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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."
Absolutely. With Corporate America supporting SOPA by a vote of 158 to 87, I wouldn't blame Congress for passing it. Who's right, Corporate America, or you and I? I don't know, but I know who has more lobbying power, and it ain't me.
PBS might also support it. Last month, the News Hour ran a story on piracy. They interviewed two "opposing" parties, the Open Internet Coalition and the MPAA, whose only difference was how much copying should be regulated: a lot, or a lot more. That was the most biased, unbalanced, and stupidly wrong coverage I'd ever seen from PBS. I thought they were a cut above the rest of the mainstream media. They weren't, not that time.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Just look at these amounts :
Sen. Harry Reid [D, NV] $3,502,624
Sen. Charles Schumer [D, NY] $2,648,770
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand [D, NY] $2,080,651
I wonder how much Obama got ... in the beginning of an election year no less. What do you think Obama > Harry Reid or the reverse ?
Weird, weird names on the list though :
* United States Tennis Association
* Council of state governments
* National Confectioners Association
* Major City Chiefs
* Let Freedom Ring
* Outdoor Industry Association
* Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council
* Eli Lilly and Company
* Center for Individual Freedom
* Concerned Women for America
* Americans for Tax Reform
* Society of Plastics Industry
* Beam Global Spirits &Wine
Half of these sound extremely fake. Most of these look like it's VERY unlikely they would get themselves on this list if it didn't gain them money ...
Not that I tell myself these guys collectively contributed even 1% of those amounts ... very strange names here. Were the pressured into signing this ? There's another collection of names that clearly were pressured to get in there (National Electrical Manufacturers Association ... are these names just an attempt to point "broad support" or ? Weird weird weird.
, Electronic Components Industry Association)
Interesting though : all but one electronics manufacturers are in the opposing category ... /me suspects threats from customers. All think tanks, democrat or republican, are on the opposing side. So clearly both parties are aware of the publicity loss. Lots of the organisations supporting this bill are subsidiaries of other supporters (so the supporter list shoulds be a LOT shorter). WTF is visa doing supporting these guys ?
Some organisations could have contributed more by staying out of it, me thinks :
* 4chan
* Torrentfreak
* Tumblr
(let's just say people might think they know why these guys are opposed, and it's not for the right reasons)
And, surprisingly in the "opposing" category (although I must admit this legislation doesn't strike me as conservative, and it doesn't seem like it's supported by the software industry either, it's almost purely privilege grab by the entertainment industry) :
* Business Software Alliance (also known as Microsoft)
* Brookings Institute
* Competitive Enterprise Institute
So rather, make it known that you will boycott products from SOPA supporters, who can tell congressmen what to vote for. Someone developped a nifty app for that :
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/o78co/my_friend_and_i_wrote_an_application_to_boycott/
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Interesting/Informative post, but you miss two key issues:
1. You ARE aware that the whole fashion industry has NO copyright and yet still continues to profit, right?
Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture
http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html
> There is no difference in the intrinsic value of the product.
2. Correct. You are close to a key Insight to reach the next level of understanding but not quite there yet; so let me help you out --> Value is multi-valued! i.e. Two different people can value the same thing differently; what is it "perceived" value then? The High, the Low, the Average? No, it is BOTH the low AND the high. It is a 1-to-many relationship, NOT a 1-to-1 relationship. THIS is the main factor on why [almost] all economic theories are doomed to fail -- they don't accurately model the relationship of value -- multi-valued, not single-valued.
> The real counterfeit is ... people are buying fake value
People literally buy into the pseudo-cool factor all the time. They are called "fads." Suckers have yet to learn that having object X doesn't matter one bit when you the true value in life is relationships. e.g. The rest of us get on with our lives buying the $20 jeans instead of the $100 designer jeans laughing (and/or feeling sad) at the sucker ^H^H^H financial idiot willing to throw away his money at a lame attempt of being a hipster.
There is a much bigger issue looming on the horizon ( 100 - 400 years) though that you will want to ponder -- what happens to "value" when anyone can simply "print" whatever object they want? =)
Cheers
In a recent study, researchers Raquel Alexander and Susan Scholz calculated the total amount the corporations saved from the lower tax rate. They compared the taxes saved to the amount the firms spent lobbying for the law. Their research showed the return on lobbying for those multinational corporations was 22,000 percent. That means for every dollar spent on lobbying, the companies got $220 in tax benefits.
You know what's funny? In Germany, the president is currently under a lot of pressure, and may have to resign, because he got a private credit for his house at too favorable a rate of interest. In the US (the home of democracy, defender of the free world, etc), corporations can openly bribe their senators to get the laws they want.
Something's rotten in the state of Merica...
CJ
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
Calling them fake is ignorant at best. First, China makes the "genuine" ones; then they make "non genuine" of varying qualities, starting from identical, all down to rip-off. Also, you can make them stamp anything on them, starting from an identical logo, subtle variations to avoid "counterfeit" claims in different countries, down to generic or whatever you want written on them. These variations have different prices and levels of legality (within China). They will officially deny to stamp "Sony" in some random electronic equipment, but if you are willing to pay, it can be done. Kinda defeats the saving of buying a cheap alternative in the first place? You decide, but people is stupid enough to buy for brands.
Many times I'd rather buy a Chinese labelled device because at least the price is fair, some people do try to sell you bad quality but brand stamped stuff; when instead you could buy good quality but generic Chinese brand instead. Indeed, you can buy in Hong Kong super expensive brands, or cross the street and obtain very high quality same brand stamped "non genuine" product. Knowing to recognise which is which can be very hard, sometimes they copy packaging, stickers and such very well; and normally that doesn't matter there because it has the fair (much lower price) while keeping the same quality very often.
What I hate is when they try to sell you a counterfeit with almost the same price of the genuine, or sometimes just a little cheaper. Software is silly, "counterfeit" price is 0$ in the net, but fakes are sold online for 25$ or such, sometimes with good enough packaging, aluminium (plant pressed) CDs etc for software meant to cost 100$, 500$ etc.
Does these justify blocking of sites? the Bill is a blacklist, how do you fall on it or how do you get out of it is shady at best. Further, the State is not even enforcing it directly (like China or Iran), it passes the responsibility to the ISPs. This means they will rather block in excess rather than infringe the law; and many will be falsely accused and promptly disconnected in fear.
Iran is requiring full ID before using the net, and America is not far from that. China forbids cryptographic connections, America will get there as well, because this gets in the way of proper deep packet inspection; and only criminals have something to hide... Soon enough dissent will get banned, it is too easy to make a site go down by having agents post links to blacklisted sites; and this way the establishment cannot be accused. See? Americans are much more refined than China and Iran, while achieving the same.
Of course, the countries who do not implement these laws become "source of terrorism", blah, blah lets invade (war helps the economy, stupid).
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
The DMCA doesn't necessarily need to be overturned, but certainly it needs to be revisited. The DMCA provides a standardized method for handling alleged copyright infringement, allowing the host to avoid being caught in the cross-fire. This has been abused by infringers, and certainly by people wishing to censor. I've had both types of complaints, albeit not under circumstances covered by the DMCA. In the case of some guy trying to remove an embarrassing critique of some private messages in which he libeled me, I was fortunate to have had a hosting company who didn't just buckle for their own safety, and had the DMCA applied, the complainant could have sent a take-down, which I could have countered - leaving the host off the hook. I think it helped that the guy sending the complaint was clearly a whining bitch, demonstrating his fundamental lack of legal knowledge through his references to "Internet laws". The DMCA also poses problems for content owners who find themselves playing whack-a-mole with sites that repeatedly allow copyright infringement. I see that as a legitimate concern. I'm very much in favor of equitable copyright protection, the cornerstone of which should be severally shortened copyright terms. Things have clearly swung too far in favor of rights owners, with the bulk of the money appearing to miss the pockets of the producers themselves.
My main issues with the DMCA lie in how it interferes with the bypassing of DRM, and reverse engineering. Another problem though is that the DMCA introduced pretty stiff penalties for infringement, yet what happens when a media company, with the presumption that they have legal people who should know better, send pretty obviously frivolous take-down notices. In theory this is perjury, yet how many prosecutions do we see? Out of curiosity, should I receive a malicious take-down notice from an American entity, how would I get a prosecution rolling? Send a letter to the FBI, or would I instead need to engage a solicitor to begin civil proceedings?
We'll have to route around the USA. Make the DNS root be in EU or iceland, and start paying for things in bitcoin, rather than Mastercard or Visa. Actually, it's not so big a deal. It can be done!
Yes, it is a big deal because DNS only works _if everyone uses it._ One of the big fears about DNS (one that I think Congress is not considering because, well, they're fundamentally stupid) is what will happen to the global network when DNS becomes balkanized, with every nation (or blocs of nations) running their own systems. Granted, the Internet couldn't care less about DNS: all it cares about is IP addresses. But the Domain Name System is a vital part of the World Wide Web, and URLs are everywhere, even within embedded systems.
Secondly, there is no single "DNS root". There are, last I was aware, thirteen root servers that are geographically distributed around the world, and hundreds of thousands of secondary domain name servers operated by ISPs and large organizations of one kind or another. Historically, the U.S. government pretty much left the things alone, and that worked out very well for all concerned. The fact that we're going to be sacrificing the trust other countries placed in us when they got on-board the Internet, just to satisfy the greed of an industry worth a paltry five or ten billion dollars a year is just astonishing. The rest of us, the ones who run our 2.4 trillion dollar economy, are more than a little pissed off about this.
To be fair, you can thank several _European_ corporations, the big media conglomerates such as Sony, Vivendi, BMG and others, for spending the millions to buy SOPA, PIPA, and a host of other similar bad laws. So you don't get to dump all of this in our laps, and if our Justice Department hadn't already been subverted by big media (several top spots at the DoJ are currently occupied by ex-RIAA lawyers) several Congresspeople would be under investigation for treason.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Thank You.
The long and short of it, is that this bill is, put charitably, penny-wise and pound-foolish. We will lose $300 billion to get back $10 billion. And that's just the monetary aspect. From the freedoms aspect, we stand to lose a fair amount more.
Two points need to made here:
1.) Steam figured out how to use DRM and not piss off its customer base. That members of the MPAA and RIAA are seemingly incapable of doing the same is a reason I would not invest in either their constituent's companies, given the choice (leadership failure, lack of vision).
2.) Using jack-booted thugs (off-duty police offices dressed like members of SWAT) to bust into people's homes, and arrest someone's grandmother for copyright violations is f*cked up. Any sane politician would cut off his own arm to NOT be associated with that kind of imagery.
The only possible reason I can contemplate that some members of government are getting on board with this is some sort of power-grab. Which is cute. The people you are going after are already US citizens, but for some reason you feel the need to degrade and humiliate your own people. Basically, it's a form of power masturbation: it gives our country something to do, but in the end, we're f*cking themselves.
I am John Hurt.