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DNS Provision Pulled From SOPA
New submitter crvtec sends this excerpt from CNet:
"Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), one of the biggest backers of the Stop Online Piracy Act, today said he plans to remove the Domain Name System blocking provision. 'After consultation with industry groups across the country,' Smith said in a statement released by his office, 'I feel we should remove (DNS) blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the [U.S. House Judiciary] Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision.'"
We'll slip this back into some other bill later on when you sheeple are not paying attention.
Bad laws never go away forever in america. They just keep comming back until they stick.
The idea is to back-pedal a little bit on this bill so we heave a sigh of relief over the DNS part and don't notice what they left in.
Next time around they do DNS thing plus something far worse. We protest the "worse", they back-pedal a bit on that and DNS blocking gets passed amidst all the sighs of relief.
Rinse, repeat until they get everything they want.
Bottom line: Unless we defeat the WHOLE of this bill and get a few morons kicked out of office then we might as well just hand the keys of the Internet over to the MAFIAA. They'll get them eventually if we don't.
No sig today...
(1) Expect A;
(2) Ask for something else A+B+C, where B and C are even more insane-sounding things and C is pratically unworkable;
(3) Make concessions to get people onside by suggesting that you're prepared to renegotiate on C;
(4) Wait for objections to be made to much of B and a near complete elimination of C;
(5) End up with all of A and a few scraps from B and C.
Notice this pattern in every jurisdiction with every proposed law. Always tackle the principles, which will be in A - you'll probably find that you want to eliminate the bill entirely. (That's at the second reading at the latest, if you're looking at the UK Parliament. Beyond that it's too late unless the increasingly castrated Lords throw up a fuss.)
Honestly, I dont think anyone can breathe any sighs of relief until all the current politicians are either replaced by people who are younger and know what's going on, or are heavily educated in the ways that this shit works,
It's not enough to change the people. We have to change the system. We need publicly financed elections, some form of preference voting, and a "no confidence" option with actual teeth on every ballot.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Excuse me, sonny boy, but "younger" isn't the problem. Some of us old folk (aka, fifty in my case) know what the hell is going on here: We're all being frelled by morons and ignorati with this bill and other pieces of stupid legisilation.
I don't give a damn about who's on my lawn (literally, kids walk thru my yard all the time) -- I want these damned politicians out of my head, thank you very much.
All about me
The stuff that is still in the bill is still completely unacceptable. It still gives the MAFIAA the power to shut down the revenue of a company based merely on accusations, and removes any liability for payment processors or advertising programs for refusing to do business with a company based exclusively on a hit list written by the MAFIAA.
Between the MAFIAA shutting down the MegaUpload song and Warner's admission in court that checking whether they actually own some copyright is too much trouble, they cannot be trusted with that kind of authority.
Moreover, we have already given them law after law after law for more than a decade. They keep saying, "We need this to stop copyright infringement, even though it is going to be costly, intrusive, and strain the bounds of civil liberties." And it keeps not working, and they keep abusing what we do grant them, and they keep asking for more.
We have given them more than we have given any other industry except maybe the investment banks, and they are still telling us they need more.
It does not make sense for us to keep going to more and more extreme lengths to protect this business model. Either it works in the Internet age, or they need to come up with some ideas for funding their production that does not rely entirely on heavy-handed interference in the marketplace. Centralized enforcement is a blunt and expensive weapon. If this particular government-granted monopoly is no longer a cost efficient means to channel revenue into science and the useful arts, we need to try some new approaches instead of just plugging holes in the failing levee.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
When I quote the first post from last night's thread on PIPA:
Fuck you. We still don't want it.
I did not know this kind of thing growing up. that was the 70's and some of the 80's and there was no mass communication other than the boob tube, for us. it spoke and we watched. at school, the approved textbooks gave us the 'view' on things. we really didn't know any better! the disney view of life they rammed down our throats (cops are trustable good guys, politicians care about us, judges and lawyers are honest. ok, the last one was never ever taught, lol) is mostly what we knew. dissent was not allowed and effectively was filtered.
but NOW, its really different. kids at school can hear the bullshit preaching by the teachers who are paid to carry the company line and not really tell things how they are - then they can come home, login and read the real truth by people, totally unfiltered and make up their own minds! the info is NOW THERE for them. it wasn't for me when I was growing up.
this is a huge difference from now compared to ALL of mankind's past. ALL of it. for the first time in earth history, people can directly exchange ideas even if they are not approved ideas by their current state. that's HUGE. and its hugely scary to those in usual old-style control positions.
my point is that there is hope for the future because the next generation will be at least potentially informed about how the world really runs. they can possibly make it different. if they do not, they have a LOT of blame on their hands. we have half the blame (us older guys) but the new ones can see how bad the architecture is and try to correct it when they get power, when they grow up.
I don't see change in my generation or lifetime. but I would hope for it for the next one.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It's not in any way. It's an abused stretch of the concept of "one man, one vote," though it doesn't actually change that. You don't actually get more than one vote counted, but for people who are mathematically illiterate it's trotted out as an excuse for why any change to the way votes are held is bad.
First past the post is about the worst method for choosing a palatable leader, and its failure is more clear as elections become more partisan. For having accurate minority representation it fails entirely for any minority which is not at least close in size to the majority party.
The Tea Party was all about being "Taxed Enough Already", and they were out there actively protesting for the rights of billionaires to keep their tax cuts. It was an astro-turf movement, and that's why you don't see it anymore. The wealthy people bankrolling got their tax breaks, and moved on. The reason I pointed out what I did, is because the Republican party is the one that says they're for "smaller government", and yet they've had plenty of chances to prove it over the decades, and they don't deliver at all.
An even better solution, which would eliminate most of these kinds of problems before they even start, would be to go back to the old Copyright standard of a few years ago (and for centuries before that): for most things you have to first DECLARE a copyright before you can enforce it.
It is this new "automatic" copyright for almost all works that has caused most of the mischief. The old way worked just fine for many generations. But less than one generation into this scheme, and it has caused all kinds of very serious problems for society.
Goes from a civil tort to a federal felony, which is a pretty big fucking deal.
At the very least, this is probably a case of "Here's a bill for like 5 things you hate, alright twist my arm, I'll drop one of them to get the four I really wanted, that's reasonable right?"
Because infringement is very easy to do unintentionally, as Representative Smith found out, I feel there needs to be a safe-harbor course of action. If infringement is removed within (picks a number from thin air) seven days, then the infringement should be presumed to be unintentional and not liable for any damages. Furthermore, there should be a process where an alleged infringer can say to an accuser, "No, you've got it all wrong. I have a right to use this because of [insert reason here]." The matter would be settled either inside or outside of courts, using well-established procedures from Civil Law, but the matter would eventually be settled.
The bone-jarringly stupid thing about this whole mess is, what you describe is more or less the way a DMCA takedown request works NOW - a copyright holder claims their work is being infringed and the site hosting the material pulls it pending review. If it's infringing (ie, if the infringing user can't explain why it isn't) it stays down and if it isn't it's reinstated.
That's the biggest problem with this whack-a-doodle bill - the measures in place to deal with copyright currently work perfectly well for everybody except gigantic corporations with too much copyrighted material to effectively police.
How did you let him past that double standard?!
Not to excuse it, but that's not the biggest double standard in the thing, I think the fact that GoDaddy helped write the bill and was conveniently exempted from the penalties their competitors would face under the bill. To me that sounds like a literal double standard with much bigger consequences.