Hacker News Reader

Comment by AJ007 | Hacker News Reader

Donald Verrilli Jr is replacing Elena Kagan. Elena Kagan is now sits on the Supreme Court. That should shed some light on how important this position is.

If the RIAA/MPAA/old media (Donald also represented Viacom in its case against Google/Youtube) wrote its own laws the internet would be a sliver of what it is today. Many entities, for profit, not for profit, corporation, or association work to crush individual rights. Few do so to the degree that the RIAA has pursued.

Its sickening and disturbing that any representative, former or current, for such an organisation would be even nominated for such a powerful role in the United States government.

Clearly this guy has had a vested interest in crushing innovation and personal freedom in the United States. And you are irked that anyone cares.

View on HN

> The internet would be a sliver of what it is today.

The American portion of the internet would be a sliver of what it is today.

Keep in mind that the world is a bit larger than just the US and that whenever the US decides to shoot itself in the foot like this some other entity will take its place.

This will likely continue until the US wises up to that and starts to move with all the resources they've got directed at recovering the lost ground, which I'm sure they'll be able to do fairly rapidly.

Software patents, the situation around copyright, it's all the same thing, a temporary disturbance. On a human lifespan scale it looks like things are moving with glacial speed but since the web as we know it is not even two decades old you can bet that given the changes it has already brought about you won't be able to recognize the information landscape in another hundred years or so.

This is just a delaying action, in the long run it won't mean anything. Now if we could make it not mean anything in the short run is up for grabs, vested interests will always fight to the death to keep their gravy trains rolling.

When Gutenberg made the printing press it took another 100 years or so before the implications were really felt far and wide give it some time.

Incidentally it only took very little time after the printing press was invented for the first primitive copyright legislation to follow.

You would be comfortable with YouTube's alternative hosted in Russia connected to the web by a likely mob influenced ISP?

Laws the United States makes have a more wide reaching affect that you seem to realise. Your outlook of online freedom is quite optimistic. Smaller countries follow the lead of larger ones and for profit corporations generally do their best to follow (or write) the laws of the United States. What happens here influences the behaviour of many. After all, no CEO wants to be arrested on a layover in the United States because their company happened to break a US (this has happened.)

The reality is that organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been fighting hard against our own government, the United States, since the early 1990s to keep the internet as free as possible. Had no one decided to take up that fight your internet would be under control of such gems as 1998's COPA, along with who knows what garbage the RIAA and MPAA would dream up.

The rising influence of authoritarian states such as China dim the prospect of an open and free world generations to come. While they may flaunt intellectual property law today, make no mistake when it is their own intellectual property being infringed upon they will happily add infringement to one of their 68 crimes punishable by death.

Make no mistake, what happens today will have a decisive impact on how free the world is 50 or 100 years from now.

Nominating Donald Verrilli Jr as the Solicitor General of the United States sends a clear message that the Obama administration seeks the same expertise in chilling internet freedoms as the RIAA and Viacom did when they hired him.

Can you please explain how the RIAA crushed 'individual rights' and 'innovation and personal freedom'? I mean, from what I know they only got it to be illegal to copy movies/music, right? And the DMCA was passed unanimously by the Senate, so it's clearly not just the RIAA that is interested in 'crushing innovation and personal freedom in the United States' as you claim. What am I missing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com