CNN covers SOPA on homepage | Hacker News Reader

CNN covers SOPA on homepage

cnn.com

170 pointssolipsist29 comments

So much effort on tackling SOPA. Three months later, there's a bill titled Stop Online Child Pornography. Then there's a lot of PR issues.

The companies should be demanding Internet Freedom bills to replace SOPA, DMCA, PROTECT-IP, COICA, CEST, OPENA, ACTA and more.

Take the fight back against the anti-Internet companies in the war against the Internet.

New laws take precedence over old laws. A hypothetical "Stop Online Child Pornography" act could trivially undo any internet freedom law.

If that's true, a hypothetical "Protect Children's Internet Future" act could trivially undo any anti-Internet law too.

We need a government censorship engine for child pornography, and if you disagree, then obviously you are pro-child pornagraphy and can be ignored from public debate... Brilliant strategy. These guys are playing Chess. We need to be equally cunning.

We need to give our children the Internet Freedom to create their own future. If you disagree, you hate children's futures and should not be part of politics.

"At stake, say supporters, are American jobs. Every free piece of content scraped to be sold, or given away, online takes money out of the pockets of record companies, movie producers and other content creators and their millions of employees. Pharmaceutical companies, sports leagues and video-game makers have also voiced support. "Especially in this time of economic recovery, we cannot stand by and watch while American companies and the jobs they support are being bled by foreign criminals who are taking advantage of a massive loophole in our law enforcement capabilities," wrote Steve Tepp, who works on counterfeiting and piracy issues for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "These illicit enterprises are not tolerated in the brick and mortar marketplace, so why would we allow them to flourish unchecked online?""

Rhetoric of SOPA supporters > Rhetoric of SOPA detractors, when it comes to winning public support. The message needs to be streamlined...

CNN, owned by Turner Broadcasting, owned by Time Warner, which supports SOPA.

It's not mentioned in the article, but CNN has a dog in this fight with their iReport service. They receive and post a lot of user-generated content nowadays.

This is true to some extent or another for almost all of the major news sites. Even if they just have comments, they're aren't offering them out of the goodness of their hearts, it's because it's a cheap way to boost impressions, sometimes dramatically. (At least, this is why they existed when I worked for one of them.)

That probably explains it. I was wondering why all of the sudden a mainstream media company would start talking about it, as it's generally in all the MSM's benefit to let SOPA pass and kill all their Internet competitors, and even use it as a tool for political censorship under the disguise of "copyright infringement".

They are also a big company that donates to the government so I doubt they're expecting serious ramifications from this bill's passage to their bottom line.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/9CfwQ.png

I am opposed to SOPA in the strongest sense possible coming from a nation where majority of internet users cannot afford content(music, software) at market prices let alone afford a good internet connection.

Was watching the president of the Motion Picture Association of America talk on Bloomberg West about their reasons for supporting SOPA and why SOPA is important and that guy(and those like him) is good at what he does. Those opposed to SOPA for now have confined the fight to blogs and videos on Youtube but we need to take the fight where it matters, to Washington and sway those who should be swayed to stop this thing.

Not an American citizen but american tech companies opposed to this should be talking to their lobbyists and not just posting statements on their sites

Related discussion on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/o6ymp/reddit_user...

If SOPA would increase your business income by 10 times, would you accept it then?

No, you're still talking about fundamentally broken mechanisms and rules. If SOPA would decrease your business income by 10 times, would you accept it then? I can make up numbers too.

If SOPA would increase my business's income, I'd be in the wrong business, and I wouldn't be me.

Except that it won't. An almost insignificantly small industry has an outrageous amount of influence compared to the industries that actually make real money and jobs in the US.

Just imagine what it would be like to make 10 times more money from iOS development say. Wouldn't you like that?

Never. I can't even imagine wanting to sell my freedom.

EDIT: I'm not sure why you would like it, either, given that the iOS games in your profile appear to be derivatives of more popular ones. If some legal department felt that you crossed the line somewhere in one of those games, you could have all your accounts suspended. That's not 10x the profit, that's 10x the risk.

I'm quite satisfied with my DropZap game in terms of originality.

I personally don't have any problem with your games, but you and I aren't the people who have to be satisfied. Your competitor's legal departments are.

There's plenty of precedent for overzealous legal departments sending out baseless legal threats already. Under SOPA, they get to shut you down right away, then leave you to clean up the resulting mess.

This is a classic case of the "prisoner's dilemma". By supporting the bill, you may increase your profit (but probably not by 10x). However, you interfere with legitimate businesses, and thus cause a net loss to society.

The threat is that some day, the other companies will support a law which is beneficial to them (and bad for you). Systemically, it is best for us to cooperate to achieve a group maximum

"Go sell crazy somewhere else, we're all stocked up here."

I like hypothetical money trees just as much as the next person but on what do you base these hypothetical scenarios?

Those hypothetical money trees probably seem real to SOPA supporters. Among other things, this article explores how some wild guesses about hypothetical job losses from a 1986 speech keep getting cited as facts by Congress:

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-...

Or, if you prefer, there's also an independent review of their report:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120104/04545217274/cato-i...

I just wonder why you think SOPA will increase your revenue by 10 times? That's a figure which is pulled out of nowhere.

I actually don't know the piracy rates of my apps.

Some reported rates:

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/27/another-developer-reports-...

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25809

http://247wallst.com/2010/01/13/apple-app-store-has-lost-450...

You make the fatal but tragically common mistake of assuming that if somebody thinks a program is worth $0.00, they would think it would also be worth $[however much it legally costs] if getting it for free was not an option.

I see what you're getting at, and I think that those piracy rates are at best accurate and at worst much higher. And as a game dev I would like to see more people paying for the software I work on.

However, there's absolutely no reason to suspect that SOPA will make a significant dent in piracy rates. On the contrary, as well as making little piracy impact, the industry will become increasingly constrained and there will be greater risk for developers.

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