Slashdot Mirror
SOPA Creator In TV/Film/Music Industry's Pocket
First time accepted submitter en4bz writes "Representative Lamar Smith, the creator of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), has been consistently receiving donations averaging $50 000 from the TV/Film/Music industry for each of his re-election campaigns for the past ten years. Smith has received roughly half a million dollars from the TV/Film/Music lobby over the past ten years according to opensecrets.org. Check out the source link for a full breakdown of donors to Smith's campaigns."
Speaking of SOPA, new submitter DarkStar1O9 submits this "explanation in simple terms of why this dangerous new bill in congress could result in the extinction of sites that are based on user-generated content like YouTube, Reddit, and StumbleUpon." Update: 12/18 20:42 GMT by T : An anonymous reader writes "Eric S. Raymond weighs in on SOPA and the question of why so many people hate this bill and not the dozens of others just like it that get passed on a regular basis."
Well DUH.
Go vote for Ron Paul.
Deleted
Color me surprised!
Not.
No sig today...
Which representative isn't in someone's pocket? Good fucking luck finding one...
Speaking as a non American, this is how the USA looks today to non Americans. The USA economy is broke, bust, only surviving by the willingness of countries like China to prop you up. Like many Western countries, you sent your manufacturing economy abroad, believing in the fairy story of "Intellectual Property" as the new way of making money.
Intellectual Property is worthless, especially to the many countries that don't care about it. It's not as if the USA cares about fair trade, using geopolitical muscle to frighten smaller states into submission.
If you keep on electing the same morons who push controls on the internet for big corporate friend donors, then the only person you can blame is yourself.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
As observed here, we could realistically defeat Lamar Smith in 2012 because his district picks up much of Austin, including the University of Texas. Fill his local media with talk about Lamar Smith's attempt to destroy the internet.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
If it is "user generated" why would anyone take it down?
Ask Universal Media Group, since they did just that less than a week ago.
copyrighted (copywritten?)
Copyrighted. As in, the government granted monopoly on the right to make copies of a work; ostensibly for the promotion of useful arts and sciences.
This needs to stop NOW! seriously, this is corruption.
I agree with Ron Paul 100% that we need to get corporate influence out of our politics.
However, everything else he believes will destroy our economy, his beliefs are economic suicide.
We don't defeat the plutocracy in Washington DC by embracing a vision even worse than the plutocracy.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
ESR on SOPA opponents:
Does someone want to reply to this post with a list of Senators/Representatives who are for SOPA? If Slashdot had a list of these people, we could just vote them out next election. Intent to violate our first amendment rights should be a good reason to vote them out.
God spoke to me
Trading money for votes may be legal, but it is neither fair nor ethical. Stop being a shill.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Yup I guess corruption could be seen as a form of speech. Still it is corruption and should have no place whatsoever in politics.
Just because it is technically legal doesn't mean it isn't corrupt. There is such a thing as rigging the system to legally profit from selling influence. That is pretty much what lobbying has become. Sure, if we all had the same amount of money to throw around at politicians maybe it would work for everyone. But since a very small percentage of US citizens hold most of the money, that influence is unevenly distributed.
NBC reported last week that this Congress is on a pace for a record low number of bills passed, and cited the failed Super-Committee effort to reach a budget deal as one of the time wasters as they were doing that required-to-keep-the-Government-running step rather than marking off new territory. So, it looks like we're going to have SOPA floating around for the rest of this term until January 2013...
Well, it is all well and good to bring in so called "expertise and nuance" into government so that legislators can make informed decisions. So can I assume that you would be OK with eliminating campaign contributions from these so called experts? Because if not, what you wrote is a bunch of BS and just a convenient excuse for buying off politicians.
One of the shocking things to me is how cheap it is to buy your own laws. A million people could part with one dollar and easily block these laws. A million people isn't even 1% of the population. I think we need to start a PAC (or some type of corporation) and start buying our laws just like everyone else. Surly, as non-caring as everyone is about these issues, we could get 1% of the population to go in on some laws that favor the people.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Individual natural persons have rights. Corporations are legal constructs, which means that the concept of corporations having rights makes no sense.
I would refer you to Dartmouth College v. Woodward 1819. The U.S. was built on corporations having rights. It's one of several factors that made us the most powerful nation in history.
"In the case of this issue, you have huge corporations with vast sums of money working on both sides of the issue." That's your justification? So it's not corruption because we have huge corporate proxies fighting for both sides? This is laughable. It' not about which side you are on. It's about the fact that money is involved in influencing a politician to legislate favorably to those who support their campaign efforts. I don't care which side you are on, this is corrupt and it's not how our government is supposed to work. There was never any vision for paid lobbyists within our system. Congressmen and Senators are supposed to be influenced by the voters in their states and districts, not to the corporation who throws the most money at them.
The moron vote is herded like cattle by demagogues who are paid to do so by the Faux News corporate propaganda machine. The demagogues appeal to their prejudices, to ignore the policies that might hurt the plutocracy. So you have the insane situation where the lower middle class hates health care reform, where they are the actual benefactors of health care reform. We have a dynamic where their health and the education of their children is damaged by policies they fully support, because they believe fairy tales like welfare queens with 20 kids and lazy illegal immigrants, that that is the real threat. And they don't want to reward these stereotypes. When of course it is themselves who are having their benefits removed, and the real threat is the corporation who doesn't want their bottom line impacted and the health care insurance corporation who wants the money to keep flowing in the wasteful healthcare system we have.
So what do you do? Forget the morons for a moment, you can't do anything about them. Aim like a laser beam on one issue that even the morons understand: corporate influence in our politics. Keep up a constant drumbeat of how our elected representatives represent the influence of those who pay for the reelection campaigns, rather than the actual people they are supposed to serve. Even a moron can get behind that. It will take time, but enough inertial movement will eventually be established that the point will be too loud and obvious, and even the demagogues can't distract the morons anymore from the real tragedy going on.
It is "We the people", not "we the rich people and the corporations." Hammer on that point every day. This is the weak point in the propaganda machine that the lower middle class morons are currently under full influence of. Their standard of living gets worse every day. And it is exactly because of the agenda of those who pay for the propaganda machine that keeps them spellbound. Break the spell. Show the little plutocrat behind the curtain creating the illusion of the fake frightening Oz.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Don't you see that in the current system most of us are deprived access to influence? Our votes are the only power we have in this system. I'll never be able to influence my local congressman to pass legislation that favors me, especially if the local corporation can work against me and contribute far more money to their campaign than I can. The simple reality is that this is about who should have the political influence in our country. Because if money is removed from the electoral process then you pretty much remove the influence of corporations and give the power back to the individual voter. But that will never happen will it? Politicians love their money too much and corporations love their influence too much and the American public just sleeps.
Wrong on 3 out of 4. I know it's snark but why not - I'll give a guy who delivered 4000 babies a pass for abortion, then again from a moral point of view contraceptives are everywhere and adoptions work (Have 2 adopted in my family). Of course he believes it should be a state issue not a fed issue. Gay - and straight - marriage should not involve the gov at all. The idea that the gov gives us the right to marry is asinine. RP supports gays in the military. He voted for repealing Don't ask don't tell. He thinks everyone should have the liberty to do as they want.
Separation of Church and state isn't spelled out in the constitution. Personally I find it silly that even at a township level when a new board is sworn in they do the 'so help you god'. Then again with hundreds of recognized religions, being able to sign up to be a legal minister over the 'net (Universal Life Church even accepts atheists) I'm fine with that. There are far more interesting things than the 10 commandments to put on buildings.
Which is why political lobbies love the two party system...
Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
Just vote them all out. This entire Congress is ineffective and corrupt. Let's turn it into a revolving door until we find some people who care more about the American people than making money for the next election.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The U.S. was built on corporations having rights
No. The U.S. was built on slave labour and international swindles.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
that Ron Paul's being put forward as the candidate for personal freedom, but that his stance on several issues isn't consistent with the ideology of personal freedom so long as you're not infringing on others. If personal freedom is a core tenet of his ideology it stands to reason he would apply it at a Federal level; because it's a basic principle he would found government on. You wouldn't leave such things up to the States, any more than you would leave them up to individual counties. e.g. If you start breaking down your core principles of governing and saying that you can leave them up to a smaller body of gov't (States instead of Federal), where does it end? Couldn't separate laws apply depending on what part of the city you live in? But even the code of Hammurabi required the law apply equally to everyone.
So to summarize: If you can't count on Ron Paul to apply what he touts as his basic principles of gov't at the national level, then what business does he have running the national gov't?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Didn't we used to hang corrupt politicians?
Are you seriously suggesting that a system in which corporations funnel money to campaigns based on politicians' votes, and politicians know this and cast their votes accordingly, is in any material way distinguishable from "trading money for votes"?
They have this guy, too:
Chris Dodd, Ex-Senator, Named MPAA Chairman
at $1.3 million/year.
Stretching the truth to pass SOPA:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111214/04100017081/chris-dodd-resorting-to-outright-lying-desperate-attempt-to-get-sopa-passed.shtml
More:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/24/christopher-dodd-as-mpaa-chairman-can-he-save-hollywood.html
Sig this!
i think you are gay. you are a closeted homosexual who has not come to grips with the contrast between his upbringing and what your family and society expects of you and your true innate homosexual impulses. i'm being serious
look: as a heterosexual male, homosexuality or gay men have no effect on me. it doesn't frighten me. it doesn't arouse me. it doesn't confuse me. it doesn't do anything for me at all. i feel nothing. make me watch gay porn for hours and what will i do? i will fall asleep. BECAUSE I'M NOT GAY
now show some me a pair of full breasts or a nice ass, and i will get promptly aroused and excited. because i'm a heterosexual male. duh! show me two guys kissing and what do i feel? anger? arousal? confusion? no, i feel nothing
so whenever i see someone getting REALLY upset at this hypothetical shower scenario, i think: you are a closeted homosexual. if you were straight, you simply would not care
and in fact i think a lot of homophobia is driven by people like you: deeply closeted gay men deeply in the closet, projecting their internal psychological struggle onto the outside world. we suffer, because you haven't come to grips and made peace with the fact you are a gay man. accept it, deal with, move on, and stop forcing us to bear witness to your ugly struggle between the societal expectations you have internalized and your true identity
i'm 100% serious. the greatest loudest homophobes in this world are deeply closeted gay men. no one else except them care so much about homosexuality. i'm looking at you rick santorum
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So, ESR considers equates SOPA with the following as power grabs:
>> "cap and trade, campaign finance “reform”, the incandescent lightbulb ban, Obamacare, you name it"
More to the point, he equates attempts to assist the public interest by: 1) mitigating climate change, 2) limiting the power of big money to buy representation and reelect entrenched incumbents, and 3) provide health insurance as a public service rather than a profit center to putting the Federal Government at the full disposal of entrenched IP rent collectors.
Coming from Eric, or anyone else, this demonstrates my problem with libertarians: glued to a dogma, regardless of the context.
Luke, help me take this mask off
How odd. I thought we were talking about education, not brainwashing. Because a truly educated man (or woman) would read enough history to know that every time socialism is tried it always devolves into tens (or hundreds of millions) dead and the state standing on your throat.
Seems to work pretty well for us here in Norway. Or did you mean communism?
There's a several infographics around that show how the majority of the deficit is attributable to Bush policies. About 90-95% of it is the tax cuts, the wars, and the unfunded drug plan extensions. Ironically, the Bush tax cuts gave away about the same amount of money as the Bush wars cost. Talk about doubling down on stupidity. Bush should have raised taxes by 3% on those earning more than $250,000 per year and the debt would have grown only by the 1.8 trillion spent on stimulus. Which could be easily be paid for out of the taxes after the wars ended.
The U.S. is more than able to pay for it's programs. However, the people with 40% of the money would rather not.
Fanatically anti-fanatical