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SOPA Makes Strange Bedfellows
davide marney writes "What do 1-800-Contacts, Adidas, Americans for Tax Reform, Comcast, the Country Music Association, Estee Lauder, Ford, Nike and Xerox all have in common? According to OpenCongress.org, they all have specifically endorsed H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act. A total of 158 corporations have signed up in favor of the bill, and only 87 against. $21 Million has been donated to Congressmen who favor the bill, but only $5 Million to those against. Thanks to OpenCongress for these insights. This goes a long way towards explaining why this bill has so much traction, despite all its negative publicity."
And nothing more.
Write to your senators, your representatives! Tell them you oppose this bill!
http://www.opencongress.org/contact_congress_letters/new?bill=112-h3261&position=oppose
Tell your family, friends, even the guy at the gas station to do the same!
This bill WILL get passed if we don't make our position clear to elected officials!
Be sure to include a check for at least $10,000.
Go after the companies that are supporting the bill as well. Look what happened to GoDaddy when it was found out they were supporting it. Imagine what happens when companies like 1800contacts, Ford, Adidas and others start getting consumers telling them to drop support as well or lose business.
Business funds Congress... if they start saying no, Congress will say no too.
You are being hopelessly optimistic. Not only do most people not care at all about SOPA, even if they did care they would forget about it by the time election season rolled around. Politicians know this, and that is why the DMCA was passed, the Mickey Mouse bill was passed, the PATRIOT act, etc. That is why I have little hope for SOPA or PIPA being defeated; I wrote to my representatives in the House and the Senate, and I have told everyone I know that these bills are bad and why they are bad, but I doubt there will be much of an effect.
Ten years from now, when the Internet has been conquered by old media interests and there are toll booths and walls everywhere, people will start to get annoyed -- and by then, it will be too late. People are annoyed by the DMCA now, but there is little hope of getting it overturned. SOPA will be no different.
Palm trees and 8
On the one hand, I can see the point of view of the designers who are annoyed about the counterfeiting of their product.
On the other hand, what does it say about the actual value of their designs? It says that people are not willing to pay the prices they demand for the somewhat ephemeral value that their design commands.
It used to be that artisans had makers marks because their product was of superior quality and they wished to differentiate it. People seeing the superior quality of the product and desiring that quality for themselves would see the makers mark and know where they could get an item of similar quality.
Quality is no longer the differentiation though - price is. The relationship has inverted ; a maker no longer puts their mark on something to identify the maker of the product and generate sales, he puts the mark on to increase the perceived value of the product. As some people are no doubt pointing out - a lot of the so-called "counterfeit" product is made on the same production line, from the same materials, by the same workers using the same amount of labour.
There is no difference in the intrinsic value of the product - it's the same material object with the same properties - so why can Loius Vuitton sell it for more than Mr Chang? Because Loius Vuitton inflates the perception of value of their products in ways that have nothing to do with their actual utility - they put them in a swanky shop with a flunky on the door, they don't pile them high, and they don't sell them cheap.
The real counterfeit is therefore the perceived value of the "genuine" product - people are buying fake value. This is not an artisan product made by a skilled craftsman. This is a product designed to be made as piecework in a third world sweatshop - a product that by definition, has to be makable by the lowest common denominator of skill.
The one thing I hate most about these, though, is that the Americans basically think themselves as above everybody else. What can I do, as a Canadian citizen, to stop this bill? Nothing. But if it passes, I will have to live with the consequences.
If it were just the Americans that would be affected, I'd just let them hang themselves. They seem very capable in doing so. However, when their laws start trespassing borders to affect the entire PLANET, I think something is clearly wrong.
Obama is a singular individual who can kill this bill directly. He has more power over it becoming law than anyone else.
Damn right we need to know what his position on this bill is and why.
The next most important influences on this bill becoming law are Reid (already betrayed us by bringing it up for a vote) and Boehner (very likely to betray us by bringing SOPA to a vote in the house).
I just can't shake the feeling that when SOPA/PIPA passes, that the Internet will catch fire and rain down torment on 'our' elected officials and the content industry.
Perhaps all the shooting in the next revolution will happen online.
If Obama were to oppose SOPA, expect to see a huge amount of negative news coverage of him come the election, and plenty of glowing stories about his opponent. The electorate may choose the president, but it is the media that really tells them who to vote for, and the media wants SOPA badly.
It's a goddamn crime that the list of those supporting this heinous, un-American tyranny is topped with giant corporations. Multinational corporations. Foreign corporations.
These foreign non-people should have absolutely no influence over the laws set by the government of the United States. The legitimate government is by, of and for the people, not the people's property like corporations.
The Constitution does not give the government any power to represent corporations. But even from the beginning the Constitution has needed amendments that spelled out for corrupt government officials the limits to its power that were not already spelled out: the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights shouldn't have been necessary, because the powers it prohibits aren't granted in the original document. But obviously it was necessary; obvious when it was written and passed, and obvious ever since as it must be constantly invoked when government reaches across its bounds. It's clear by now that we need to amend the Constitution to spell out that corporations aren't people. That they don't have rights, that the government can restrict their actions with the existing powers government has.
There is already such an amendment in the works. Closing in on 200,000 people have already signed on supporting it. You should too. If you're a person, anyway. Why suffer being a second class citizen behind corporations that aren't even people?
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make install -not war