't wanna know what they do people who try to speak without paying for it.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[andresa]

Welcome to world where you do what's good for you at the moment. It's not like this is a new concept for US either. China practically owns US now, and in 10-20 years it will start to really show. In the end, they will probably fall again, but it will be China who controls the world soon (again). It's the cycle of life.

Copyright hypocrasy

[msobkow]

It's kind of hypocritical to preach about copyrights providing the teeth to software licensing, while ignoring the demands of other copyright holders.

Re:Copyright hypocrasy

[msobkow]

I will no longer feed my OCD-like compulsion to collect media. It's not like I watch what I download, anyhow. I just archive it for later, but later never seems to come.

Re:Copyright hypocrasy

[msobkow]

Torrent site links deleted.

Re:Copyright hypocrasy

[Travelsonic]

And it is outright stupid to think that this is "THE" dichotomy present, IMO.

A veto doesn't help

[tepples]

A veto doesn't help when a bipartisan bill clears both houses by unanimous consent; they'll just go right ahead and unanimously override the veto.

Re:A veto doesn't help

[AK Marc]

Has that ever happened? Presidents threaten veto, but if they think it might be overridden, they won't veto, even when they think it should be vetoed. To veto and lose leads to loss of political clout. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_vetoes Not that many overrides, well, except for Andrew Jackson, but he was impeached for not playing nice with Congress, even more of a sham impeachment than Clinton's.

E-parasite, e-crime, e-jail, e-conomy

[gale the simple]

I sometimes wonder if there is any sense of irony in those who name those bills. For second I figured it cannot possibly be real. Back to earth..

I skimmed through the text and found a nice little nugget stating search engines have to make sure the offending sites cannot be found. That will be fun.

I also find it especially heart warming that our leaders have time to draft this while the country is literally falling apart. Sigh, time for another letter to my, supposed, representative.

Re:E-parasite, e-crime, e-jail, e-conomy

[am 2k]

I also find it especially heart warming that our leaders have time to draft this while the country is literally falling apart.

Uh, that bill is a side effect of that (being ruled by corporations), not some coincidence.

Re:E-parasite, e-crime, e-jail, e-conomy

[maxwell demon]

I also find it especially heart warming that our leaders have time to draft this while the country is literally falling apart.

You honestly think they drafted it themselves? More probably it's mostly drafted by the lobbyists.

On Piracy...

[Sasayaki]

I'm in the process of writing a book, called Lacuna: Demons of the Void, seen here. I'm just in the final review and cleanup pass now.

The first three chapters are available for free, and are CC-BY-SA-NC; this means that you can legally and safely write whatever fanfiction you want, or pass the sample chapters around, or change and remix them or do whatever you want basically as long as you don't sell it, don't change the licence and credit me appropriately.

I did this because if the book (and subsequent sequels if any) gets popular, I didn't want to get old and fat and retarded and turn into the next George Lucas, grabbing hold of my precious precious IP and never letting go.

Anyway. This law is basically insane.

I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.

I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?

Fuck those guys.

Re:On Piracy...

[microbox]

Fuck those guys.

Hypocrites indeed. Happiness doesn't come from their crap anyway. Not being able to download something is nothing to get bent out of shape about. If this law is ever enforced, then we'll just see a sharp contraction in MAFIAA profits, and it will serve them right. Nothing of real value will have been lost.

Re:On Piracy...

[Sasayaki]

If this law is ever enforced, then we'll just see a sharp contraction in MAFIAA profits, and it will serve them right. Nothing of real value will have been lost.

And all the losses will be blamed on piracy, and used to support even stronger and more insane laws.

Re:On Piracy...

[himurabattousai]

Fuck those guys.

Or, better yet, don't. We don't want more of them around.

Re:On Piracy...

[Ragun]

This was the best rant I have heard in a good while.

I'll check out your book.

Re:On Piracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the new Tyler Durden rant. We're no longer slaves to buying STUFF we're slaves to buying AIRWAVES.

Re:On Piracy...

[TangoMargarine]

Optimistic poster is (overly) optimistic.

Re:On Piracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the three chapters you have posted. You have a lot of spelling and grammar errors. You need a proof reader or two.

Land of the free...

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporations! It's about regulating the people and deregulating the corporations.

Obviously unconsititutional

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think even the horrible treasonous supreme court we have now would let this through

Re:Obviously unconsititutional

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think even the horrible treasonous supreme court we have now would let this through

Ha ha ha ha. You sir made my day.

Re:Obviously unconsititutional

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, even if that were true, it will still take YEARS for it to work its way up to the supreme court. Not to mention all the money in court costs and lawyers.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[inviolet]

Welcome to world where you do what's good for you at the moment. It's not like this is a new concept for US either. China practically owns US now, and in 10-20 years it will start to really show. In the end, they will probably fall again, but it will be China who controls the world soon (again). It's the cycle of life.

It's hard to 'own' a country by holding its currency, when you don't also control its printing presses. In the past decade, the US has doubled its money supply (M2), which via inflation has pulled about 40% of the rug out from under the US currency holdings in China's central bank. And there is no let-up in sight. In terms of money, China has been royally screwed.

Of course they weren't after money; what they wanted was to industrialize and modernize, getting their hands on our IP. They did, but you are mistaken if you think that such a thing is a net loss for the US. When the world contains many new manufacturers of the goods we desire, the real cost of those goods goes down. Have you noticed that even though your money has been inflating like crazy over the past decade, manufactured goods have nevertheless cost fewer dollars? A microwave oven these days costs $35!

Not to mention new R&D. China is beginning to invent new things, and make new discoveries. While these things have temporary effects on the movements of money, in the long run we benefit from having other people making discoveries alongside us, rather than continuing to scrabble in rice paddies.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[ackthpt]

Welcome to world where you do what's good for you at the moment. It's not like this is a new concept for US either. China practically owns US now, and in 10-20 years it will start to really show. In the end, they will probably fall again, but it will be China who controls the world soon (again). It's the cycle of life.

Back in the eighteenth century Lord Macartney approached the Emperor with the finest goods of Britain - which paled in comparison to the riches of the asian court. There's a saying, "China already has everything, would could you possibly offer China", ultimately the answer was Opium.

China is returning to glory days, where China will have everything everyone else has and the question will be, "What can you possibly offer to the Chinese?" Tough question to answer.

Filling the jails

[Anonymous Coward]

The Oakland OWS is filling the jails already. I don't like the communist element in there; but when more real Americans join, that shit tends to get drowned out.

Oakland is a start. Fill the jails, pirate all you can. It'll reach a tipping point where the bloated salaries of public union prison guards and cops aren't enough to prop it up. The whole thing has to fall over at some point.

Re:Filling the jails

[GameboyRMH]

It'll reach a tipping point where the bloated salaries of public union prison guards and cops aren't enough to prop it up. The whole thing has to fall over at some point.

I'm sure the 1% would love to have their private prisons filled to capacity and beyond.

So bye-bye these American rights

[jpapon]

A long, long time ago...

I can still remember

How that music used to make me smile.

And I knew if I had my chance

That I could make those people dance

And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while.

But legislation made me shiver

With every takedown I’d deliver.

Bad news on the doorstep;

I couldn’t take one more step.

I can’t remember if I cried

When I read about their lawless crime

But something touched me deep inside

The day the freedom died.

Re:So bye-bye these American rights

[Cheerio Boy]

Good job! Too bad we don't have an ending to the song yet. :-/

You're not the first to write something like that btw:
http://nimitzbrood.livejournal.com/184178.html

Mine was a little more hopeful at the end...foolish me...

Re:So bye-bye these American rights

[Anonymous Coward]

Good job! Too bad we don't have an ending to the song yet. :-/

That is the ending. He was told that he wasn't allowed to even think about the original tune because it violated E-PARASITE.

Re:So bye-bye these American rights

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that this was intended to be funny, but the sad part is that its very true! It greatly saddens me to see what this once-great nation has come to because of corrupt politicians, uncontrolled rampant corporate greed, and public apathy.

I used to be proud to be an American, and to say so. Now I am ashamed at what we have allowed to be done to to what was once the greatest nation on earth. We see the constitution ignored by the federal, state and local governments on a daily basis as our rights and freedoms are stolen away to increase the wealth of the waelthiest corporations and individuals at the expense of everyone else.

Will we ever see government of the people BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE again? Instead of government of the people, by the corporations, for the waelthy, which is what we have now? What will happen when the corporations and the wealthy have all of everything, and the rest of us have nothing? It doesn't seem like that is far off now.

Re:So bye-bye these American rights

[Anonymous Coward]

old pirates yes the rob i
sold i to the merchant ship
in three minutes loops they locked i
from the bottomless pit
but my creativity was made strong
by the hands of the almighty
we forward in this generation
triumphantly

won't you help to share
these songs for freedom
cause all i ever have
Redemption songs

Emancipate yourselves from music industry
none but ourselves can distribute the sound
have no fear for parasite act
cause non of them can stop the time

how long shall they steal our culture
while we stand beside and look
some say it's just a part of it
we've got to pay for the hooker

won't you help to share

Possibly not

[F69631]

IIRC it wasn't clear whether the year was actually 1984 or whether that was just one of the lies that the ministry had created.

Re:Possibly not

[Bucky24]

Maybe 1984 was written in the future and sent back in time as a warning...

Re:Possibly not

[Lanteran]

No, but it couldn't have been drastically wrong, Winston was about 39, and he had pre-revolution childhood memories.

Re:You know you've given up on the government when

[Carewolf]

They even name the act PARASITE now, just to mock you. They know IP is parasitic, and they are telling you they know, and they will still pass it while laughing at you at the same time.

Actually that some pretty high-class douche-baggery.. I am both impressed and slightly scared.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 1. The Chinese have everything.
Step 2. Offer them opium.
Step 3. PROFIT!!
Step 4. Repeat

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[Luckyo]

The main sign of failure in pre-WW1 and pre-WW2 Europe has been copyright crackdown, while New World has been blatantly copying and pirating everything.

Look at how that story ended up. Truly history keeps repeating itself, and every time we do not learn.

You are number 921437...

[linatux]

and presumably happy to take any +1's going

Re:You know you've given up on the government when

[Sipper]

You can either scorn apathy, or become apathetic yourself, but somehow you've done both. Interesting dichotomy.

I think the acronym "E-PARASITE" makes it clear that the bill is a big "fuck you". This is good, because it gives us something obvious to hate, rather than calling the bill something like "PROTECT " and making it seem as if we're supposed to like the shit sandwich that it is. However my concern is that with all of this trying to "protect IP", there doesn't seem to be any recognition within government that all of the protected "IP" is greatly slowing down innovation. Yet the U.S. in general wants it both ways -- to be leading innovators, and yet also be leading in IP protection which slows down innovation. Yet another interesting dichotomy.

Presumption of guilt

[Adrian Lopez]

In the United States, people accused of a crime are guaranteed a trial and presumed innocent until proved guilty. Under the E-PARASITE Act, a website is presumed to be infringing unless and until the affected party can, if allowed to do so by the government, prove to the government that the website is perfectly legal. What a shameful perversion of a justice system that prides itself in being a model of justice.

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

people accused of a crime are guaranteed a trial and presumed innocent until proved guilty. Under the E-PARASITE Act, a website is presumed to be infringing

Solution: Incorporate your website. It then becomes a person entitled to a trial and presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Voila!

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you should incorporate your website and bring that case before the supreme court. Corporations have the same rights as people you know!

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't changing the presumption of guilt raise constitutional issues? There was a similar case in Australia recently (R v Momcilovic) which resulted in a statute creating a presumption of guilt for drug offenses being overturned.

Posting anon because I modded.

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

In the United States, people accused of a crime are guaranteed a trial and presumed innocent until proved guilty.

Tell that to the people in Guantanamo Bay...

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

In the United States, people accused of a crime are guaranteed a trial and presumed innocent until proved guilty.

Yeah, umm, that's why people are put in jail while they are awaiting trial... not to mention all that PATRIOT act stuff.

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we can get this bill mentioned on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Any ideas on the best way to do that?

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

The DMCA's been doing that for a minute now.

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not novel. Just ask the many people who've had their possessions seized by the police because of simple suspicion of illegal activity -- even those possessions that have absolutely no evidentiary value, such as money, cars, boats, etc. Most Americans really don't give a shit about it because the goernment wouldn't seize your shit unless you're guilty of dealing or hacking or whatever, right?

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Adrian Lopez]

That's not novel. Just ask the many people who've had their possessions seized by the police because of simple suspicion of illegal activity -- even those possessions that have absolutely no evidentiary value, such as money, cars, boats, etc. Most Americans really don't give a shit about it because the goernment wouldn't seize your shit unless you're guilty of dealing or hacking or whatever, right?

Those laws are fucked up, but it's not necessarily the same thing. The difference, I think, is that the First Amendment comes into play when websites containing constitutionally protected content are shut down due to claims of infringement.

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

In the United States, people accused of a crime are guaranteed a trial and presumed innocent until proved guilty. Under the E-PARASITE Act, a website is presumed to be infringing ...

Websites are not people. Corporations are people.

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

But websites are people, too!

They have a right to free speech.

Re:Presumption of guilt

[bwcbwc]

And the 4th amendment comes into play for unreasonable search and seizure. I can see the seizure up to a point, but a lot of times the assets are disposed of at auction before there is a trial, which is just plain conversion.

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Adrian Lopez]

But websites are people, too!

They have a right to free speech.

No, but the people behind those websites have a right to free speech.

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

"people accused of a crime are guaranteed a trial and presumed innocent until proved guilty"

Yeah - try saying that to Bradley Manning....

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

In the United States, people accused of a crime are guaranteed a trial and presumed innocent until proved guilty. Under the E-PARASITE Act, a website is presumed to be infringing unless and until the affected party can, if allowed to do so by the government, prove to the government that the website is perfectly legal. What a shameful perversion of a justice system that prides itself in being a model of justice.

are "people" assumed to be innocent until proven guilty or is it "American Citizens"? being a non-american person myself, I have no idea which it is, though I suspect it could actually be the latter, despite the blatant contradiction with "All men are created equal" of the declaration of independence.

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

It may be perverse, but it's not new. Websites are not people; they're property, and civil asset forfeiture law has used the legal fiction of accusing inanimate objects of crimes for some time now.

Re:Presumption of guilt

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps reading up on what happened to Kevin Mitnick, one of many such cases, would clear up your delusions that you'll get a trial. If someone does not want you to have a trial, all they have to do is instill enough fear about your capabilities to make it impossible for the potential host of the trial to ensure those fears will not manifest. Mass media has gotten very good at doing just that.

Maybe this isn't such a bad thing

[Pence128]

Sometimes the only way to get something fixed is to break it all the way.

Re:Maybe this isn't such a bad thing

[EdgeCreeper]

They're not that dumb.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[Bucky24]

I guess we'll have to offer them something more potent this time...

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[slick7]

The main sign of failure in pre-WW1 and pre-WW2 Europe has been copyright crackdown, while New World has been blatantly copying and pirating everything.

Look at how that story ended up. Truly history keeps repeating itself, and every time we do not learn.

The true parasites are the corporate banksters and their bought dog lackeys in government. It is said of the mafia that it is like an artichoke, attack any part and the whole will continue to grow. However, salt the whole ground and the plant will die.
The time to make the environment between corporate and state so toxic that it can no longer flourish is fast approaching.The 99% have a voice, yet, the ears that need to listen only hear the jingling of thirty pieces of silver.

Corporations are People?

[Anonymous Coward]

If corporations are people, then why can't we make Soylent Green out of corporations?

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[Anonymous Coward]

A microwave oven these days costs $35!

Yes, and it costs $35 because corners have been cut in its production. Microwave ovens today are far simpler and more fragile than their counterparts from 20 or even 10 years ago.

A side effect of this: because new ones are so cheap, a broken one will be thrown away instead of repaired. More waste. More consumption. Is the world any better off because of it?

E-PARASITES ?

[unity100]

You mean, senators named the bill after themselves ? with a hip, trendy 'e' prefix in compliance with digital age ?

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[lennier]

The true parasites are... banksters... dog lackeys... like an artichoke... ears that need to listen... jingling of thirty pieces of silver.

I for one salute our dog-artichoke-gangster-ear mutant chimera underlords, as long as they don't leak too many toxic fluids onto the carpet.

We need the E-COLI act

[Anonymous Coward]

Enforcing Congressional Openness and Legislator Integrity.

Just thought it up. Maybe you can do better.

E-PARASITE law

[Arancaytar]

Describes it and the ones it serves perfectly. Stroke of genius in that name.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[Fluffeh]

China is returning to glory days, where China will have everything everyone else has and the question will be, "What can you possibly offer to the Chinese?" Tough question to answer.

Markets for the stuff they want to get rid of.

Re:You know you've given up on the government when

[Anonymous Coward]

Look up the pa castle doctrine

sides of the asile

[pellik]

I hate this. One political party takes my freedom to protect me from inequality while the other sells it to mega-corporations for votes. Why couldn't there be a political party that cares about liberty and isn't a bunch of nut-jobs?

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[Grishnakh]

Yes, and it costs $35 because corners have been cut in its production. Microwave ovens today are far simpler and more fragile than their counterparts from 20 or even 10 years ago.

Interesting, I hadn't even noticed this with microwaves, since I'm still using the same microwave I got in college back around 1993. It's blown an internal fuse a couple of times, but other than that it still works great. I guess I better hang onto it if the new ones are that bad.

It was sold...

[Grog6]

to the military-industrial complex.

Eisenhower was right; hooda thunkit?

Here we go again.

[T-Mckenney]

Another hopeless attempt for a government to control something that's completely uncontrollable. Look at some well-known attempts at making things "Unable to be copied; completely under our control" (I'm looking at you DVD, BluRay) How long did it take to crack the encryption key and sail right on to making copies? Seriously, pass this, and watch the chaos. They seriously need to learn that this is one thing you cannot, and never will, control.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[tmosley]

The English said the same of the US as they were building their industrial base.

Then they lost the Empire.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[turing_m]

World of Warcraft?

Classic engineering problem

[Fned]

1. Political Party
2. Cares about liberty
3. Isn't Nut-Jobs

Pick any two.

Re:Classic engineering problem

[gstrickler]

I pick #2 & 3. Don't need any political party.

What E-PARASITE really stands for...

[gstrickler]

Egregiously Purloining Anyone's Rights by Arbitrarily Stifling Information Transfer for Enterprises.

Re:What E-PARASITE really stands for...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exorbitant Profits As Rights by Assholes Suppressing Information To Everyone

Re:What E-PARASITE really stands for...

[bobamu]

Effectively Purchasing Americas Regulatory Agencies, System, Internet and The Economy

Well, there it is

[Alunral]

The US will not last long at this rate, and anyone with a brain will be trying their damn hardest to get out of here. You can deny it all you want, but with this happening, it's becoming unsafe. All it'll do is make sites move servers out of the US. Do we need more proof of Corporation of America controlling everything?

Re:You know you've given up on the government when

[lexman098]

From the wiki: "...may be used to imply that those who assert the Castle Doctrine defense want to have to shoot their assailant."

Very interesting in conjunction with the previous comment: "...but at least I get to keep my guns. Well, I cant use them in self defense anymore, but they sure do look neat."

Re:You know you've given up on the government when

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be insane. Western Europe at least enjoys universal health care and nice living conditions. ;-)

just stop buying entertainment junk

[Anonymous Coward]

i haven't seen anything that i want that i wouldn't pay for in the category of entertainment. if i really like something, i'll pay for it. if i don't, i don't even bother. i think part of the problem is that people for whatever reason keep feeding a more or less useless industry. kinda like the addiction to junk food. i mean, if an industry is treating you this bad, send a direct message legally by not even bothering to support it.

i find that the label of "e-parasite" being ironic because that's what the entertainment industry basically is at this point.

Excellent

[russotto]

Which would a representative rather tout himself as voting for? "PROTECT IP" or "E-PARASITE"? This new bill name is a major victory for the other side. No rep is going to worry about his opponent saying he voted against the "E PARASITE" act.

Blah

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing that bothers me about all this BULLSHIT is how the fucktards in our administration et al can make themselves believe that they're justified to implement something like this but have yet to really even consider getting serious about blocking some of the atrocious garbage found through the internet's biggest clump of content: porn.

This country is so fucked up now that I seriously believe we're on the verge of having another civil war soon. I think we're going through the deep breath before the plunge, or at least, that's my hope because there's too many crooked sons of bitches running things.

Re:Blah

[residieu]

Yes, there's some really bad porn out there. But it's not the government's job to decide which porn is good and which is bad and block the bad stuff. Judge for yourself what porn you want to watch and ignore the rest.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[DigiShaman]

You need some historical perspective here. Except for the political/wealthy elite, China has never in its epic long history ever had "Glory days". The concept has never existed for over 99.9% of its population. It has always been ruled by dynasties in one form or another. Even this current government made up of the CCP and PLA is just another dynasty. I don't discount periods of innovation and prosperity. They were there. But again, they might as well have never existed for many Chinese as almost everyone was a poor farmer.

These past few years have been the zenith of Chinese civilization. The modern world may not be glamorous or romantic as portrayed in historical literature, but it still their zenith none the less. Even the sweatshop laborers choose this work over farming just to improve their standard of living and that of their family. Hard, very hard labor. The kind of slave and self-sacrifice dedication long gone in western civilization whom would rather milk the titty of the Federal Gov than do that kind of work. But it's not over yet. China may become democratic at some point or something else entirely that *will* listen to the demands of the people. They will get their equality, justice, and freedom. And from it, their civilized growth and prosperity will go completely vertical at warp speed. That, or it breaks down into civil war and destroys everything they've known and taken for granted. Either is a possibility.

So to answer your question. "What can you possibly offer to the Chinese?". How about continued support for their people to have and maintain inalienable rights.

I like the name

[Anonymous Coward]

It is very aptly named after **AA, oh wait, that is not what they meant? crap!

CAPTCHA: patriot

PS: I see a riot in patriot does anyone else see it too?

Can they have a worse acronym?

[mykos]

This is the worst acronym since HELPING CHILDREN THROUGH RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT (Helping Children Through Research And Development which is also turns out is an acronym, full name: Hi, Everyone. Let's Pitch In 'N' Get Cracking Here In Louisiana Doing Right, Eh? Now Then. Hateful Rich Overbearing Ugly Guys Hurt Royally Everytime Someone Eats A Radish, Carrot, Hors d'oeuvre, And Never Does Dishes. Eventually, Victor Eats Lunch Over Peoria Mit Ein Neuesberger Tod. )

Typical Lamar Smith B.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

The same cultist a-hole introduced the DMCA.

What is it about Texas Republicans? At least they were more honest twenty years ago and called themselves Democrats. (Perry included)

Corrupt, statist, red-neck, in-bred, RINO, banjo-playing, f*ck-ups.

Ya know what's really scary?

[inode_buddha]

Ya know what's really scary? Sometimes I can't tell if the gov't is being "+1, sarcastic".

The House may have simply done this bill in order to troll the whole place in a big way. That, or they actually mean it. Either prospect is scary.
.

You can do that?

[Ragun]

So.. lets wee how these things start...

FIRST AMENDMENT.—Nothing in this Act shall be construed to impose a prior restraint on free speech or the press protected under the 1st amendment to the Constitution.

Oh.. well now that we have that out of the way...

Protecting American Rights.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it does protect American rights. I doubt it protects the rights of the citizens of the United States of America, but I can see where this act would protect the rights of some wealthy citizens from Mexico,Panama and other countries in South America. I mean the wealthy global elite have bought off the congress. It is only natural that their rights should be protected. Congress says you can't enforce the U.S. borders because it would interfere with the rights of Americans (Mexican citizens to be more exact). Congress definitely supports America. They just don't support the interest of the USAians (Sure there might be some wealthy people who happen to reside in the United States of America, who are lobbying for this act, but I would not consider them to be USAians. They seem to owe their allegiance to money.

Islam is the only hope for western democracy. We need family oriented government that is beholden to traditional family values, not unmitigated greed.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[waddleman]

For example most microwaves are missing the ability to have constant output with variable power level. Now microwaves duty cycle unless you by the higher end Panasonic with "Inverter Technology". What was once standard component is now a differentiating feature for higher price models.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[ansak]

inviolet wrote:

"... While these things have temporary effects on the movements of money, in the long run we benefit from having other people making discoveries alongside us, rather than continuing to scrabble in rice paddies."

I think you're somewhat right but I get the feeling that this model is wrong when one side is nobbling currency rates and locally incentivising the newly arrived industries to the point where, for instance, nearly all Vitamin C worldwide is produced in the country that gave us melanine-laced milk and automotive-exhaust-dried tea. Is that smart for any of us? The only safeguard is that QA for export-bound products are stricter because other countries' regulators are more transparent, therefore more accountable and reliable. But market forces only work well when there are no well-established bullies (especially not 147 colluding ones) or even determined alternative rule-set writers.

And lest anyone think I'm fear-mongering, what about solar panels? The markets are only fair when the rules are all becoming more stringent on all players regardless of source and buyer and where the measures used for exchange are equitable. My hope is that greater public wealth will lead to greater openness and accountability, but it hasn't always panned out very well.

Still, I also look forward to the day when some kind of abundance is available to everyone, when we all get much better at use and re-use as opposed to use and using up. Science and technology can get us there if the greed of the few doesn't prevent it. I think our vision as a race tends not to be big enough (worrying about our own rice bowls, all too often, all too appropriately) and we're way too short-sighted and too prone to getting into shouting matches over individual issues in the larger overall programs available to our imagination.

cheers...ank

Where's Obama?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is Obama coming out saying he will veto this bill if they're stupid enough to pass it? I thought he was the man of the people.

Re:Where's Obama?

[xmorg]

obama is a corporate goon. He is wall street. Even the tea part was duped into electing house speaker "boner". There is no change, nothing changes :(

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[mirix]

Well, part of it is the move to switch-mode power supplies. In old microwaves the big transformer alone was probably $35 to make.

Your computer PS would be a lot more than $20 if it was a linear PS as opposed to switching. Bigger and heavier too.

I'm with you on the shittier construction, shorter life, more waste aspect though.
I'd gladly pay more for something made here, by people paid a living wage... but the population has spoken, cheapest wins.
A nice side effect of more expensive, serviceable equipment is that it employs people in repair, too... but that ship has sailed.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[drinkypoo]

Simpler is false, more fragile is true. Not only are they typically made shoddier (e.g. thin membrane keypads, lighter sheet metal) but the assembly is usually as slapdash as possible. The last stuff for which this wasn't true was mostly made in Japan.

Re:You know you've given up on the government when

[Anonymous Coward]

If you truly believe you can't use your guns in self defense, you truly are too stupid to own them.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you please at least try to refrain from running your mouth before you check your facts? The largest owner of American debt is not China- Over 40% of US debt is owned domestically. China owns about 10%. These figures are about a year old, but they've changed significantly.

a We the People petition

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a little link to a petition I created on We the People..

http://wh.gov/Tvf

As long as Congressmen and Senators are....

[Anonymous Coward]

re-elected while selling out the rights of the American people this will continue. Vote their asses out!

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[Curunir_wolf]

Could you please at least try to refrain from running your mouth before you check your facts? The largest owner of American debt is not China- Over 40% of US debt is owned domestically. China owns about 10%. These figures are about a year old, but they've changed significantly.

China is, for all intents and purposes, a single creditor. While domestically held debt is a much larger share of the total debt, that is spread out among millions of individual creditors. So, Chiner is still holds the largest share of US debt than any other creditor.

Why take crap from the RIAA?

[Animats]

Recorded music is a dinky little business. Congress needs to be reminded of that occasionally. Total US music sales are only about $6.8 billion a year. If the entire US music industry was a single company, it would rank around 343 on the Forbes 500, around the level of Dole Food, Goodrich, and Peabody Coal. Each of the major computer companies is far larger. Microsoft loses more money in online services than the entire music industry makes.

Re:Why take crap from the RIAA?

[Jason Levine]

But... but... but... They only make $6.8 billion because of piracy and lost sales. If only the government would pass these handy-dandy, pre-written, pro-RIAA laws, they would stomp out those evils and make $6.8 gazillion! Think of the lobbying contributions they could make then!

Re:Why take crap from the RIAA?

[Anonymous Coward]

They will use it as an excuse. They will say they are only that small because of piracy and will turn around and make more laws in support of them.

Some say it's time to destroy the music industry finacially, and politically, and legally and give the industry power to the artist.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[ohnocitizen]

Very interesting post, except for:

The kind of slave and self-sacrifice dedication long gone in western civilization whom would rather milk the titty of the Federal Gov than do that kind of work.

Why did you slip that in? As if universal health care is "milking the titty of the federal government". Or do you mean basic protections for workers?

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[nospam007]

"The concept has never existed for over 99.9% of its population. It has always been ruled by dynasties in one form or another. "

"We are the 99.9%"

many rules, little sense

[Kevin Fishburne]

I'd love to know what daily life in the U.S. would be like if every bill had a 100% compliance/enforcement rate. We're bankrupt as it is with less than stellar execution. Would it be a paradise or a hell? It reminds me of my days writing spaghetti code in QuickBASIC. While certain parts worked alone, as a whole there was a lot of contradiction.

I think the Congress needs to clean up its shit-fest of a code base and keep things simple, as complexity is the work of the devil. There's a line in some law somewhere that will screw anyone for anything, and the lawyers will always find it.

"What can you possibly offer to the Chinese?"

[freeze128]

Tibet? But it's gonna cost you....

Re:You know you've given up on the government when

[Steauengeglase]

I can understand how the poster feels. It isn't apathy, it is hopelessness.

As Mr. Burns put it:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yes, I too feel renewed appreciation for the good old US of A.
Oppression and harrassment are a small price to pay to live in the land of the free."

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[DigiShaman]

No, I wasn't talking about universal healthcare. Though the entire concept is a symptom of a much bigger problem. But whatever. What I did mean by my comment however was this. With unemployment as high as it is, most would rather collect on benefits (based off their previous income bracket) that payout more than actually working a manual labor job for less or even going so far as to *gasp*, learn an entirely new job. Say, plumbing or automotive work instead of being another real estate agent. Maybe Houston, TX is an exception, but I still see a few "Now Hiring" signs posted now and then. Why haven't those jobs been filled yet? I don't see why not.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[justforgetme]

because new ones are so cheap, a broken one will be thrown away instead of repaired. More waste. More consumption

Good finally we can stop buying microwaves and spend our money on pans; where you can cook real food in :-)

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[justforgetme]

True. They got fooled once by their ignorance and they are much more vigilant now. Much more vigilant, at that, as their European and American counterparts. I just hope that the conflict that will inevitably present itself at some point between china and (maybe) the rest of the world will be a productivity war. Anything else would be just a shame...

Anyway, very insightful, wish I had mod points.

The law that gets the most money for America wins.

[beachdog]

What I see as a problem is there is no organization or lobby to draft a people and citizen friendly Copyright and Patent Reform Act.

Underlying that problem is the apparent political legislative power imbalance that is some version of 300 leopard seals versus 3 million penguins. The relatively few big sponsors of predatory legislation are overwhelming the interests of the hundreds of millions of consumers or users of Internet media.
----
In the previous posts, there are a number of really interesting nomenclatures and process descriptions of what is happening. The reality is, there are 8 or 9 lawyers and some unknown millions of dollars of lobbyist energy paid for by the leopard seals. Their law is just a file on some lawyer's word processor, that is being tweaked and handed over by maybe 5 lobbying firms working closely with 20% of the Congress, with another million dollars of campaign money and 20 buzz word phrases for every incumbent Congressman regardless of party affiliation and regardless of the Congressman's position for or against making the most money for America.
---
  In the end, the argument that nasty aggressive Copyright and Patent laws make the most money for America in general will prevail over any proposal that provides less money and less aggrandizement. No politician can withstand the pressure to pass laws to make America strong, rich and successful.
----
So we have to steal that argument "Make America strong, rich and successful" and write a law that caps the unlimited avarice and extraction potential of patent and copyright.
---
The starting point for that new law are as follows: Pick up the concerns of anti-trust and common carrier regulation from the 19th Century Progressive movement. The cellphone patent wars are leading to a few companies that exclude all the possible free software and hardware stacks.FCC radio bandwidth auctions have defrauded the entire American people of a common carrier service that should cost no more than 5 times the electricity used. Pick up the recent observation that the max fair price of Internet streaming media is now limited by the human attention bandwidth. No human being can consume more than x hours of media in a month. Those x hours of media need a max price. None of this $1200 per song file sharing stuff. There is no Internet media worth (to me) more than $.60 per hour. Put it on my Internet access bill and go away.
---
Then we need a lobbying solution that will create pressure on every candidate running for office, a draft law, a slogan and campaign money: The starter slogan "Stop screwing the American people with outrageous prices for Internet media."

Re:You know you've given up on the government when

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry. The corrupt fucks of the EU government will make sure we'll be getting this in a few years, too.

Got the name right

[Anonymous Coward]

Give these people a break, its is hard work for the bottom feeding scum behind this abberation to find something to exploit for whatever reason and personal gain. I bet they thought long and hard on the name so they get the recognition they deserve.

You mean Fascism?

[pablo_max]

Is that not what Fascism it?

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[am 2k]

Markets for the stuff they want to get rid of.

A market is always some kind of exchange. When you can't offer them anything in return, why should they give their stuff to you?

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[ohnocitizen]

Fair enough, but where do you get this claim of "most" from? If I got fired from a white collar job that paid 70k a year, I'd be trying to get something even somewhat close to that, not going for a minimum wage manual labor job. Perhaps some of the "now hiring" signs are in retail establishments, which tend to pay just barely at or below a living wage. Its easy to say "just change careers and give up on ever finding the same kind of job you lost" to people you don't know, but when its you in that situation, you are probably going to try and keep from slipping down enough income brackets to go from middle class to working poor. The poverty rate (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/poverty-rate-increases-recession-highest-level-1994-census/story?id=11652753) is increasing, and the middle class is shrinking. The middle class's spending money has been driving a pretty significant chunk of the economy. With real estate agents, project managers, journalists, and other workers fighting for less jobs, or being told "just become an auto mechanic (as if that is an easy transition), you have less consumer spending as a result of less cash. Less spending drags the economy down for everyone. So it isn't as simple as *gasp* learning a new job. Not if the end goal is a healthy economy.

At last!

[Anonymous Coward]

Truth in advertising!

I'm glad I don't live in America

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporate totalitarianism needs to be stopped. Don't the American people care that they are living in a military/corporate dictatorship?

E-PARASITE and the Great Firewall

[Anonymous Coward]

With the E-PARASITE Act a bill is being discussed in the House that would allow US authorities to censor foreign websites without a hearing. At the same time, the US trade representative is making a formal inquiry within the WTO rule framework about the workings of China's Great Firewall, citing the infringement of internet censorship on the US's and its private businesses' commercial interests as the reason for inquiry and implicitly complaining about the fact that there is no possibility for US companies to get a hearing with Chinese authorities in case their website should be censored. Go figure...

"An Internet website that can be accessed in China is increasingly a critical element for service suppliers aiming to reach Chinese consumers, and a number of U.S. businesses, especially small- and medium-sized enterprises, have expressed concerns regarding the adverse business impacts from periodic disruptions to the availability of their websites in China. While the United States believes that the best Internet policy is to encourage the free flow of information globally, the United Statesâ(TM) WTO request relates specifically to the commercial and trade impact of the Internet disruptions."

www.ustr.gov

Welcome to City 17. It's safer here.

[p0p0]

You, citizen, delete that link.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[Pikoro]

I think the point is that there is always work. It might not be something you want to do, but some income is better than no income. I went through this almost exactly a year ago. After over 20 years in IT, I got "downsized" and had to look for other work. Of course I started by looking at something inside my existing skill set, but after a couple of months with no income, I bit the bullet and shotgunned my resume to anyone who would accept it. I now work as a construction site foreman. Have for about a year. Pay is shitty, but hey, it gets the bills paid. I don't have any spending money anymore outside food for the wife and kids, school, etc... but we're not starving and the kids' clothes aren't falling off of them.

If you need the money, you'll find a job. People just need to stop feeling "Since I used to make 70k/yr, I won't give up until I find something in a similar price range". Screw that. Get out and flip burgers or work at a gas station, or do some other "menial" job. You get to learn a new trade. Keep up your old skills in your spare time if possible to keep yourself marketable, but hell, don't just sit around and collect unemployment!

  Besides, you can get a nice tan from working outdoors every day. Vitamin D is a good thing :)

Corporations are protected by the First Amendment

[mangu]

The First Amendment says, among other things, "Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble".

A corporation is an assembly of people. If it's legal for one person to make financial contributions to a politician, or to hold property, be it material or intellectual, it should be legal for a group of people assembled to do the same.

If you aren't satisfied with the way corporations act because they are too powerful, well that's how things happen in life. A group of people united for a purpose are more powerful than a person acting alone.

Corporations do not have personhood or rights by themselves, but they represent their shareholders. It would be insane to say that you have a right to speak whatever you want, but only if you spoke alone, if other people agree with you then your right to free speech does not exist.

A corporation is just that, a group of people who have agreed to act together for a specific purpose.

Re:You know you've given up on the government when

[Anonymous Coward]

When you're response to garbage like this changes from outrage, and a motivation to act, to a sigh and a slump of the shoulders.

You know what? Fuck it. The majority in this country doesn't understand or care whats going on in Washington, and the corporations now run both political parties, but at least I get to keep my guns. Well, I cant use them in self defense anymore, but they sure do look neat.

When did you act before? What exactly did you to prior to this announcement to make sure this bill is enacted properly, or not at all? Sounds like a convenient excuse to continue to do nothing.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[mestar]

"For example most microwaves are missing the ability to have constant output with variable power level."

Yeah, dude, I was eating my milk with cereal today and I could totally feel that 'microwave with variable output' taste.

US is borked

[Anonymous Coward]

The tune behind the Star Spangled Banner was ripped off from a British drinking song "To Anacreon in Heaven ...."

http://glyfix.com/soa/anacreon.html

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[w_dragon]

When was that standard? It wasn't on the microwave I bought in the 80s, or the one in the 90s, or the one I just bought a couple weeks ago. Every microwave I've ever used used some form of duty cycle for reduced power levels.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[TheRaven64]

How many of those 'now hiring' posters will accept someone with no relevant skills and train them on the job?

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[TheRaven64]

The problem with this is that a lot of employers seem to regard time spent working outside the industry as worse than time spent unemployed. Workers don't have control over this perception, but they do have control over whether they choose to accept a different job.

In some parts of the world, the incentives are also massively wrong. I'm not sure what it's like in the US, but in North Devon in the UK, where my mother lives, it's fairly easy to get £20K/year from various benefits, but very difficult to make this much from a job. After tax, someone making minimum wage at a full time job earns £9,727.55/year. Two people doing this make less than they can claim in unemployment, housing, and child benefits for doing nothing (unemployed people also get exemptions from council tax [property tax] and a few other things). Why would you get a minimum wage job if you could make more by not working? You need a serious work ethic to decide that it's better to work hard and have less money than to not work at all and have more.

Freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

Perfect, just the push that Freenet needs to reach critical mass.

Re:Corporations are protected by the First Amendme

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are claiming that the corporations for which people work speak for them, and agree 100% with the employees' views? What if one of the employees disagrees with the company stance? Can monies be taken away for those that don't agree with the company line?

Time to call your reps

[thogard]

Call their office and ask if they have ever sung "Happy Birthday" in public and did they pay the royalties. If they were in the Senate in 2001, ask if they asked for permission to sing a copyrighted song before they sang it on the steps of the Capital. This works much better if you can ask a Senator in public.

Glad they named it after the supporters

[Nyder]

I guess they are looking for a violent revolution.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

These past few years have been the zenith of Chinese civilization.

They have been a zenith for the Chinese economy. As for Chinese civilisation, after what happened recently to a small girl in Guangdong, many Chinese people believe that has reached its nadir.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[DarkOx]

Neither, I think he means that around 49pct of the population is net recipient in dollars from Federal Government. They qualify all kinds of grants and programs and pay nothing in Federal Income taxes to support them. They will almost certainly receive more in benefits from SS and medicare than even the time value adjusted contributions to those programs they may make.

Regardless on your opinion the socialization of health care, social safety net programs, worker protections, and even thoughts on what is fair in terms progressive vs. flat taxation; Its really hard for me to understand how anybody thinks its moral, ethical, sustainable, and otherwise practical for nearly half the citizens of this country to have 0 or negative skin in the game.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[LanMan04]

That's not the problem.

The problem is that cycling on and off, on and off is BAD for the microwave and leads to premature equipment failure.

Re:You know you've given up on the government when

[Anonymous Coward]

Hold on there.

I seem to recall some text in the declaration of independence which indicates when the few have the power to correct the great wrongs, they have the responsibility to do so.

It's not up to all the people, just the brave bold patriots that stand up to it.

Glad to see...

[bwcbwc]

they've finally found an accurate name for big media copyright holders. e-Parasites indeed.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[spire3661]

You do realize we PAY for unemployment with every paycheck right? Its not a handout, thats why its called INSURANCE.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[HeckRuler]

Oh fer shuur!
The Palestines had it so much better under the Romans.
And the serfs lived glorious lives under their kings.
A those guys with the stone foot-balls in Aztec? They were living it up.
And don't forget all the artistic output that came form the farmers under Incan rule.

Yes indeed, these poor Chinese have never had "glory days". It's was just the rulers.... Sure.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[omnichad]

I actually tried to find one with a better keypad. I replaced mine this week because the old microwave's keypad started losing buttons even though everything else on it worked fine. I really like tactile feedback on buttons, so I wouldn't want touch buttons, but I wouldn't mind having those clickier flat buttons with the arched metal underneath. I just know my buttons will be the first thing to go on the replacement. I didn't want to pay for nicer features if even the nicer microwaves use the same kind of buttons.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[cdrudge]

Growing up we had an old Amana microwave that was built like a tank that had that ability. I can't count the number of times that we used it on zero hands. My current microwave has about a thousand settings for all sorts of heating, defrosting, pre-cooking, different foods, different sizes, the whole shebang. I can count the number of times on two fingers that I've used anything other then "On". Once I used the defrost setting. It didn't work very well. The other time I made a bag of popcorn using the automatic setting. It was ok.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[omnichad]

Add to that how hard it is to get time off if you work minimum wage and you need to go to a job interview.

Democrats aren't pandering to progressives

[Anonymous Coward]

And quite how you can get that idea when the president's office has called progressives every bad name under the sun and complained that they should STFU and toe the party line else the eeebil republicans will get in.

Democrats are pandering to the rightwing that are put off by religious extremists and deluded fucking rednecks. Not liberals in the main and definitely not progressives. The democrats get those because there's only rightwing and extreme rightwing, so who are they going to vote for if not the democrats?

Re:Democrats aren't pandering to progressives

[Grishnakh]

Actually, this is a very good point, but I do insist that this is a very recent development. Prior to Obama's election, the Dems were indeed pandering to progressives and liberals; just listen to all of Obama's speeches from that time. It wasn't until he got in office that suddenly the Democrat party (and esp. Obama himself) switched to pandering to the right-wing, with the idea that it didn't matter what he did because surely everyone left of the right-wingers would come out and vote for Obama in his re-election because what alternative do they have? Well, we saw their alternative in 2010: they stay home out of apathy, and the Reps get elected (and then we still don't see any real change), but Obama apparently isn't that smart because he still hasn't figured out that he needs to appeal more to his base, which he's completely abandoned. Of course, it doesn't help that there's a strong group of his supporters that back his every move and tell all the disaffected ones to STFU and toe the party line; you can see this on political forums everywhere.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see how it might be useful.

The "on/off" approach of controlling output doesn't really work well for different types of foods.

If you're trying to warm something to a certain temperature without overheating any part of it you don't want to repeatedly blast it at max power, then cut off a few seconds later.

Re:You know you've given up on the government when

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just the thing. The few of us that DO care are vastly, VASTLY outnumbered by the proles that don't. Therefore, our opinions simply don't matter any more since they're being drowned out and lost in the vast expanse of 'vote for whoever's face they see more often' and say 'yes' to any changes because it's less hassle.

These days, the higher ups just have to convince the stupid people of something... extraordinarily easy to do... and they can do whatever they want. The non-stupid can simply be ignored as background noise. And milking this system for everything they can is exactly what they're doing.

So when you say the response is to sigh and slump your shoulders... that's exactly all that we CAN do, because anything else is just outright ignored anyway.

Re:You know you've given up on the government when

[Jason Levine]

I don't know about apathy. Look at the Occupy movement. People upset at how big companies aren't 1) playing by the rules or 2) paying government officials to get rules set in favor of their company. Now, Congress wants to pass legislation to give big companies more power? This should go over well with the Occupy swarms.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[TheLink]

In China, if you were male, and did well in the Imperial examinations you had a chance to become a bureaucrat even if you were from a peasant background.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholar-bureaucrats
Quote from wiki:

However, there are vast numbers of examples in Chinese history in which individuals moved from a low social status to political prominence through success in imperial examination.

http://www.sacu.org/examinations.html

No doubt the odds were still against a peasant student, but the odds were still much better than say a peasant in feudal Europe rising to a similar level without a revolution/rebellion.

Lastly, Chinese Emperors would come and go, but they often kept much of the same bureaucracy around to do the actually day-to-day operations.

I guess they'd rather spend time eating, drinking, making merry and choosing concubines/wives ;).

Re:Corporations are protected by the First Amendme

[mangu]

So you are claiming that the corporations for which people work speak for them, and agree 100% with the employees' views?

Do you speak for your housekeeper and agree 100% with her views? I don't think so.

Corporations are an assembly of their shareholders, not of their employees.

Mod poins where art thou

[Anonymous Coward]

I so wish I had mod points... It's a sad and still heartwarming read. Heartwarming to see that some people have seen through the mist of blinding haze. Albeit - too late. It's time for next empire to take over. Just wondering if it will be a state (China) or state supported corporations or simply we-don't-give-a-fsck-about-national-states corporations.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[scot4875]

With unemployment as high as it is, most would rather collect on benefits (based off their previous income bracket) that payout more than actually working a manual labor job for less or even going so far as to *gasp*, learn an entirely new job

Do you have numbers to back this statement up, or are you just spouting bullshit? Seeing a "now hiring" sign now and again isn't "data".

--Jeremy

WHERE IS YOUR RON PAUL, NOW, AMERICA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder what his take on this is?

So one more step toward tyranny.

[Anonymous Coward]

Never would I have thought the US would even consider censoring what Americans can read and do before the time a crime is actually committed. Now we need to surf knowing the KGB, er - FBI -- is waiting to entrap, imprison and beat a confession out of clueless teens and parents. And the entertainment companies will still lose money because their product is crap.

Re:Corporations are protected by the First Amendme

[millertimebjm]

And yet there are limits to the right of assembly. There is no right to assembly on private property.

Corporate entities have even more specific rules to follow than assembly. Persons employed by a corporate entity must receive compensation that is at or above minimum wage. Safety and sanitation requirements must be met.

I'm not in any way a financial specialist, but I'm not sure what the difference would be constitutionally between tax code requirements already placed on corporate entities and an additional requirement to 'make available publicly the amount of donations given as campaign contributions', or above that, anyone who has given a campaign contribution over a certain dollar figure, could be listed somewhere on a government website.

I'm interested in government transparency and would like to understand downsides to the right to assembly when dealing with limiting rights to a corporate entity.

Lost my first draft so I might have missed a point or two.

Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me or does this equate to censorship? Not only are they trying to take down domestic websites, but now they're going to limit access to foreign websites deemed "intent on theft and exploitation", which is extremely subjective. The sites shouldn't be taken down; just because it is a crime to pirate doesn't mean they should take down or limit access to the websites entirely. It's nearly equivalent to saying "Since it's illegal to steal cars and we haven't been able to stop every car theft, we're going to make cars illegal." To me, it seems wrong for the government to tell us what we are/aren't allowed to access on the internet. Nevertheless, new websites will pop up as soon as the major ones get taken down. I think this is going to cause much more restlessness among people than it will prevent copyright infringement.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[danlip]

GP said "stuff they want to get rid of" ... like nuclear waste ... we could store all of China's nuclear waste, and they'll have a lot soon.

how to remove the SCOTUS

[danlip]

Federal judges (including Supreme court justices) can be removed by the same impeachment process used to remove a president. Which in reality is very difficult to accomplish but has been done in the past. But I doubt you'll get much support from congress on those issues.

Screw The RIAA

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey /. Have a free song. Courtesy of the Murnane Tribe.

http://www.murnanetribe.com/free-song.html

If you like it, you can buy it on Amazon or iTunes. If not, maybe give to someone who might. Music is meant to be shared and enjoyed. Not horded by a big corp to stuff their pockets. If artists are able to make a living without the big corps, then the RIAA will just disappear. Problem solved.

Sincerely,
Tony Logan of Murnane Tribe

Tea Party defending the people.

[pugugly]

I really love how the house, taken over by the Tea Party "Bastions of Democracy" that they are, are such corporate whores that they can't even keep the nice dresses on like they do in the Senate but *want* everyone to see them on their knees before their corporate masters.

Pug

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[ohnocitizen]

That's quite a privileged viewpoint. If you make 70k a year, and live frugally enough to survive on 35k a year, how would you be able to survive at a job flipping burgers? Minimum wage in NY is 7.25/hr. For hourly positions, the usual figure is 40 hours * 50 weeks (14.5k). You'd have to work two full time jobs flipping burgers, that's 80 hours a week, to come up with 29k a year, still 6k short of half your previous income!! That's presuming you can find two minimum wage jobs that give you the hours, and don't stiff you at 32 because for full time employees they give out health care, and they don't want to be bothered with the additional cost. So you might need 3 jobs. That's also presuming your 2+ jobs don't have scheduling conflicts. Now imagine you have kids to take care of, and were juggling a 40/hr a week job with parenting responsibilities (which can be quite the task even in a two parent household). Or imagine that you suddenly get sick. Does your burger flipping job offer health insurance? No? Are you on cobra? Do you know how much that costs just for an individual plan? How about for a family plan?

You can keep your quips about a nice tan, and your statements that you are trying to "keep yourself marketable" in the spare time 80 hours a week leaves you.

If we had a real living wage as our minimum wage, then your point would stand. As it is, your points are as divorced from reality as a jobs creation speech at a GOP Presidential debate.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[ohnocitizen]

The idea that they pay nothing in Federal Income taxes ignores all the other taxes they do pay, and the extreme lack of income they have to qualify for no federal income taxes. That is a misleading figure to quote out of context. If you want an interesting figure, notice how most red-states seem to be on the take from the federal government, while most blue-states have the opposite financial relationship. If you want people to be punished for their personal actions, how about letting people be punished for their choices in the voting booth?

Thinking that they have no skin in the game and supposing the rich are paying their fare share (http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/27/324204/report-right-wing-misleading-taxes/) is the result of not being fully informed.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[riondluz]

First (i hope), everything is temporary, moreso these days; be it employment or unemployment.
Its one thing to be able to hold out before the door closes on what used to be your career and, perhaps, a pleasurable skill in your life; and another to do just one has to to survive.
That is the safety net a civilized state is supposed to provide. As above china sub-thread validates, no safety nets makes peons of all but a few percent. Some more content than others, all subject to the whim of a fixed game controlled by elites.
Second, to say that "there is always work" belies suffering from the 'it cant happen here' naivety
that any developing country (with up to 40% unemployment) would have a good laugh at.
Climbing up has taken an industrial century, the gravity of falling is 10X as fast.

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[Pikoro]

i live in Japan btw

Re:Corporations are protected by the First Amendme

[Anonymous Coward]

So corporations speak for their share holders, and agree with 100% of the share holder's views? I don't think so. So a corporation declares that chocolate is the best flavor and all of the share holders have to agree? Even the one's allergic to it?

Re:china copys us stuff and pass it off as there o

[slick7]

The true parasites are... banksters... dog lackeys... like an artichoke... ears that need to listen... jingling of thirty pieces of silver.

I for one salute our dog-artichoke-gangster-ear mutant chimera underlords, as long as they don't leak too many toxic fluids onto the carpet.

They sure made a mess of the Gulf of Mexico.