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?

[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?

[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

[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.

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.

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]

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??!?

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: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.