Slashdot Mirror
New Media Giants Take Out Print Ad Against SOPA
itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will recall that the SOPA hearings earlier this week 'excluded any witnesses who advocate for civil rights. Google's Katherine Oyama was the only witness to object to the bill in a meaningful way.' So to get the attention of lawmakers, new media giants Google, Facebook, and Zynga turned to the only place they knew that politicians gather daily. They took out a full page ad in the New York Times. The irony of taking out a newspaper ad to protect the Web is certainly lost on no one."
Just who's interests are these entities protecting, Ours, or their own?
Google owns Youtube. I dont think I need to explain that.
Facebook sells people's personal data, including photos, to advertisers.
Zygna has been embroiled at least once for outright stealing of graphical assets from other commercial games companies.
I am not saying to look the gift horse in the mouth here-- if it gets our dumbass leaders to shelve their onerous legislation and bury it at sea without honors, I am all for it, but I draw the line at saying these corporations represent *MY* interests.
Grow a pair and put something about it on their logo/main search page? They can change it for International-Paper-Mache-With-Your-Kids Day, but not for THIS??!?
This is an article linking anyone who supports the BSA to supporting SOPA. Just because a company supports the BSA does not mean they support SOPA. They might and they might not.
Personally, I don't presume guilt by association.
That's one of the reasons I kind of hope it does pass initially it will cause a lot of problems (technical and otherwise). But we'll have to come up with solutions to those problems and when they really want to censor us it will be a lot more difficult. Where as if it doesn't pass it will likely be replaced shortly by more reasonable and enforceable means of censorship.
I think that's actually a bit too optimistic. What Hollywood, "traditional media", Politicians and associated Moneypolists want is to turn the web into Television. They want a one-way medium to distribute their content, whether it be entertainment, political platform or other stuff they sell. They don't want the regular Joe to generate their own content, hence the extremes they go to brand anything not made by them as spurious and pirated.
If this law was to remain, it would cement their grip on the medium so they can turn it into the advertisement broadcast platform they want it to be: sanitized, monetized and sales-orientated. They want to know who you are and where you are so you can't dodge them; they want you to be a trapped consumer, and they want to keep tabs on you to better tailor their efforts at shovelling their crap down your throat. This is why that MoFo Murdoch (or was it Turner?) said the Internet should have been patented from the start. This is why politicians and law enforcement agencies everywhere want it muzzled, they don't want disent they want obedience and mindless consumerism.
+Raider of the lost BBS
If these guys want to make a statement, they should disconnect the user accounts of all politicians who support SOPA. I'm sure it's within their ludicrously one-sided ToSs to exclude members at a whim (and it's legal as long as it's not discrimination). It'd be a nice reminder about what life would be like without these tech services.
A page with explanation instead of no page would be better.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
The problem is that if you can choose the issues that get media attention then you can choose the winner. As between a candidate that agrees with the majority of a district on 80% of the important issues vs. one that agrees on substantially fewer, you would expect the first candidate to win. But if you throw ten million dollars behind a campaign to bring the the remaining 20% of issues to the forefront of the debate, you cause the "better" candidate to lose. Which you can do merely because you disagree with the candidate on one of the issues for which that candidate agrees with the majority of the district, if you have a big enough pile of money.
You don't even have to find issues where the candidate disagrees with the majority. If the majority of the district supports strong measures against illegal immigration and so does the candidate, but 80% of Spanish-speaking constituents strongly oppose those measures, you run ads describing the candidate's position in Spanish. If the candidate is pro choice, you run ads on religious TV networks. If the candidate is pro life, you run ads on liberal women's networks. If the candidate opposes further unfunded increases in Medicare benefits, you put ads in AARP publications, etc.
It's easy to destroy an honest candidate by telling the truth in inconvenient places.
I think he is saying that there is more to this world than USA, and by allowing SOPA and PROTECT IP, USA will effectively isolate themselves from the rest of the world.
This in turn means that USA won't benefit from what Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the rest of the world invents, which means the rest of the world will outrun USA when it comes to technology. In fifty years USA will still be stuck with 2010 tech while Europe etc will have 2060 tech. Both SOPA and PROTECT IP will drag down USA in the mud. Shame, really, since the US had some really great things going for it...
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
If you are 40 then computers were a part of your childhood
Nonsense. If you are 40 then you were born in 1970. Home computing started to appear in the very late '70s, but didn't become common until the '90s. I'm just under 30, and at least half of the people I knew growing up didn't have a home computer. When I came to university, a lot of my friends didn't have their own computer (well, all of my geek friends did). I bought the computer I took to university with money from a summer job, and it cost about as much as four months rent in student accommodation. People who had to work a part-time job to afford the rent certainly couldn't afford one.
It would be more accurate to say 'if you are 40, middle class, and from a family with a technical background who thought computers were important, then computers were a part of your childhood'. If you were poor, they were not. If your parents didn't think computers were important, they were not.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Welcome to the real world.
In the starting days of the automobile, the horse farmers and buggy whip manufacturers managed to come up with all sorts of insane fucking laws. For instance, these. In a few states, you had to have a flagman walk in front of your car (yes WALK) waving a flag and beeping a horn to "warn" drivers of horse-drawn carriages that one of these crazy horseless contraptions was coming through.
Eventually, good sense prevailed, and the buggy whip manufacturers fell to their proper place in history... but some of these crazy stupid laws remain on the books, just unenforced.
Likewise, we'll probably see the same thing happen here. "Piracy", as the MafiAA goons tell it, is killing their ability to rip off artists of money. Sooner or later, the artists will find a way to make money that doesn't involve the goons and the illegal MafiAA price-fixing monopolies. It's already starting to happen. "Piracy" is also, thanks to fucked up copyright laws, becoming the only way to preserve our digital history; in the meantime, plenty has been lost, such as software for the Cray-1 that wasn't preserved and that can't be run on other platforms. The Apple II/e library is preserved only because "pirates" have preserved most of it and crafted emulation for it. Similar for most of the early Commodore computers, the Atari lines... DosBox almost REQUIRES that you have "pirate" software that ran on 5 1/4" disk in order to run it (e.g. "copy the disk") for some of the oldest stuff it runs, but modern computers don't even have the connections required to attach an actual 5 1/4" disk even if you could find media that hasn't succumbed to bit-rot.
It's impossible to say that copyright is meaningful when so much of "copyrighted" products today is covered by a law that lasts 100x longer than the expected platform lifespan. That's just ridiculous on the face of it and deliberately breaks the contract between copyright holders and society, which is that the copyrighted work WILL enter the public domain as repayment to the public for the grant of LIMITED duration monopoly.