How does SOPA threaten Stack Overflow?
meta.stackoverflow.com
meta.stackoverflow.com
Fewer than 1 in 10 came to me (the person registered to receive the notices). Subcontractors working on behalf of rights holders would send notices to any email address that they could find. Some went to retired employees, transferred employees, etc. It got so bad that we put a comment in ARIN that specified the agent's contact address to try and stop it. Didn't work.
The DMCA requires a proper notice be sent to the registered agent and grants the organization safe-harbor. It is very well defined. Here is the official list of registered agents (the one and only list... but DMCA subcontractors don't read it):
I wonder what would happen if you ignored a DMCA notice sent to the wrong contact. Would it be invalid?
Rights holders and their subcontractors can't just email anyone in your domain (the janitor's office) and expect action to be taken. The law (DMCA) is very explicit about this. Notice must be given to the registered agent (PERIOD). However, you should ask your legal counsel what they which to do with invalid notices. Some will want the organization to respond anyway, others won't. It depends on whether or not they wish to waste money spending time following-up on invalid notices. I can tell you this though, a notice sent to janitor@domain.com is not going to stand up in court unless janitor@domain.com is indeed the registered agent.
The point is that if they can't be bothered to obey the DMCA and take the time to look-up the proper published registered agent, why should new laws be considered that let them get away with even worse laziness and accusations?
The response from my (Republican) Congressman was a form letter telling me I was wrong, and regurgitating a the pro-SOPA talking points.
I've been contemplating a rather severe letter in response, but I haven't gotten to it as I don't believe anything I can say to him will be effective.
A response informing the congressman of why he's wrong, citing loss of jobs and liberty while threatening innovation, all in the name of an ever-growing government keen to erode our rights in the service of special interests, would likely hit enough republican talking points to at least merit a moment's consideration. Which, at the end of the day, is probably the best you could hope for.
Hit them where it hurts. Threaten _their_ job. If you lose your job due to their legislation, they'll just blame their opponent and tell you to stop begging for handouts.
In short, it's going too far, and even if it isn't, certainly seems like an idle threat.
Saying something more like "I cannot vote for any candidate who supports this policy or any like it" is perhaps a more effective statement to make.
"But it is necessary to know well how to disguise this characteristic, and to be a great pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived. One recent example I cannot pass over in silence. Alexander VI did nothing else but deceive men, nor ever thought of doing otherwise, and he always found victims; for there never was a man who had greater power in asserting, or who with greater oaths would affirm a thing, yet would observe it less; nevertheless his deceits always succeeded according to his wishes, because he well understood this side of mankind.
"Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them."
http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince18.htm (As they say, read the whole thing... the chapter, anyhow.)
The same way the NAACP was embraced over the Black Panther Party.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_movement_for_Ind...
So your choice is either to concede that issue or vote for a fringe party (which here in the UK basically makes your vote worthless).
I doubt whether anything you say to _him_ would be effective. But why not write a response and then post the three letters (your first, his reply, your response) to a blog or website? If you publicly reveal the weakness of his position it could have some effect.
I didn't make a copy, and instantly after sending, wished I had.
No response at all from my Senators. I assume in three months, I'll get a condescending letter from at least one of them explaining why I'm wrong, just like with TARP and any other issue I bother to contact these folks about.
So, the trick is to raise 2 (unrelated or related) issues in your letter. Issue one is the real issue you are concerned about, and the other needs to be something low profile that will not already have a canned response.
That way a reply will need to be drafted by staffers and reviewed by someone (hopefully the actual politician).
What gets a politicians attention is money, and less directly votes - but money can move votes... and people have a poor long-term memory at the voting booth.
I wonder what a open "real-time democracy" Political Action Committee website might look like. Suppose there were tracked tallies of voting intentions, donations, donator "votes" to apply money to issues to be spent on specific campaigns at election time. I imagine you'd want to distribute election targeting data to the PAC voters so they can individually make their resource decisions, maybe to shift their donation to politicians who were most vulnerable in a given district. Sending a politician updates of that summarized data with time series growth might get their attention better than letters. It sucks that we need to bribe your own representatives though...
I'm not going to say one should or shouldn't vote Democrat. But, there are too many considerations on which I'm unwilling to compromise to just vote for the enemy of my enemy. Neither party is your friend.
And they need to be punished, just like a good spanking at the right time does wonders for spoiled brats.
This sounds awfully like "I Voted for Kodos".
Why would voting for someone who voted for SOPA help stop it?
Harry Reid, D-NV, senate majority leader, is pushing SOPA as a jobs bill so claiming that it's a republican idea is silly.
http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/112-hr-3261/1019110/tot... shows that police and firefighter unions are supporting SOPA, as are the teamsters, the electrical workers union, as well as the movie-related groups that you'd expect.
Politics is no fun. It's not like if I voted for the Republican opposing her that we'd get a better deal for ANYTHING that I cared about. We need a third party with reasonable political power, and/or a proportional-governance system where you tally the votes and give each party its proportional share of representatives. The current system is broken.
Why don't you try writing him while incorporating some more conservative commentary? Here's a couple of links from the National Review, one of my morning reads:
http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/281962/larry-downes-sop...
http://www.nationalreview.com/media-blog/283537/sopa-battle-...
I'm sure you can find more with a little Google-fu.
One of the more interesting things about SOPA is that both its supporters and opponents are pretty bipartisan. You can't oppose (or support) it by indiscriminately supporting one party or the other.
Until 2001, some of those (encryption and privacy) were conservative issues. Now both parties tend to be in agreement and oppose the EFF on all of these issues.
I think of the EFF as more Libertarian, and a often bit extreme in its position, which I think often puts it at the fringes of either of the major parties.
As is mentioned elsewhere, both parties have trouble understanding/responding to tech/privacy/open source/IP issues, so it's good there's a voice. I glad the EFF finds opportunities to disagree with both parties.
Big media has scary pull in D.C.
The current copyright regime is tolerable. Tolerable and good are worlds apart.
The DMCA did not create copyright law, it modified it, and pre-DMCA, YouTube would have had no protections.
Imagine search engine results that consisted only of URL's.
You can read about the various portions of it on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac...
Title I includes the anti-circumvention measures, which is what everyone loves to hate, but the act as a whole deals with a lot of other stuff. (Title V deals with copyright and boat hull designs, for instance!)
[1]Or something stronger, tis not like it was perfect!
$winter_holiday_of_choice should include a Explain SOPA To Your Parents Lunch or something - we need to get as many level-headed against SOPA as possible.
It would have made sense if SOPA was an American problem, but as it stands it threatens the internet for the whole world because of hosting locations and origin of technology companies.
So you're saying we should go with $solstice_holiday_of_choice ?
Just because they didn't abstract sufficiently doesn't mean that abstraction is necessarily futile.
People just need to face reality. Its a corrupt system. The government is full of fraudsters and even mass murderers. I know its hard to accept that, but that's the truth.
The other problem is that its the very structure of our government and society that creates these outcomes over and over again.
We need to do some agile engineering on society, starting from base premises.
Any government consisting of representatives of the people will end up proposing and debating laws that certain segments of the population sees as "bad" at times.
It's a test of how well the government works if the people can voice their opinion and have an effect on Congress's debate. If this happens and curtails the law, then government is working.
At this point, I'd probably ditch it as unworkable, and replace it with a more meritocratic, less corruptible form.
It's a test of how well the government works if the people can voice their opinion and have an effect on Congress's debate. If this happens and curtails the law, then government is working.
No, it isn't. SOPA is an obvious exercise in moving the Overton Window. The bill(s) that follow it -- including those that will eventually pass -- will seem innocuous by comparison, regardless of their content.
Really we need the eBay's, AOL's and Craiglist's of this world to be running campaigns like this, getting the message out to the more casual internet user.
somebody else here had this idea, and i love it: facebook needs to shut down their site for an hour and replace it with the message "this is what happens if SOPA passes".
Let's stand against SOPA, but let's not get too radical while doing it. The Internet is not a savior of "the people" or a second coming of anything. No one will save us but ourselves.
Tell us how you really feel. Don't worry though, I'm confident that the government will eventually find a way to expunge all the undesirable "low-lives" from the net.
There are plenty of things that are wrong with the government, but being paranoid and bitter is not the way to fix them.
We are still subject to the same petty and idiotic politicians as always, and will be for the foreseeable future. That's how the world works. The internet celebrates the cult of personality just as much if not more than real life.
The use of the tool for memorials to Steve Jobs or for political messages like this is extremely rare.
It's a good thing that you read the status messages. Normally, they're important.
Seeing that this is directed to the US users of Stack Overflow, I am not sure what the rest of the world should be doing other than spreading the message.
To play devil's advocate, since SO has dumps of their data under CC, anyone from another country can still get the content.
The community and the system of asking and answering questions are threatened, the previous data will still be around.