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The Privatization of Copyright Lawmaking
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
"The biggest misperception about [the Stop Online Piracy Act] is that it is somehow unprecedented or extraordinary. It is not. SOPA represents just the latest example of copyright law defined and controlled not by the government but by private entities. Copyright owners will deploy SOPA in the same way they have behaved in the past: to extend out their rights. They will disrupt sites that do not infringe a copyright, interfere with fair uses of copyrighted works, and take other steps that evade the limits that the Copyright Act sets on a copyright owner's actual rights."
America is totally corrupt. How many of the current US politicians are not taking corporate handouts, accepting meetings with lobbyists, or preaching 'free market' ideology. It has to be accepted that America is a banana republic, run by a mafia of corporate interests, and a collection of crazed religious zealots. I am just so glad I don't live there.
In a democracy, there is a choice of government. Choice is impossible in the United States, because the Republican/Democrat Party, is the only party that can attract enough campaign contributions. The Republican/Democrat Party, is consequently the only party that can buy power. This is not democracy.
To some extent it was - up until the courts decided that corporations have the same rights (at least one specifically, and others implied by induction) that people do. Now laws are in the best interests of the biggest bank accounts.
---jstlook ---For that is the way of Elves, for they say both yes AND no, and mean every word of it. --- J.R.R.T.
Over recent years there has been an accelerating plunge into rule by corporation in its interests rather than rule by government in the interests of all. This has resulted in the loosening of regulation or oversight, laws allow corporations to do things that are effectively disallowed to individuals. The results of this include: the financial woes of recent times; copyright abuse; globalisation for corporation but not individuals (think: they buy where it is cheap in the world, but stop you doing so, eg by region encoding).
This has happened by a variety of means: bribing of law makers (whoops silly me, I mean - donations to campaigns and pet causes, promises of jobs on leaving office, ...); threats to move to another country; ...
Don't get me wrong: not everything about corporations is bad, not all corporations are problematic. A restoration of balance is needed.
This isn't due to any flaw in democracy; it has nothing at all to do with democracy. These kinds of abuses come from autocratic structures that do not answer to any outsiders. A better way to describe these kinds of systems is 'totalitarian.' Of course, democracy is a nice word that we have all been taught applies to our systems of centralized planning and property, but just 5 minutes of thinking about it should induce uncontrollable laughter. The fact that most Americans don't laugh is a sign of how deeply indoctrinated much of the population, especially the political and technical class, has become. The Soviet system was similar. The intelligentsia (including the technical intelligentsia) needed to be well-indoctrinated. The remaining 80% would follow, as guided by the 20% of `proper' thinkers and the truly mass media. In the US, the situation is nearly indistinguishable. The mass media depends on things like publicly subsidized sports (franchises run by universities with the profits primarily going to private owners) and `popular' music and movies. It is crucial that these means of mass control remain firmly in the grip of private power; mass media is the primary means by which popular consent is shaped in the US and projected abroad.
The reality is that no modern corporation -- be it a financial institution, a mass media distributor (RIAA/MPAA/etc), or whatever -- can tolerate democracy. We can see how the machinery respond to even modest democratic initiatives, such as the occupy movement: hysteria. They can't tolerate 'free markets' either, but that's a different (though related) story. What we see now are interrelated systems of global mercantilism backed by state power and by a hugely profitable propaganda system, which we now call the media and public relations, and those propaganda systems depend on favorable 'IP laws.'
The problem is that you're the chicken.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The answer is, that the system delivers what most of people consider to be most essential, namely: Bread and circuses. Of course this reasoning preceded the Roman Republic's transformation into the Roman Empire before it's ultimate collapse
Run with the lemmings, and you'll get your feet wet.
Now laws are in the best interests of the biggest bank accounts.
Not familiar with The Golden Rule? "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Not disagreeing with you, by the way, just wanted to point out that what you said is similar to a Mitch Hedburg joke.
"I used to do a lot of drugs. I still do, but I used to, too."
I'm still waiting for corporate entities to be executed for capital crimes - until then, I won't actually believe they're people. A possible alternative would be to make the CEO of the company directly and personally responsible for everything the company does, as if the CEO had done it him/her self - make 'em earn those golden parachutes by risking life in prison.
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Freedom is not something you achieve and then enjoy for the rest of your life. It's something that you have to fight for every day of your life. So what you are talking about — is nothing new. Corporations have their interests, you have yours. They will keep trying to get what they want, so should you. The whole idea of democracy is based on balance: everybody is trying as hard as they can to get what they want and everything ends up in a compromise. If the balance is shifting somewhere — you should push harder, it's just that.
Sure, but his point is that noble causes are frequently used as fig leaves. Larger issues remain outside of the scope of public discussion and are typically counter to the interests of the population. This tactic serves to give the population the illusion of participation in political issues. Of course, go on all day talking about gays or abortion (again, important issues in their own rights). Just don't get too worked up over the issues that affect your owners. In a democracy, *all* of those issues would be discussed, not just the ones that are inconsequential to real power.
What does gay marriage or the lack thereof actually do? Nothing at all.
Unless you're gay and want to marry your partner, in which case it does quite a lot.
Never assume that the freedoms you care most about are the ones that are most important to other people. You want to live your life as you see fit; so does everyone else, and what you see fit to do may well be something that's of no interest to them.
Support other people's freedoms. It gives them a motivation to support yours.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.