The United States is a police state. If you faciliate communication in ways not approved by the military-industrial complex (including the media), you will be sent to the gulag for hard labor.
Which explains why you're free to say those exact (utter BS) words here, in public, to your heart's content. Idiot.
Try that in places around the world where that's actually true, just for a bit of perspective. Not that you would, since you're a proud living-in-mom's-basement rebel without a damn clue.
His point is that he tried, while his political opponents not only didn't try, but actively went to a lot of trouble to prevent change. People like Barney Frank are the ones who anti-tried to fix it.
The people who are IN the dry cleaning business are protected by the first amendment. I don't believe that the business itself is a "person", so that's not really relevant.
So if a group of people exercise their constitutionally protected rights and gather together (you know, freedom of assembly, right?) and as a group, happen to express their opinions (you know, freedom of speech?) and perhaps support a campaign, you're all for that. Your problem is that you want to define the structure of the group, where forming certain kinds of groups strips you of your rights. Can you be specific about how you draw the line? You seem to say that the people in a company have rights, but if they act together, they lose those rights.
in real life example here, 'dry cleaners' are banning any other form of chemical cleaners, detergents to force people to have to go to dry cleaners to get clothes cleaned
Except, of course, that's complete BS, and you know it. And since you're trying to make a completely tortured analogy to the desires of recording artists, film makers, and other people who are seeking to protect their copyrights, you really should include the entire picture: if you think that people should be able to rip of work without paying, because that's how it ought to be, then all you have to do is convince artists to do what they can do right now, and simply grant a license that makes their copyrights irrelevelent. Many artists already do this. So all you have to do is limit yourself to people who don't want to charge you for their work, and all's well. Everyone else can just be ignored, since there are plenty of mechanisms in place already to find and distribute works for which artists don't want to charge.
Neither individual people nor any set of people should be able to bribe politicians with campaign contributions.
And because you don't want them to, you also want to violate the first amendment by preventing people from speaking their minds. Are you even listening to yourself?
Are you some kind of hard core libertarian who believes that only governments can do evil?
No, but I believe that Google's YouTube service is not public property (why is that? because it's not).
When a private web site decides not to maintain content they don't want up, that's editing, or enforcing policies related to their choice of policies. Now, forcing a private company to host content they don't want to host - that would be evil.
Regardless, the case here wasn't Google/YouTube "censoring" anything. Which you know.
mega-upload is no different then the other huge list of storage sites
Have you actually read the indictment? No, I didn't think so. They paid people to upload pirated material, they knew they were hosting pirated material, they didn't take down the pirated material when notified that it was there, and they communicated internally and externally about the existence of and links to that pirated material. Storage services like DropBox do not do this. But you know that already, and you're just trying to pretend there's no difference. Why is that? Never mind, I know. Because you want free stuff, and are trying to change the topic and hope nobody notices the reality of the situation. Guess what: we already noticed.
By which you mean, "Run hundreds of servers in the US in order to support your criminal business model of ripping off material and making millions of dollars doing it, and eventually it's going to end badly for you, because you're a leeching idiot that is loudly, deliberately, and hugely breaking the law, and boasting about it."
Universal Music should also be held accountable for their abuses of the law.
Which has nothing to do with censorship. Why is that so hard for people to understand? One party lying about something someone else did isn't censorship. The government didn't, as a matter of policy because of the content, take down the video. That would have been censorship. Instead, a content-agnostic law was (so it's said) mis-used by a third party for their own purposes. That's not censorship. You not being able to post the comment you just posted, because it violates a speech policy set by the government, that's censorship. Nobody is saying that the DMCA's provisions and purpose were to block a video like the one taken down. But for some reason that doesn't stop people from reflexively using the word "censorship" (incorrectly) just like they constantly say "OMG Fascists!" without any sort of rational context or understanding of what the word means.
Why do you put that in quotes? What else is it when you put money into a campaign except support for what that campaign is setting out to do?
Regardless: let's say that you and your wife have just formed a business (you know, incorporated). Maybe a dry-cleaning operation. And now some guy wants to be elected to the office of mayor, and one of the things he's promising is to ban all dry cleaners in city limits because he heard the chemicals they use are bad for pigeons. Whatever. Someone else decides to run for the same office, and promises he won't let the city government run all the dry cleaners out of town.
So, you don't think that the people who are the dry cleaning business are protected by the first amendment? They can't look out for their business's inerests by running an ad that tells their customers the details about what's at stake? They shouldn't be able to offer support for the rational candidate's campaign, the one that isn't looking to shut them down? How is agreeing with a candidate and throwing your support behind them bribery? Do you feel as though you are bribing a candidate if you contribute to their campaign? Really?
What do you think it means when people with an axe to grind on some subject submit their idea of good legislative language to a legislator for use in a bill? Those 400 representatives can't be experts on everything. They are offered and they solicit outside contributions because they must. One of the problems with the "we hate businesses and think all public policy efforts by anyone who runs a business are inherently evil" crowd is that it never occurs to them to get their own act together and provide their own coherent packages of legislative proposals/counter-proposals. Well, some do. People opposed to particular things (think, the Sierra Club, or the AARP, etc) do just as much prospective legislation language writing as do the People That Everyone Loves To Hate (say, Google, or Apple, or some trade association full of hundreds of record labels).
Your own cartoonish characterization (we have to assume it is, since you're deliberately not being specific, to avoid being caught uttering specific BS) shows how little you actually know about it, or care.
You mean like the people who lobby for labor unions? The people who lobby for environmental activist groups? The people who lobby for academic societies? The people who lobby for professional associations formed by... podiatrists and nutritionists? The people who lobby for ethnic groups? The people that a bunch of artists get together and pay to go talk on their behalf? The people who lobby for groups like Mothers Agains Drunk Driving, or the NAACP, or the NRA, the dues paying members of the AARP? Do you mean you, if you went to DC and made appointments to talk to people, or someone you and a few like-minded friends paid to do so?
Your notion of "always" is incorrect on the face of it, but you know that. You're just trying to keep up the All Businesses Are Evil And Only Businesses Ever Do Anything brainwashing. It's not clear why, unless it's knowing, deliberately disingenous BS-ing.
I gather from the posts here defending our system of legalized corruption that you're a member of the 9%. (The 9% who approve of the performance of the US Congress.)
Why would you gather that? Do you think that there should be no legislative branch of government? If you think there should still be one, and just don't like the people who are currently holding those elected positions, why would you be opposed to being able to say, out loud, that you won't give your campaign support to people who don't do what you think they should? Be specific.
you're really, really fantastically stupid (which I imagine you'll demonstrate very clearly in a response).
Well, at least we know how you approach these sorts of discussions.
I could spend $1 on my own campaign, or you could spend $1 for me.
Or you could spend everything you can afford on a campaign, personally, and a bunch of other people who like what you stand for can also spend money to help get your message out and get you elected. You know, because they think you're they guy they prefer over the other guy. It's highly limited already, but at least there's still a semblance of you being able to put your own money into your own free speech. You know, you using your cash to help say (in concert with other people, in wider/bigger venues because it's that important to you), "I think this guy deserves a look and to be elected." Such support isn't in lieu of the candidate financing such communication. It's almost always in addition to that.
Of couse, there are plenty of candidates who don't personally have anything like enough money to mount a large, complex campaign. They need to persuade other like-minded people that it's worth helping to cover the costs of such a campaign.
the net effect is pretty similar
No, it's not even slightly similar. Unless every election's campaign expenditures are limited to the amount of personal cash that the poorest candidate has on hand. And why should it be? There are people who are completely broke who want to be elected. Should we allow them to set the bar for what sort of ads the people supporting someone else should be allowed to run? Why? The freedoms to assemble and speak are fundamental. If you and ten friends pool your resources because you want to speak on behalf of someone that you think is a good fit with your world view and likely to be a good elected representative or executive, do you really see that as giving money to that person?
How does the candidate get to personally keep the proceeds? Are you saying that such events, unlike all other events, aren't subject to disclosure and exhaustive auditing?
How is he indirectly paid? How does the cash get in his pocket? Or are you talking about campaign donations, which the politician can't touch because every single dollar is audited to death? Please be specific about how a lobbyst puts money in a politician's pocket.
So, you're saying that if you and a bunch of people who think like you decided to pool some resources and hire somebody to go to DC and make sure that the staffers working for congressional reps and senators were up to speed on some complex topic that most people don't understand (the better to hope that any voting they do that might impact this thing you care about is based on actual information, and not what someone else told them)... that's dishonest? How, exactly? Be specific.
If you write an informative, persuasive letter to your congressman, are you being dishonest? No? OK then, are you being dishonest if you say the exact same thing in person? Why?
I read his (Dodd's) comment to mean, essentially, "Don't expect to keep getting campaign support from people that don't think you're supporting their interests."
How is this any different than a thousand donors to, say, Obama's last campaign saying, "We don't think you still care about [topic x] the way you did in 2008 when we supported you with cash, and if we still feel that way, we may not support your campaign next time around."
Saying that - because you don't like a politician's posture/policy on a topiuc - you won't give a campaign donation next time doesn't mean that when you did support their campaign in the past, you were bribing them. If that were true, then every dollar donated by every person or organization is always bribery. Which is ridiculous.
I dislke Dodd. He's an ass. But he's perfectly within his (and his employers') rights to say the same thing we can all say: "Mr. Politician: you're not committed to what I think is important, and so I'm probably not going to help your campaign fund next time."
Anger "on the internet" about him being that straightforward is just the usual anger at the fact that a trade association made of up people who run studios and labels puts a priority on protecting their members' works. Shocking, I say! But thousands of people calling it "bribery" is just an adolescent display of ignorance or a disingenuous display of pandering rhetoric aimed at uninformed people.
most people never have and never will take copyrights seriously
That's because most people are clueless, period, and don't know how any aspect of modern society actually works. They don't know where chicken sandwiches or anti-biotics come from either. But they actually do take copyrights seriously, indirectly. They want professionally created entertainment, books, software, music, plays, operas, video games, news programs, movies... and even the leeches who want to rip it all off know that it will only exist if the honest chumps they love to rag on will continue to pay writers, artists, filmakers, musicians, photographers for the works they find worthy. The leeches actually like copyrights because it's the mechanism that allows the market in which other parties gladly create/finance what they want to function, and off of which the leeches knowingly suck using criminal operations like MegaUpload.
Except none of that matters, and you know it, because it doesn't apply in this case. MU wasn't doing the minimum required by the law... they were actively and profitably engaged in deliberately breaking the law. They lied, on purpose, about their actions in meeting the law's requirements. Their compliance process was a placebo, taking down a link or two, while maintaining hundreds or thousands more pointing to the same file. All of your deliberate off-topic ranting is beside the point, and you know it, which shows just how wrong you know you are.
The trouble is, thats like saying Toshiba, Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi and Western Digital are profiting from Pirating because people store illegally acquired content on their hard drives
No, it's not anything like that. Companies like Rapidshare and Megaupload are expressly and purposefully trafficking in ripped-off material. They exist for piracy, woo people willing to rip off (for money!) and pay for access to ripped-off material. This - unlike, say, DropBox, is what they set out to do. Megaupload's profits went up as they supported more piracy, they knew it, and they deliberately tap-danced around requests for take-downs by faking up link removals, etc.
Attempting to lump services like DropBox - to say nothing of disk drives - into the same category as Megaupload is the height of either ignorance or a really clumsy bit of lame misdirection aimed at defending the professional rip off business because you like paying them better than you like paying the people who actually create the eterntainment you want. I'm guessing the latter.
nor should they be expected to, Police the content their users upload
You're confusing people who explicitly say you may not use their systems for piracy with people who explicitly run systems to profit from piracy. Of course, you know that. Shill.
... it's the fact that some people seem to be making the leap between it getting hotter and humans not trading enough carbon credits, now that is an exercise in fantasy.
No, it's an act of sleazy salesmanship. Looking at you, Al Gore.
No, I merely responded in kind to point out the GP's cherry picking of his favorite cartoon villains. That you didn't pick up on that bit of obviousness is your shortcoming, not mine.
The point is we know these negotiations are going on with Unions
Really? You know that multiple unions will get together behind the scenes and agree on tactics that will force their mutual customers to deal with them and to pay higher wages? You know when two different unions are making arrangements that benefit only each other and not the businesses that - through hidden actions by the unions - have no choice and must deal with them? How much do you know about those deals? They're not talked about publicly, they're not part of any written contracts, they're not part of any press release, and no union boss will publicly admit engaging in them. Is that the transparency you're referring to? Or, are you saying that such arrangements are - despite never being disclosed - something that large organizations have every right to make, and that's why it's OK for unions to make them... but not for employers to make them?
Big Environment Crazies, Big No Nukes Protesters, Big Individual Donators, Big NAACP, Big AARP, Big Labor Unions, Big Illegal Immigration Advocacy, Big Couple Hundred Million Voters...
The whole point of being able to freely assemble is that it allows people with a common interest to get more done than they would individually. If your point of view is the least bit compelling, there's never been a better or easier time in human history to form a large group of like minded people and to use that group's larger profile and resources to impact public thought, elections, and policy. The people who complain the most about all of this are the ones who can't sell their ideas to enough people to matter. Some of that is bad intellectual salesmanship, but most of it is just bad ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
truth is, all game developers who come up with a really, really good game end up with gobs and gobs of cash
Which would be interesting if it were the least bit true.
The United States is a police state. If you faciliate communication in ways not approved by the military-industrial complex (including the media), you will be sent to the gulag for hard labor.
Which explains why you're free to say those exact (utter BS) words here, in public, to your heart's content. Idiot.
Try that in places around the world where that's actually true, just for a bit of perspective. Not that you would, since you're a proud living-in-mom's-basement rebel without a damn clue.
His point is that he tried, while his political opponents not only didn't try, but actively went to a lot of trouble to prevent change. People like Barney Frank are the ones who anti-tried to fix it.
The people who are IN the dry cleaning business are protected by the first amendment. I don't believe that the business itself is a "person", so that's not really relevant.
So if a group of people exercise their constitutionally protected rights and gather together (you know, freedom of assembly, right?) and as a group, happen to express their opinions (you know, freedom of speech?) and perhaps support a campaign, you're all for that. Your problem is that you want to define the structure of the group, where forming certain kinds of groups strips you of your rights. Can you be specific about how you draw the line? You seem to say that the people in a company have rights, but if they act together, they lose those rights.
in real life example here, 'dry cleaners' are banning any other form of chemical cleaners, detergents to force people to have to go to dry cleaners to get clothes cleaned
Except, of course, that's complete BS, and you know it. And since you're trying to make a completely tortured analogy to the desires of recording artists, film makers, and other people who are seeking to protect their copyrights, you really should include the entire picture: if you think that people should be able to rip of work without paying, because that's how it ought to be, then all you have to do is convince artists to do what they can do right now, and simply grant a license that makes their copyrights irrelevelent. Many artists already do this. So all you have to do is limit yourself to people who don't want to charge you for their work, and all's well. Everyone else can just be ignored, since there are plenty of mechanisms in place already to find and distribute works for which artists don't want to charge.
Neither individual people nor any set of people should be able to bribe politicians with campaign contributions.
And because you don't want them to, you also want to violate the first amendment by preventing people from speaking their minds. Are you even listening to yourself?
Are you some kind of hard core libertarian who believes that only governments can do evil?
No, but I believe that Google's YouTube service is not public property (why is that? because it's not).
When a private web site decides not to maintain content they don't want up, that's editing, or enforcing policies related to their choice of policies. Now, forcing a private company to host content they don't want to host - that would be evil.
Regardless, the case here wasn't Google/YouTube "censoring" anything. Which you know.
mega-upload is no different then the other huge list of storage sites
Have you actually read the indictment? No, I didn't think so. They paid people to upload pirated material, they knew they were hosting pirated material, they didn't take down the pirated material when notified that it was there, and they communicated internally and externally about the existence of and links to that pirated material. Storage services like DropBox do not do this. But you know that already, and you're just trying to pretend there's no difference. Why is that? Never mind, I know. Because you want free stuff, and are trying to change the topic and hope nobody notices the reality of the situation. Guess what: we already noticed.
By which you mean, "Run hundreds of servers in the US in order to support your criminal business model of ripping off material and making millions of dollars doing it, and eventually it's going to end badly for you, because you're a leeching idiot that is loudly, deliberately, and hugely breaking the law, and boasting about it."
Universal Music should also be held accountable for their abuses of the law.
Which has nothing to do with censorship. Why is that so hard for people to understand? One party lying about something someone else did isn't censorship. The government didn't, as a matter of policy because of the content, take down the video. That would have been censorship. Instead, a content-agnostic law was (so it's said) mis-used by a third party for their own purposes. That's not censorship. You not being able to post the comment you just posted, because it violates a speech policy set by the government, that's censorship. Nobody is saying that the DMCA's provisions and purpose were to block a video like the one taken down. But for some reason that doesn't stop people from reflexively using the word "censorship" (incorrectly) just like they constantly say "OMG Fascists!" without any sort of rational context or understanding of what the word means.
shouldn't be able to "give campaign support"
Why do you put that in quotes? What else is it when you put money into a campaign except support for what that campaign is setting out to do?
Regardless: let's say that you and your wife have just formed a business (you know, incorporated). Maybe a dry-cleaning operation. And now some guy wants to be elected to the office of mayor, and one of the things he's promising is to ban all dry cleaners in city limits because he heard the chemicals they use are bad for pigeons. Whatever. Someone else decides to run for the same office, and promises he won't let the city government run all the dry cleaners out of town.
So, you don't think that the people who are the dry cleaning business are protected by the first amendment? They can't look out for their business's inerests by running an ad that tells their customers the details about what's at stake? They shouldn't be able to offer support for the rational candidate's campaign, the one that isn't looking to shut them down? How is agreeing with a candidate and throwing your support behind them bribery? Do you feel as though you are bribing a candidate if you contribute to their campaign? Really?
What do you think it means when people with an axe to grind on some subject submit their idea of good legislative language to a legislator for use in a bill? Those 400 representatives can't be experts on everything. They are offered and they solicit outside contributions because they must. One of the problems with the "we hate businesses and think all public policy efforts by anyone who runs a business are inherently evil" crowd is that it never occurs to them to get their own act together and provide their own coherent packages of legislative proposals/counter-proposals. Well, some do. People opposed to particular things (think, the Sierra Club, or the AARP, etc) do just as much prospective legislation language writing as do the People That Everyone Loves To Hate (say, Google, or Apple, or some trade association full of hundreds of record labels).
Your own cartoonish characterization (we have to assume it is, since you're deliberately not being specific, to avoid being caught uttering specific BS) shows how little you actually know about it, or care.
always a corporate mouthpiece?
You mean like the people who lobby for labor unions? The people who lobby for environmental activist groups? The people who lobby for academic societies? The people who lobby for professional associations formed by ... podiatrists and nutritionists? The people who lobby for ethnic groups? The people that a bunch of artists get together and pay to go talk on their behalf? The people who lobby for groups like Mothers Agains Drunk Driving, or the NAACP, or the NRA, the dues paying members of the AARP? Do you mean you, if you went to DC and made appointments to talk to people, or someone you and a few like-minded friends paid to do so?
Your notion of "always" is incorrect on the face of it, but you know that. You're just trying to keep up the All Businesses Are Evil And Only Businesses Ever Do Anything brainwashing. It's not clear why, unless it's knowing, deliberately disingenous BS-ing.
I gather from the posts here defending our system of legalized corruption that you're a member of the 9%. (The 9% who approve of the performance of the US Congress.)
Why would you gather that? Do you think that there should be no legislative branch of government? If you think there should still be one, and just don't like the people who are currently holding those elected positions, why would you be opposed to being able to say, out loud, that you won't give your campaign support to people who don't do what you think they should? Be specific.
you're really, really fantastically stupid (which I imagine you'll demonstrate very clearly in a response).
Well, at least we know how you approach these sorts of discussions.
I could spend $1 on my own campaign, or you could spend $1 for me.
Or you could spend everything you can afford on a campaign, personally, and a bunch of other people who like what you stand for can also spend money to help get your message out and get you elected. You know, because they think you're they guy they prefer over the other guy. It's highly limited already, but at least there's still a semblance of you being able to put your own money into your own free speech. You know, you using your cash to help say (in concert with other people, in wider/bigger venues because it's that important to you), "I think this guy deserves a look and to be elected." Such support isn't in lieu of the candidate financing such communication. It's almost always in addition to that.
Of couse, there are plenty of candidates who don't personally have anything like enough money to mount a large, complex campaign. They need to persuade other like-minded people that it's worth helping to cover the costs of such a campaign.
the net effect is pretty similar
No, it's not even slightly similar. Unless every election's campaign expenditures are limited to the amount of personal cash that the poorest candidate has on hand. And why should it be? There are people who are completely broke who want to be elected. Should we allow them to set the bar for what sort of ads the people supporting someone else should be allowed to run? Why? The freedoms to assemble and speak are fundamental. If you and ten friends pool your resources because you want to speak on behalf of someone that you think is a good fit with your world view and likely to be a good elected representative or executive, do you really see that as giving money to that person?
and you get to keep all the proceeds
How does the candidate get to personally keep the proceeds? Are you saying that such events, unlike all other events, aren't subject to disclosure and exhaustive auditing?
he is paid (indirectly)
How is he indirectly paid? How does the cash get in his pocket? Or are you talking about campaign donations, which the politician can't touch because every single dollar is audited to death? Please be specific about how a lobbyst puts money in a politician's pocket.
lobbying is dishonest
Do you even know what the work means?
... that's dishonest? How, exactly? Be specific.
So, you're saying that if you and a bunch of people who think like you decided to pool some resources and hire somebody to go to DC and make sure that the staffers working for congressional reps and senators were up to speed on some complex topic that most people don't understand (the better to hope that any voting they do that might impact this thing you care about is based on actual information, and not what someone else told them)
If you write an informative, persuasive letter to your congressman, are you being dishonest? No? OK then, are you being dishonest if you say the exact same thing in person? Why?
I read his (Dodd's) comment to mean, essentially, "Don't expect to keep getting campaign support from people that don't think you're supporting their interests."
How is this any different than a thousand donors to, say, Obama's last campaign saying, "We don't think you still care about [topic x] the way you did in 2008 when we supported you with cash, and if we still feel that way, we may not support your campaign next time around."
Saying that - because you don't like a politician's posture/policy on a topiuc - you won't give a campaign donation next time doesn't mean that when you did support their campaign in the past, you were bribing them. If that were true, then every dollar donated by every person or organization is always bribery. Which is ridiculous.
I dislke Dodd. He's an ass. But he's perfectly within his (and his employers') rights to say the same thing we can all say: "Mr. Politician: you're not committed to what I think is important, and so I'm probably not going to help your campaign fund next time."
Anger "on the internet" about him being that straightforward is just the usual anger at the fact that a trade association made of up people who run studios and labels puts a priority on protecting their members' works. Shocking, I say! But thousands of people calling it "bribery" is just an adolescent display of ignorance or a disingenuous display of pandering rhetoric aimed at uninformed people.
most people never have and never will take copyrights seriously
That's because most people are clueless, period, and don't know how any aspect of modern society actually works. They don't know where chicken sandwiches or anti-biotics come from either. But they actually do take copyrights seriously, indirectly. They want professionally created entertainment, books, software, music, plays, operas, video games, news programs, movies ... and even the leeches who want to rip it all off know that it will only exist if the honest chumps they love to rag on will continue to pay writers, artists, filmakers, musicians, photographers for the works they find worthy. The leeches actually like copyrights because it's the mechanism that allows the market in which other parties gladly create/finance what they want to function, and off of which the leeches knowingly suck using criminal operations like MegaUpload.
Except none of that matters, and you know it, because it doesn't apply in this case. MU wasn't doing the minimum required by the law ... they were actively and profitably engaged in deliberately breaking the law. They lied, on purpose, about their actions in meeting the law's requirements. Their compliance process was a placebo, taking down a link or two, while maintaining hundreds or thousands more pointing to the same file. All of your deliberate off-topic ranting is beside the point, and you know it, which shows just how wrong you know you are.
destruction of society
Citation, please.
The trouble is, thats like saying Toshiba, Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi and Western Digital are profiting from Pirating because people store illegally acquired content on their hard drives
No, it's not anything like that. Companies like Rapidshare and Megaupload are expressly and purposefully trafficking in ripped-off material. They exist for piracy, woo people willing to rip off (for money!) and pay for access to ripped-off material. This - unlike, say, DropBox, is what they set out to do. Megaupload's profits went up as they supported more piracy, they knew it, and they deliberately tap-danced around requests for take-downs by faking up link removals, etc.
Attempting to lump services like DropBox - to say nothing of disk drives - into the same category as Megaupload is the height of either ignorance or a really clumsy bit of lame misdirection aimed at defending the professional rip off business because you like paying them better than you like paying the people who actually create the eterntainment you want. I'm guessing the latter.
nor should they be expected to, Police the content their users upload
You're confusing people who explicitly say you may not use their systems for piracy with people who explicitly run systems to profit from piracy. Of course, you know that. Shill.
No, it's an act of sleazy salesmanship. Looking at you, Al Gore.
No, I merely responded in kind to point out the GP's cherry picking of his favorite cartoon villains. That you didn't pick up on that bit of obviousness is your shortcoming, not mine.
The point is we know these negotiations are going on with Unions
Really? You know that multiple unions will get together behind the scenes and agree on tactics that will force their mutual customers to deal with them and to pay higher wages? You know when two different unions are making arrangements that benefit only each other and not the businesses that - through hidden actions by the unions - have no choice and must deal with them? How much do you know about those deals? They're not talked about publicly, they're not part of any written contracts, they're not part of any press release, and no union boss will publicly admit engaging in them. Is that the transparency you're referring to? Or, are you saying that such arrangements are - despite never being disclosed - something that large organizations have every right to make, and that's why it's OK for unions to make them ... but not for employers to make them?
Big Media, Big Pharma, Big Oil...
Big Environment Crazies, Big No Nukes Protesters, Big Individual Donators, Big NAACP, Big AARP, Big Labor Unions, Big Illegal Immigration Advocacy, Big Couple Hundred Million Voters ...
The whole point of being able to freely assemble is that it allows people with a common interest to get more done than they would individually. If your point of view is the least bit compelling, there's never been a better or easier time in human history to form a large group of like minded people and to use that group's larger profile and resources to impact public thought, elections, and policy. The people who complain the most about all of this are the ones who can't sell their ideas to enough people to matter. Some of that is bad intellectual salesmanship, but most of it is just bad ideas.