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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."
Enjoy your police state.
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 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.