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Hollywood's Secret War With Google
cpt kangarooski writes: Information has come to light (thanks to the recent Sony hack) that the MPAA and six major studios are pondering the legal actions available to them to compel an entity referred to as 'Goliath,' most likely Google, into taking aggressive anti-piracy action on behalf of the entertainment industry. The MPAA and member studios Universal, Sony, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Disney have had lengthy email discussions concerning how to block pirate sites at the ISP level, and how to take action at the state level to work around the failure of SOPA in 2012. Emails also indicate that they are working with Comcast (which owns Universal) on some form of traffic inspection to find copyright infringements as they happen.
Corporate greed vs individual entitlement. Both extremes are wrong and harmful, and proponents will always use the slippery slope fallacy to prevent any kind of middle-ground from being established.
This battle will never end.
Nor did Movie title, or Sony BMG artist. Why is nobody going to see our movies or buy our artists' music?
The liberal Hollywood elite sold out to megacorp bean counters a long time ago. Now the studios are nothing more than subsidaries of large global conglomerates.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Why isn't this front page news everywhere?
General Info and Links:
Full text of the bill can be found here.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/4681
White House petition:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/protect-our-privacy-and-please-veto-hr-4681-aka-intelligence-authorization-act-fiscal-year-2015/lln5hN5c
Justin Amash's Facebook Post:
https://www.facebook.com/repjustinamash/posts/812569822115759
Locate your reps:
http://www.opencongress.org/people/zipcodelookup
This is especially important. Find your congressman and let him know you hate this
How your reps voted:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2014/roll271.xml
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
I think you're confusing the actors and directors with the studios. Those groups have very often been very liberal, but the studio heads care only about money, and they will cozy up with anyone they think has it, and attack anyone who dares threaten it. If real fascists took over the United States tomorrow, Hollywood would quite happily begin producing films supporting that ideology. Essentially, the heads of the big studios are soulless accountants and lawyers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Altavista
and I thought net neutrality was about throttling.... I didn't realize how much money was opposing net neutrality and the actual reasons.
Comcast (Universal) doesn't need SOPA if the can win the net neutrality battle.
So read it on TD https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141212/12142629419/leaked-emails-reveal-mpaa-plans-to-pay-elected-officials-to-attack-google.shtml [techdirt.com]
I just want to take a moment, at this sympathetic time of year, to say that I really feel for the poor souls who are (or should I say were) responsible for security at Sony. We've all got issues, but those folks must be in a dark place now. For what it's worth I blame the execs who skimped on the IT security budget.
If real fascists took over the United States tomorrow, Hollywood would quite happily begin producing films supporting that ideology.
you mean like the TV show "24" or the CoD series or Pacific Rim or The Butler or Fantastic Mr Bush.
There's no secret here. Perhaps some old memos used codewords, though.
Pretty sure it is Cox, which has refused to go along with draconian measures that are not required by law.
We have Cox service here in San Diego (at least parts). It's one reason I will not live north of Interstate 8, which is Comcast territory. The difference is night and day.
Comcast pulls all this anti-consumer BS and under-delivers on services.
Cox doesn't put up with it and goes to bat for their customers on privacy. They also over-deliver on services. (I have always got higher than advertised Internet speeds. I currently get 120mbit/sec down/20mbps up on a 100/10 plan, and they just doubled the bandwidth from 50/5 to 100/10.)
Both Comcast and Cox are expensive. You can't have everything.
Considering that fascism is closely associated with dirigism, where a government exerts a strong directive influence over the means of production, we're already there in spirit if not in name.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Not sure of the specifics on "24", but many cop drama's like "Criminal Minds" dumb down the viewers perception of their rights. They always seem to be able to instantly find any information about anyone through online means including by hacking and there is absolutely zero discussion of a warrant or any approval. It's just OK because they are trying to catch the super evil bad guy. If your perception of the constitution, your rights and the limitations on police power where based on television, you likely wouldn't have a clue what they are actually supposed to be allowed to do. From the few episodes of "24" I've seen I believe the same issues exist there.
Actually what I find most awful about CSI shows is the notion that police investigations are akin to unbeatable magical formulas. If investigators zero in on a suspect, almost inevitably that suspect is guilty, and found to be so by incredible technologies used by beautiful people in sci-fi like laboratories. Even in slightly more realistic portrayals of criminal investigations, like the original Law And Order, seldom is the accused actually innocent, but rather he or she manages to elude justice through some combination of sloppy police work and prosecutorial errors.
But even worse than all those cop and CSI dramas to my mind are the police investigation news magazines like 48 hours, where the police zero in on a suspect, arrest him, and the prosecutors successfully see the accused right through conviction. They usually pay lip service to the notion of the presumption of innocence by allowing the inevitably evil convict to assert "I'm innocent!", though with a weary and bemused postscript by the narrator indicating that justice was done, the cops always get their man, and the DA is godlike in his or her ability to convince a jury of guilt.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ugh, the only thing "24" supports in me is dizziness. I can't watch shows filmed in "drunken cameraman" style.
While they keep fighting their own customers, Indie artists and movie makers are slowly eating their market share. Seriously, even these days I can find enough quality shows and even movies to watch on YouTube. Give it another XY years and Hollywood would be squeezed into some small niche market only few people will care about and I will not be one of them.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Sounds like you're willfully blind by insisting that mountains and molehills are the same thing. Sense of proportion: get one.
Of course, 24 doesn't suport fascism. Actually, I don't think that the producers know what facism is at all, judging from the story.
It's only an outrageus plot that wants to demonstrate that the USA has no problem in torturing and killing people who's innocence is not quite clear. Or, where it's known. But, there -- according to the series plot, the hero is the hero because he's not hindered by those pesky human rights. Let's kill those bastards!! Actually, 24 is the perfect serieis to demonstrate what's wrong with the current US society. That people think this series is cool is an abonimation. They should go to an hospital to be treated for mental illness.
24 is, clearly, a movie-series / Hollywood fiction, with no backing in the real world.
Oh, wait, no. Bush/CIA/Cheney has something do to with current revelations.
That you don't see the connection of the current revelations to your country's slow sliding into fascism is a sad singular report on the state of affairs. The rest of the world watches; the USA and other similar-minded terrorist states act and show their colors.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
Dont worry, Eric Holder (and slimy filth like him) will go crying to congress, telling them all about how but-hurt strong elliptical curve crypto makes them because it stops them being able to indiscriminately decode all that data going over the inter-tubes. (Gotta use language the congress critters understand you know.) "Normal citizens should have nothing to hide, and thus shouldn't have any reason to use such dangerous, 'munitions grade' cryptography!" they will whine. "Such strong crypto should only be used by government agencies, and we should have a strong hand in approving publicly used cryptographic libraries and functions!" they will sob at the congressional hearing. "Imagine how terrible it would be if Osama Bin-Laden had been able to fully encrypt all of his traffic end-to-end, and was able to use redundant, distributed proxies to hide his location!", and other such "oooh! Spooky! Baaaaad things will happen if we cant keep our tentacles in everyone's stuff!" type arguments.
Just look at how butt-hurt they are already about google and apple implementing strong full-device crypto on android and ios devices. You can bet they would be moaning about how sandy their manginas feel if full end-to-end strong encryption with strong, true-random keys were to be used at every point on the internet.
"Why, we would have to actually use real agents that arent just jackbooted thugs in uniform, and use actual detective and police work to have government intelligence instead of just dumping hundreds of terabytes of collected feeds into a giant sorting and collating algorithm! Think about how much that would reduce our response times should a major terrorist action be started! Why, we might not even know about it until it happened! WHooooo! Scary! Better give us what we want so you can feel safe!"
And, at that point, you would end up with government mandated weaknesses in your VPN security, in your proxies, and even in your very network switches themselves. Perhaps even wholly secondary channels tracking routing to collect data exchange meta-data to help identify "suspicious" use patterns, etc.
Eric Holder and his slimewad cock-goblin friends would be all over that shit like stink on shit, and the corrupt and horribly incompetent congress critters would be wiggling their asses every which way to give it to them. Bet on it.
If the tiny industries of Hollywood and the four record companies sue for trillions, then start taxing that value. An IP tax. Pay up or lower the damage claims. Quid pro quo.
Whatever happened in between the Hollywood studios and Google don't worry as much as the following:
Emails also indicate that they are working with Comcast (which owns Universal) on some form of traffic inspection to find copyright infringements as they happen
My question being this --- are the 'traffic inspection' legal?
Well, if you made a list of fields TV portrays accurately it'd fit on a very small business card. We shake our heads at the use of computers and technology, doctors shake their heads at medicine....
The problem with your analogies is that Hollywood's portrayal of technology and medicine don't change public opinion in a truly harmful manner. Not so with their portrayal of law enforcement work. Read about the "CSI effect":
http://apps.americanbar.org/li...
That's not to mention shows like "cops" where a drug search *always* yields drugs whereas in real life they had to throw as much film on the cutting room floor because it showed the cops tearing up someone's car and finding nothing, and we can't have that on TV.
Even in the movies. My wife and I saw "Courageous" a few years ago, and in the plot a police officer is found to be stealing drugs from evidence and dealing them. His coworkers set up a sting, he's arrested, convicted, and sent to prison. The film targets conservatives who eat that stuff up and believe it. In reality, getting any kind of conviction in a case like that is rare enough that it's background noise.
Do you have ESP?
It's a show about a super hero FFS, you need a new hobby