Comment by naner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by naner | Hacker News Reader

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Notice that the supporters are software companies and the opposed are Internet companies. Here is a theory I proposed yesterday[1]:

Microsoft makes the vast majority of their money selling licenses. So does the entertainment industry.

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.

Google's lawyers bringing up the Wikileaks payment processor embargo as a preferred solution also supports this position. Google (and other Internet companies) aren't really trying to protect free speech or other perceived rights, they are merely trying to protect their own interests.

1: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3246019

I have interned with Microsoft in the past, and am scheduled to in the future. Therefore take everything I say with a metric ton of salt. Obviously my opinions don't speak for them.

Most corporations put their lobbying efforts behind or against legislation based on what's in their interest. I don't believe that the public can honestly expect them to act any differently so long as their behavior is in accordance with the law -- even if only technically, and even if the law should be changed.

I don't like SOPA one bit, and I don't think it should pass. I think what this highlights, however, is that legislation should stem from principles and the interest of the people (individuals only, please). This is not currently the case, thanks in part to a long history of Supreme Court decisions (culminating in Citizens United v. FEC) which permits corporations to buy politicians. It is certainly not in most politicians' interest to alter the status quo.

As with the Occupy Wall Street crowd, I say again: if corporations are following the law of the land in a way that's detrimental to the public, then the law is what's broken. In this case I'm increasingly of the opinion that all campaign contributions of any kind should be banned. In any case I'm appalled that the primary concern with sweeping and dangerous legislation is what will happen to the economy, and not the basis on which such a law is founded.

>I don't believe that the public can honestly expect them to act any differently so long as their behavior is in accordance with the law -- even if only technically, and even if the law should be changed.

Corporations are composed of people, and I expect people to act morally. Laws are never going to properly capture morality, to put it another way legality is a weak indicator of morality. I humbly submit that it's not OK to be a sociopath in the service of a corporation, just because legally corporations are allowed to be sociopaths. People are just people, and should use their consciences.

While you are right that the people working for a corporation should act as human beings, not some kind of soulless aliens, the reality is a pretty simple one ... a corporation is a complex system in which the whole really is bigger than the sum of the parts.

This complex system is goal oriented towards making more and more profits - and the trouble is Groupthink happens. Let me quote Wikipedia on this:

     the desire for harmony in a decision-making 
     group overrides a realistic appraisal of 
     alternatives

That's right, it is in our nature to behave irrational as part of bigger groups, which sometimes makes people do completely stupid things ... how do you think group suicides are possible?

And in corporations, because of inertia it is really hard for individuals inside it to steer it off the wrong path, especially since such individuals also have their own problems to worry about, like building a career or paying their monthly mortgage or paying for their child's private school. Instead, they end up getting assimilated in the hive-mind, which is a powerful force. Sometimes corporations do change drastically, but it starts from the top, most likely from the CEO. But not even a CEO can steer a company unless she's a force of nature, mostly because a CEO doesn't get elected unless she can promise ... more profits.

Basically corporations are inherently evil and should be treated as such. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen and the only reasonable things that you can do as an individual is to (1) fight against such legislation + (2) vote with your wallet.

And I don't know what other people will do about SOPA, but my intent is to not pay for music ever again. Fuck iTunes. And even though I have a monthly habit of going to my local movie theater, I'll never again rent or pay for a home movie again. I work too hard for my money and the RIAA and MPAA of the world can kiss my ass.

Corporations' only moral code is greed. And I'm not talking abstractly, I've been part of discussions at companies where people adamantly say it is wrong to leave money on the table no matter what. The only time it is OK not to grab all money you can is if it might prevent the company from grabbing even more money in the future.

The REALLY long term game is helping your country be prosperous so that you have an educated workforce to draw from and people and people and companies wealthy enough to pay high prices for your products. That requires a pretty pervasive altruistic/moral attitude to make it work, though... tragedy of the commons and all that, otherwise.

Try selling national prosperity to shareholders.

It works fine for the buy and hold crowd...

You're right, ericd, but the vast majority of corporations (and shareholders, and lawmakers) are incapable of thinking beyond the next quarter earnings call.

Yeah, definitely aware that it's not realistic in the current environment (and it might not be realistic on a wide scale, period, given human nature). Just thinking aloud.

Google is one of the few companies that I would say has stayed strongly principled and has taken a really long view on a lot of things. I think it's probably because the founders are principled and idealistic and are still at the helm, but also because they seem to have hired idealistic people from top to bottom. I wonder if it could ever be the case that a majority of companies were Googley.

Compositions of people are not individuals.

Of course somebody will counter-argue with the legal obligation to their shareholders, yadda yadda.

Right and this also explains other behavior. Take patents, for example. Microsoft took advantage of the laws pertaining to software patents and now that they have a massive patent portfolio, they use them to generate revenue and hurt competitors. And they try to influence the law to protect or enhance this revenue stream and competitive advantage. So Microsoft is somewhat a product of the legal terrain and the legal terrain is to some extent a reflection of Microsoft (and other companies).

And our congresspeople could be imagined as mini corporations. Instead of selling goods and services they sell political influence. Instead of shareholders they have constituents. And they often act according to their best financial interests.

> In this case I'm increasingly of the opinion that all campaign contributions of any kind should be banned.

Unfortunately the only real effect of this is that only the independently wealthy would be able to successfully run for office.

Public funding.

If getting information to the public about candidates costs money, then that's just another tragedy of the commons - an external cost of government that is simply ignored so that the rich and powerful can have government to themselves. It is very easy to argue that informing the public about their options in an election is essential and should therefore be covered by public funds.

Who decides which candidates get public money to spend?

In Denmark (and other European countries i assume) we have public founding. Parties who have been nominated for an election and received at least 1000 votes in the recent election, are entitled to receive state aid amounting to 28 DKK (~USD 5) per vote.

It seems to work pretty well.

I don't understand your system, but what prevents giving money out according to votes from creating a self-fulfilling prophecy?

That is the point.

Under this system, how can a new party gain traction? Can they spend their own money if they don't have public funding? And if so, why would established parties NOT spend their own money if they have more than public funding will provide?

We do something similar in Australia too: http://results.aec.gov.au/12246/fad.htm

Any registered candidate would have to get funding for public funding to make any sense. Since the registration is already in place, there you go. If you can't get your minimum signatures to register, you don't get funding. Seems fair to me.

Looking ahead to the next ca election with 2000 candidates... Give each candidate enough money to buy a tv ad and go bankrupt or give each candidate a nickel? I can't envision this system leading to more informed voters.

Yeah, they were real informed last time without public funding. If you guys like to have a circus every time there's nothing I can say about that, but private funding isn't the answer. Because the outcome of that is Governor Schwarzenegger.

That's a very good place for using public funds, in my opinion.

Ban corporate donations, and limit personal donations to a relatively small sum. Ron Paul for example is getting millions every month from donations made by people alone. This should be the status quo, not the exception.

But most politicians right now they know they couldn't gather as much money as they'd like this way, because they know there aren't that many enthusiastic people who love them enough to give them money. So getting money from rich people or corporations is a shortcut to being elected.

I don't see how that is any different from the current situation. Surely everyone who has run for office and seen even the slightest level of success in the US in the last century have been independently wealthy before-hand?

> I think what this highlights, however, is that legislation should stem from principles and the interest of the people (individuals only, please)

Exactly. No bill should be longer than a couple of pages. The Constitution is less than 15 pages, no bill should be longer than that. (Or you can pick another arbitrary number as long as it is low).

Special interests are unintentionally creating a worse world for all of us (and not just IP proponents, I mean all special interests from banking lobbyists to teacher unions), and the way they are doing it is because bills are impossible to understand (even if that's your job!), and so everyone tries to get their short term benefit while making the whole system worse in the long run.

Make a constitutional amendment saying no bill can be more than 15 pages and I guarantee you countless problems will go away.

I remember the article about lying to federal investigators several months ago that said something along the lines of "you are not qualified to know if you are breaking federal law. Get a lawyer." This is why.

Remember, of course, that without line-item or amendatory veto powers, the legislature can simply stuff unrelated things into unremarkable bills and get away with it. It's a great reason for your 15-page rule, and also a great reason why it will never happen.

Your constitution has spawned hundreds of years of bickering on how it is meant to be interpreted. I'm not sure this is a good model for all legislation.

It's like those solutions to fight bureaucracy: it's easy to come up with a simpler solution, but invariably you end up finding out that there's a down side to it.

> Make a constitutional amendment saying no bill can be more than 15 pages and I guarantee you countless problems will go away.

Then no bill would pass.

The default for a congress man/woman is to say no. The reason bills are so long is that if you want me to vote yes to your bill then I get to write 2 pages into your bill giving me what I want.

Take a 10 page bill get 100 votes and you've got a 210 page bill that has a chance of passing.

With a law that says no bill can be more than 15 pages you'd never get it passed unless everyone agreed to vote for everyone else's pet bill, then instead of one monster bill, you've got 100 small bills which is arguably worse off as it means you've got to kill many smaller bills rather than being able to kill one larger bill.

I would say that what you describe is a MUCH better situation. If you have 100 small bills rolled into one, it's easier for representatives to say "I voted for this part, not that," or even, "I didn't see that part of the bill." With many smaller bills, it makes the tit-for-tat more explicit.

Representatives could still trade votes if they wanted, but we would have more visibility into the process. What's bad about that?

Hmm, that's actually a very good point.

My thinking was that the time to pass a bill would still remain about the same, regardless of size. This means that we wouldn't see as many little bills passed as large bills.

I get your point about smaller bills providing better transparency. That's a very good side effect of smaller bills!

Not sure we'd see fewer bills passed; the cognitive load for each one would be smaller, so maybe they could work faster.

Anyway, "fewer bills passed" could be a good thing, depending on your perspective. The job of Congress isn't to pass as many bills as possible any more than the job of programmers is to write as many lines of code as possible. Less output may be better.

Just make lots of short bills instead, or make a sort bill granting vast regulatory authority to another group. Congressmen are clever and they will get around arbitrary restrictions like that.

If they have to individually pass 10 15-page bills to get 150 pages of legislation passed, that's still progress.

Right. It will create friction discouraging frivolous legislation, and is almost equivalent to a line-item veto.

You can't force people to make the right choices through legislation. There will always be loopholes and technicalities, and a law system that attempted to do so would be so restrictive of individual freedoms as to be entirely impractical.

If a society stops being composed primarily of good people that make the right choices for the right reasons, that society will crumble, and no amount of legislation will save it.

You are right....The notion that corporations (which is a group of individuals together to achieve a particular objective,most commonly money) have the same rights as individuals(objective:happiness) is the root of this mess!....But I dont know if such an old legal precedent like Dartmouth vs Woodward can be changed!...Not that people havent tried.....http://movetoamend.org/!

This should really be the aim of the OWS movement!

The notion of corporations as people is fine with me as a legal fiction (the original intent). The major advance in the Dartmouth case was that contracts made by corporations were valid, and that the state didn't have the right to arbitrarily dissolve them. I wouldn't want that particular aspect to be any other way.

More important is the conflation of artificial persons and actual people. In light of my previous concept of a corporation as an entity that does whatever's legal, however amoral, to make a profit, it's silly to apply moral concepts such as "inalienable rights" to them.

The dividing line can be neatly seen as whether a company derives its value from server-hosted software or not. Companies which derive their value from server-hosted software have no reason to support IP-protecting legislation because their IP is already protected by the server/client architecture.

Companies like Microsoft, Apple, most game companies, and of course content companies transmit their entire IP to each customer. It is impossible to technologically prevent the copying of this IP--we all know the failings of DRM. Thus they must depend on the law for protection.

I hypothesize that Google might be less sanguine about IP protections if a new technology became available which allowed anyone to easily view and copy the Google search algorithm code at any time.

I feel like people got soft as soon as they saw Apple on the BSA.

A few people I work with were dead-set against SOPA and all it stood for - suddenly, after seeing Apple here, had a completely different, sympathetic opinion towards it. Are you fucking kidding me?

This is what is wrong with movements like these - they are easily bent on self-fulfilling, cognitive dissonance. It's disgusting.

You're absolutely right. There's not even a gray area between the companies supporting vs. opposing SOPA. Black and white. SOPA would be a huge backstep for anyone trying to innovate or sustain on the web

Yea, "artificial scarcity" is the key word.

Of all, Apple only supported because steve jobs is not there.

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