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."

Comments

Why not use their own sites?

[Anonymous Coward]

Politicians use Google and Facebook too. Put messages there.

Heck, they could be really direct and block Google/Facebook for congressional IP ranges.

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[Baloroth]

Heck, they could be really direct and block Google/Facebook for congressional IP ranges.

Now that would be ironic.

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[grcumb]

Politicians use Google and Facebook too. Put messages there.

Or you could get together with 87,834 of your closest friends and call them.

It's good to see people mobilisation en masse to oppose this bill, but as others have said, it remains to be seen whether Congress will listen to anyone unless they dangle a cheque in front of their nose.

The big danger that I see is how dangerously regressive and backward-looking attitudes on the Hill are.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the recent House Judiciary Committee hearing was that Google, the sole opponent to the legislation allowed to present at the hearing, was castigated by most of the people there, impugned for purportedly profiting from piracy and cast as the villain in this whole affair.

Seeing one of the few growing and dynamic drivers of the information economy not only cast out of the fold but actively opposed, one can only conclude that the captains of the US media industry are perfectly content to cut their nose off to spite their face. They will burn the bridge represented by Google rather than cross it.

I see two immediate dangers if this regime is actually allowed to take the shape proposed for it:

• 1) Innovation in content re-use and sharing will move outside of the US. Some will move into the shadows (kind of like offshore pirate radio in days of yore, except the ships and radios are available for the cost of a laptop). Some will move into the less governed – or governable – areas.
• 2) US influence on innovation and invention will decline significantly. This legislative package will serve as a clear signal that Silicon Valley is no longer the influence it used to be. (Indeed, the Valley’s lack of standing in DC was evidenced by committee members’ contempt for Google throughout the hearing.)

The latter outcome is the more dangerous of the two. Losing influence in the direction the Internet’s development takes also means losing the uniquely American ethos of freedom and individualism.

There are numerous new media and technological players poised in the wings right now. But few of them (with the possible exception of Al Jazeera) have any moral stake in human rights or even individual expression. Not, at least, in the same way that many American developers do - that is, at the axiomatic level, rather than as a conscious overlay to their world view.

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[Amorymeltzer]

Go for broke, I say. Get Facebook, Wiki(m|p)edia, Youtube, and Twitter to go dark for a day. Hell, they could go dark for an hour and still the world would riot. I don't like how integral these sites have become to day-to-day life for most people, when ten years ago none even existed,[1] but for Congress to think that the people in this country or this world care one iota about "e-parasites" when put up against Honey Badger and Farmville is just bogus. Show Washington what this bill actually means for America and they'll all change. You can't get reelected on "I voted to shut down Facebook and Youtube."

1. Okay fine, Wikipedia was around, but few knew about it. Besides, it's for the sake of the narrative!

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[jjoelc]

You are thinking too small. To be truly effective, each of these sites should have a total blackout for one day. Coordinate, and choose one day that they actively refuse every connection made to any of their servers. 24 house for the entire world to see what it will be like to have no Google, no YouTube, No Gmail, no Facebook, No Zynga (kinda redundant with no Facebook, I know...) Heck, cut off all those useful Android utilities while you are at it.

24 hours worth of profits to most of these companies is chump change... 24 hours of profits lost by those other companies who rely on these services though would make a huge impact. One that could not be ignored.

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[Yetihehe]

A page with explanation instead of no page would be better.

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[SuricouRaven]

There will always be something of a generational gap in politics - just as there will be in judges, or the higher ranks of military command. These are all long-term careers, where it takes decades to work your way through the ranks and make it to the top. There may be a few who manage to get ahead fast, but even Obama is fifty now. So none of those in congress grew up with computers or really understand those who did. They do understand lobbying, and economics - so for them, it's a very simply matter: Entertainment production is one of the few industries where the US not only leads the world, but also exports a lot more than it imports. That makes it economically very valuable, and so it must be defended and strengthened.

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[wertigon]

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...

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[TheRaven64]

Nope, for the whole of America replace the page with a short notice saying that US politicians are attempting to pass laws making it easy to censor the Internet and making this kind of downtime common and provide a list of telephone numbers for the offices of all of the denizens of congress. Let the congressional switchboard be jammed with constituents' complaints for an hour or so...

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that would be ironic.

I think it would be ironic if everything were made of iron.

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[AngryDeuce]

But it still doesn't really matter much when the only realistic choices for office are chosen for us ahead of time by the kingmakers at the GOP and DNC.

Yes, I know that anyone can technically run for office, but we all know that the only way to compete with the GOP and the DNC is to have their monetary resources so as to plaster your face and message on every billboard and television screen and radio within your voting district. I actually follow politics pretty closely in my corner of the country and every time there's a vote there are still people on the ballot I've never even heard of, have no website, have no information about them or their platforms at all.

Plus, after Nader cost Gore the election in 2000 and we ended up with that idiot George W. Bush as President a lot of people started really voting for the lesser of two evils in earnest. What other choice do the people have? Support a fringe candidate that is just not going to win, period? Or throw your hat in with the guy you disagree with the least that may actually win the election?

I say this, of course, because I'm sitting here wondering what the hell I'm going to do in 2012. I'm severely pissed off at Obama for all the campaign promises he reneged on (Gitmo, the wars, campaign reform, regulatory reform...I could go on and on and on) but what am I supposed to do if he's up against someone like Michele Bachmann or Rick Santorum, that want to roll back civil rights to the 50's and start throwing gays into reeducation centers? I can vote for a third party, but we all know that is throwing your vote away, especially as regards a Presidential Election. Ross Perot and Ralph Nader got a whopping 18.9% and 2.7% of the popular vote, respectively. Neither won any electoral votes at all. You have to go back 100 years to the election of 1912 to find a third party candidate that got more than 20% of the vote, and that was Teddy fucking Roosevelt, one of the greatest President's this country has ever had in history, beloved by almost everyone. He managed to get a whole 27% of the vote running under the Bull Moose party, and this is one of four people on Mount Rushmore for Christ's sake...

So what do I do? Vote my conscience and throw my vote away on a third party? Or do my part to try and make sure that we don't turn into a fucking Christian Theocracy where abortion is murder, even in cases of rape, vaccines cause autism and are therefore banned, no mosques within 1000 feet of a government building, ridiculous shit like that? I'm heartily sick of voting for the lesser of two evils, but short of pulling an Egypt and overthrowing our government, I see no other recourse. We need to sever the ties between wealth and politics in this country, but I see no legal way to do so. There won't ever be one, there is no incentive for any of our sitting reps to change these things, and the only way one can even achieve these offices is by allowing yourself to be corrupted by this system in the first place.

So what do we do? Seriously, someone tell me how the hell we can solve these problems without plunging our country into anarchy, because I just see no other way at all...

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[Moryath]

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.

Lobby

[Virtual_Raider]

Would that make any impact? This would appear the perfect moment to use all their lobbying power, clearly appealing to the masses is passe and doesn't work anymore in the US. Witness the OWS movement.

Re:Lobby

[DigiShaman]

Call me the prophet if you will (hopefully a bad one at that). Here's how I think it's going down. The president of the United States and all of congress is basically going to tell Silicon Valley to go fuck off. Their technology robs government of power and exposes their dirty laundry to the public consistently. That's a big "no no". Second, Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry has always been involved in US politics far longer than I've been alive. They also export their media to be consumed, not to be interactive thus providing entertaining feedback to other citizens. To allow for that robs them of a time-slice in peoples lives that could otherwise be revenue generating. You know as well as I that the gaming industry and hollywood are in direct competition with each other. Expect gaming to be heavily regulated under the guise of "addition"

In there's the bottom line. To have the RIAA and MPAA cartels wither on the vine would be a national security issue. That's how it will be spun. Being a huge export of America and all and our massive debt that needs to be paired off. So, they will subsidize the industry in one of three ways. 1: Tax breaks, 2: direct subsidies, 3: put the burden of cost on all other industries to enforce the media industry (laundered tax on citizens).

Re:Lobby

[Roogna]

Easy solution. Hollywood is great at lobbying. So the tech industry should just -buy- Hollywood. After all, the entirety of Hollywood would cost the big tech giants little really. Split it up, each tech giant can buy a studio, and just straight up fire the entire executive staff. Then going forward the media industry can lobby in a tech friendly manner.

Re:Lobby

[Virtual_Raider]

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.

Re:Lobby

[rtb61]

It is not just about money paying for corruption of politics via lobbying it is about censoring and silencing the voices of opposition. It was visible in the attack upon OWS when cities around the US coordinated their attack upon the OWS movement via the Federal government.

The US government knows full well it works in opposition to the wishes of the majority, it has known that for that last thirty years, which is why corporate controlled mass media worked so hard at silencing the voices of the majority whilst pretending the corporate marketing voice was the voice of the majority.

The problem is we have allowed psychopaths and narcissist to gain control of major corporations and the government, these people will not let go the levers of power without a fight, a destructive fight which they will orchestrate.

The only place to tackle this mess is in the US primaries, the active will of the OWS movement to replace corporate stooges with representatives of the people. First step fight people to apply and start openly and publicly testing them. Test their health, intelligence, knowledge and most important of all their psychological state.

Re:Lobby

[houstonbofh]

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.

And I want a pony. I think they will find putting the cat back in the bag to be more of a problem than they think. Especially, since we no longer have a real interest in the bag...

What a useless article...

[WCLPeter]

Its three needlessly long paragraphs reiterating what was said in the summary and contains links or scans to the ad in question. How did something like this get voted to the front page?

If you're going to link to a site talking about it, at least link to a site that has the ad! Two seconds with Google people, was that really all that hard? I just wish these guys would have mentioned in the ad the combined net worth of all their companies and contrasted it to the net worth of the media empires trying to ram this shit through. Would have really gotten people talking and asking the hard questions.

They should get serious

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of taking out a newspaper ad, the "new media giants" should take a page out of the unions' book and go on strike. No Google. No Facebook. No YouTube. Just put up a static page all day explaining the threat this law poses to new media. That would get people's attention.

Re:They should get serious

[Grishnakh]

Maybe that's plan B. It's usually better to start small with methods of persuasion, rather than just bringing out the big guns right away.

Remember, most Google, Facebook, and YouTube users don't know squat about SOPA and have never heard of it; they don't read Slashdot. Shutting down these sites all of a sudden over an issue that no one's heard of is only going to create a lot of anger. Don't forget, Google has an active competitor called Bing that people could easily switch to, and it's backed by a company that's probably A-OK with SOPA. The last thing Google needs is to cause most of their users to switch to Bing during a brief "strike", and then never return.

Protecting interests?

[wierd_w]

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.

Re:Protecting interests?

[Baloroth]

It's called "enlightened self interest" and it's how capitalism should always work. Unfortunately, it doesn't. But don't complain when it does, as society as a whole benefits.

Re:Protecting interests?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, society does benefit greatly when enlightened self-interest, through capitalism, works. It's what has created the highest living standards and levels of individual freedom humans have ever known, and for more people over a longer time, than anything else ever tried.

But, on the other hand, the best average standard and happiness comes through balancing capitalism with socialism in a democracy. And your US freedoms are quickly eroding.

No, capitalism works to funnel money into ever fewer hands. Capitalism wants real freedom for the richest. Damn the consequences for anyone else.

What really is good for a society is democracy and education. These are not automatically provided by capitalism.

Even if capitalism could be said to have been the shit for a period in history, it's not doing us much more good now. The US is in a sorry state, humanity-wise and freedom-wise.

Thank you capitalism for all the burgers and denim and rock 'n' roll, but onwards from here democratic socialism is the way to go.

Re:Protecting interests?

[Anonymous Coward]

Know some other losers?

How about slahshdot? How about any forum period. Equestriadaily? gone. Penny-arcade? gone. Stackoverflow? gone.

All it takes is someone purposefully posting copyrighted stuff to any of those pages and the site can be blocked.

Old as shit

[dbryson]

This was on every other website on the internet yesterday when the ad appeared. Today the rest of the internet is covering how 27 tech companies are supporting SOPA:

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/11/17/which-tech-companies-back-sopa-microsoft-apple-and-27-others/

I realize this might be unsettling for Slashdot users used to living in the past. Sorry for that.

Re:Old as shit

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Why doesn't Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

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??!?

a good idea considering the audience

[anarcat]

Considering how disconnected politicians and lawmakers are from technology issues in general, i think it's a fairly good idea to post the ad in a newspaper. Seems to me this bill should be stopped with all means available...

Re:So the mere fact that the industry is buying ad

[Grishnakh]

I don't think that many people will complain about corporations buying ads in newspapers to get their point out. How is it really any different from advertising? Except that while still trying to sway your opinion with their ad, they're not trying to sell you anything.

The problem with corporate "speech" is not when they spend a bunch of money on ads, it's when they hand bags of money to politicians and call them "campaign contributions". Somehow the SCOTUS equate giving money to someone as "speech", which it's not, it's a bribe. With these ads, there's zero money going from the corporations to the politicians; only the newspaper is getting any money, and we can presume they charge the same rates for these ads as they'd charge anyone else for that same ad space.

If they really want their attention...

[DanielRavenNest]

Google and Facebook can drop the politicians who support this bill from their respective sites....completely. Sorry, Congressman, you don't turn up in search any more, no Facebook page. Oh, and that email to your constituents? Sorry, gmail doesn't recognize your account.

Re:If they really want their attention...

[Solandri]

Heresy! Why, Congress might be moved to pass some sort of net neturality legislation if that were to happen!

Cut the Cord

[Warhawke]

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.

Why Ad? Old Media not reporting?

[Frans Faase]

I guess the Old Media are not reporting about this. If this law passes, it is also a victory of the Old Media, I guess, because free speech will return to where it all started: the daily newspaper.

Re:So the mere fact that the industry is buying ad

[Anthony Mouse]

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.

Re:Slashdot readers are fucking bastards

[mwvdlee]

[citation needed]

Re:Obama and Silicon Valley

[L4t3r4lu5]

SO DON'T VOTE FOR EITHER!

Holy fucking jesus christ on a rotating spit, how many times do we have to say that IT ISN'T A TWO PARTY SYSTEM.

Re:The arrogance of little boys

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:The arrogance of little boys

[TheRaven64]

Just nit-picking here, but he did not actually mention "home computers" or "personal computers"; he just said "computers".

Access to other computers is even rarer. Schools typically didn't have them at all, universities did but access was limited to a science and engineering students. If you didn't encounter a computer until you arrived at university, then you can hardly be said to grow up with them.

I'm in my 50s, and I have used computers since my teens

I'm in my 20s and can dance argentine tango, but neither of these facts lets you extrapolate to the general population. A few people in their '40s and '50s grew up using computers, but most did not.