Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
This needs more Don Draper and less wall of text. It needs to tell a compelling story with a righteous underdog fighting the good fight which would be squashed if this law passes. It needs to paint anybody who support it as a traitor to America(TH).
And it needs to rebrand it the "Killing the American Dream Act" so that nobody can politically afford to support it.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/17/idUS40280193622011...
The MPAA represents companies with a combined market cap of $250 billion dollars. That's small enough for us to beat, but Pfizer ($150bn market cap) and Microsoft ($220bn market cap) are also major proponents. All together, there's a LOT of muscle behind this act, lobbyists alone aren't going to cut it.
Its members are made up of mainly non-web technology companies that sell expensive products and are worried about piracy or counterfeiting of those products: Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, Intuit, Symantec, etc. Conversely, they don't run user-generated-content sites like YouTube or Facebook, so aren't worried about the problems with weakening safe harbors.
GPLv2 does not contain the explicit patent grant that are part of why GPLv3 was created. And I very much doubt the courts will consider "or later" to include the patent grant.
The code in question seems very peripheral (something about using Firefox for configuration), and have received zero comments on the developers list. I would be very surprised if Microsoft had any other motivation for the release, than to make the engineer who worked on it happy.
However, it is probably not an accident that they choose the version of the GPL without a patent grant.
Also, unless I'm very wrong, the terms "GPLv2 or later" means you can use the software under v3 if you prefer to use it that way. The only way to block the explicit patent grant (but stay will the implicit one) would be to license it under plain v2.
For years these industries (software, music, and video) grew to massive size by exploiting cheap duplication of digital goods and control over distribution channels. Now that further advancing technology has brought duplication and distribution to the masses they are franticly trying to regain control.
The opposing tech companies sell services and advertising. Copyright infringement largely doesn't affect their bottom-line and these proposed measures will be costly for them to implement and legally difficult for them to follow.
Of course, in ten years time it could have an industry-wide chilling effect much like the DMCA, however in the meantime that will not happen. That's not how you introduce creeping, malicious legislation, and the folks responsible for this know that, of course.
Am I reading the bill in an overly alarmist way? It sounded to me like SOPA would make YouTube basically impossible to run.
I have a two year old son. He loves Thomas The Tank Engine. And he loves Youtube and will frequently ask for "Thomas on the laptop". Most of the Thomas related videos on Youtube are actually re-enactments using the toy trains rather than copies of the TV show. There's apparently a whole community around this - with movies ranging from shaky clips of a kid playing to elaborate productions trying (though usually failing badly) to get close to the production values of the original series.
Some of them use snippets of the music from the TV show - how much is too much? Some use music I can't place - copyrighted or not? I can't tell. Some of them re-use dialogue. Some use text from the books. Others have invented their entirely own stories (but might still run afoul of copyright because they use the characters). Some has as their only similarly that they use the train sets as props.
The question is, how many of these would a court find infringing? (how many should they find infringing in a reasonable world?).
The end result is that to protect themselves legally, they'll need to reject everything that even has the appearance of being infringing.
This will likely throw out a massive amount of non-infringing content as well as a lot of stuff that is in a grey area legally but that the public will find ridiculous that they have to block. Vetting it will be far too hard
Of course, this latter part is perhaps the biggest light at the end of the tunnel: The chilling effect on speech are so strong and so far overreaching due to the lack of legal safeguards, that I can't imagine SCOTUS not throwing out substantial parts of this law.
The DNS blocking is only available to federal law enforcement; a private complaint can't pull DNS under any circumstance.
2. It is available to federal law enforcement.
May be I'm just being cynical, but there seems to be an obvious way around fact 1. using fact 2.
money == power; gov officials seem to be willing to go to ANY length, given enough Shift+444
Seriously, though, I agree. A company should not make politics corollary to their brand name. If Google takes a stand on things by taking advantage of its vast user base, it will be disingenuous. A blog post is one thing. Plastering a message across their header on the home page is far different. Most Google messages are fairly innocuous, holiday themed graphics. There is a time and a place for political infrastructure, and it is not the same as for the corporate infrastructure. This is why SOPA is a problem in the first place - corporations and politics becoming intertwined in unproductive and abusive ways. You make a stand outside your brand, and you do it with integrity by not forcing it upon your user base. I agree with the theme that SOPA is bad, but I don't think it'd be good for Google to fight by putting it on their webpage.
Mozilla, I can see. Yahoo! I can't. Reddit, I can see. Google, again, I can't. Different kinds of traffic, different amounts, and different audiences.
I feel that SOPA will pass, there's no doubt in my mind - it will just be a much watered down version, much like any other bill that passes these days. Even this so-called "anti-SOPA" ad is not really anti-SOPA, it just disagrees with certain aspects of the bill. They're basically asking for a compromise and they'll get it. There will probably be a long and expensive process in order to shut sites down. There will probably be some clauses about staying up if you are compliant with take-down notices. And there will probably be more bureaucrats added to the system, with jobs that are essentially useless and another needless expense. Ultimately, it will be like the War on Drugs, War on Terror, TSA and what have you; some far-fetched, pie in the sky plan that never had a chance of working in the first place.
The sad part is that people in Washington don't understand the consequences of what they are doing. They seem to think they have a blank check to play around with. Slowly but surely, they add things like this and the government gets bigger and more expensive to run. You can't just fire bureaucrats, they have a knack for sticking around.
I can't help but feel like I'm watching the slow death of a once great nation. I haven't heard anything lately coming out of Capitol Hill that has any semblance of intelligence.
This is really twisted. The industry is taking something it wants to do -- draconian copyright enforcement -- and passing that activity (plus the cost) to taxpayers. The system is broken. You can clearly see that when special interest groups that represent a small minority can get taxpayer money and spend it against the majority while at the same time getting the majority to pay.
This text is not coincise, it doesn't draw the attention of the reader to any specific point and it shows several other shortcomings, if the message ever comes across I am pretty sure this page won't help.
Ah well. Rational writeups are all fine and good but not when you probably have a split second to capture the attention with an ad.
Large image, looks like advertising, easy to overlook.
Dense columns of text, looks like bland content, easy to overlook.
Ogilvy-styled image, headline and text, looks like advertising.
Headline and then text that looks like the letter it is, hey, let me just skim this and see what these guys are upset about. Wow, Facebook and Twitter. And so it goes.
Nearly all of the companies listed in this ad were heavy donors to the Obama administration. Now they understand what their donation got them.
Everyone in the Internet industry feels extreme pain when these regulations are proposed, and rightly so. SOPA is an insane example of a bankrupt government flailing about.
However, the same commentariat thinks that regulation is somehow "necessary" in medicine, law, or energy.
("<Calamity-of-the-day> could have been prevented if we just had more rules on the books! Surely the evil profit-making corporations would cut every corner they could, just to make a buck! It's not like taking it in the shorts every single day in the press will hit their stock price!")
Once you've tasted government intervention in your industry, you'll want some mouthwash.
Regulation should be in place to put safeties into a system. What i mean by that is don't let people "cheat" too much. By cheating the reasonable bounds of the system the whole system would suffer (people dying, civil liberties slashed or financial systems collapsing).
That said industries you would want tight regulation on is in the food or medical industries.
Nothing is black and white but always varying shades of grey.
I don't mean to diminish this effort but just imagine this kind of response every time we decided to declare war somewhere far far away. I'd be impressed. Certainly sending people to be maimed or killed is just as critical?
There were no similar protests over Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya because the US was only providing air support, and because Afghanistan started only a month after 9/11 and everyone was still shocked and compliant.
And there were protests over Afghanistan; I participated in some myself. We weren't all shocked and compliant - the first thing I said upon seeing burning towers on the TV at the Indiana University Student Union was "Reichstag", and I wasn't wrong.
The Iraq protests were the largest protest movement in decades and lasted for years. It really wasn't difficult to find out about them.
> the first thing I said upon seeing burning towers on the TV at the Indiana University Student Union was "Reichstag", and I wasn't wrong.
Well, there's always someone comparing the current administration to Nazis....
Heh. You live in a large city.
Indeed, one could imagine a potential copyright infringement complaint leveled at Zygna by Paramount, claiming that "Mafia Wars" borrows too heavily from the "Godfather" films. Completely frivolous, indeed, but possibly threatening enough to Zygna's daily operations for them to heed warnings about these bills.
The site would have "pay to promote button". People who care keeps donating which will directly fuel the ad campaigns set up on adsense, facebook ads, twitter promoted links etc. It will be all over the place.
Remember, there are a lot of people out there who go to Google and type in www.gmail.com into the search box on a daily basis. To them, Google IS the internet.
Why doesn't anyone just call bullshit on the whole concept of the US extending its law to apply to the rest of the world?
So, really, the United States wouldn't be extending its law to apply anywhere else but the United States. It would be blocking what content is viewable within the borders. But this isn't even the real issue - because you can still bypass this using the IP address directly instead of the domain name. The real issue is the corporate abuses which could be allowed to take place within our borders if websites aren't deemed to be doing enough. It could make the internet environment tyrannical in content control for fear of websites being shut down.
Do you know that they were invited and declined?
is it possible that no one asked them to join, or declined to let them join?
Wouldn't they be liable for every song, every photo, every video, every document their users store? Maybe they've got songs (mostly) covered via the agreements for iTunes Match, but the rest seem hard to pull off (especially since, IIRC, taking a picture (or video) of a copyrighted painting, sculpture, etc. can be infringement in some cases).
Google, on the other hand, doesn't make anything that can be counterfeited, so they have nothing to gain from this bill. They do have a lot to lose (with all the censorship provisions), so they are taking a stand against the bill.
The lost-income argument of this needs to be battled, because I doubt that everyone buying fake rolexes at $200 each is going to be saving up for the real deal. I have to assume that the same type of arguments are propping up this debate. I want to know where the people that support this get these numbers from. Do people really think that by passing this legislation we will somehow get money for nothing?
Does anyone really think that this won't be applied to Wikileaks and the like...
FTFY.
They may never use that power, but it would certainly make negotiating much easier.
Yes, I omitted the words "goals of the" [edit: 's stated goals] but I'm talking about what the average reader will get out of the ad before they flip to the next page.
Not good, imho. And yes, they do care about the average reader. If they were trying to reach people other than the average reader, there are better ways to do that.
Fools.
Maybe censor all requests coming from the .gov domains.