SOPA is dead: Smith pulls bill
mashable.com
mashable.com
The media industry is awash in money.
This is how your government works: a bill that is either good or bad for a wealthy industry is proposed, and then the backers go to that industry and hold out their hands. If sufficient money is forthcoming, the good bill is passed or the bad bill is not passed. If sufficient money is not forthcoming, the reverse happens.
The bill will be redrafted, with some mitigating clauses added here and there. Implementation will be delayed a year or two, to make sure that you'll have forgotten who voted for it by the time any consequences occur. All of the Congresspeople who expressed reservations about it will be visited with large checks. And it will be resubmitted within a few months. A couple of folks who have been greased especially well will stand up and say, "My concerns about the bill have been addressed." The new bill will pass. Obama will not comment on the new bill and will sign it privately, without press coverage.
Your objections raised the cost of this bill for the media industry. Congratulations, you cost them some money. You in no way affected the final outcome. To affect the final outcome, you would need to signal that you represent a large enough sum of campaign money to counterbalance the money-weight of the media industry. You have not even come close to doing so.
Why?
Correlation is not causation...I'd expect the candidate best at winning elections also to be the candidate best at raising money almost all the time.
Positive feedback loops are not a logical fallacy.
According to Wikipedia for the 2008 presidential election, Obama raised $779 million and McCain did $383 million. There were 148 canidates and all total the 2008 election raised $1.64 billion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_for_the_2008_United...
Obvious calculus. Obama's a shitty President, but man is he a fantastic campaigner.
Someone else posted that people who raise more money tend to win elections, but this could also be caused by the more popular candidate raising more money. People might also be more willing to send money to a candidate if they think that candidate will win since no one wants to waste money on a losing candidate.
Your math is flawless.
Your perception of actual reality is deeply flawed. I envy your idealism.
If anything, this weeks SOPA protest finally provided the missing link for slacktivism: when faced a titanic force with enormous amounts of money that seems unbeatable, make friends with another titanic force who's interests are not served by the original monster.
Because each time those in opposition much launch a larger more costly campaign and take time out of their normal productive jobs.
Proposing bullshit legislation does not cost the Congressmen/women anything extra, and at times can actually be profitable for them.
They can just bring it up next week and we all have to drop everything again and try to defeat it. Eventually people get fatigued or decide the continued fight is no longer worth it.
"That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders"
This isn't rocket surgery. And no, Reddit blacking out their site does not qualify as a "titanic force". The total campaign contributions for every single Reddit reader for a year are what, $10,000? Chris Dodd has more than that in his freezer right now.
How to show you understand not a single thing about the issue.
I guess if we look a bit deeper you could stretch the issue to one's worldview. Are you more concerned with your belongings or what others posses. Is there a larger inclination to worry about another's success over your own? Seemingly they're threatened by individuals possessing their products. I'd like to believe their fight is against commercial pirates but they've shown too many times that they see individual "pirates" as a threat to their industry. Public support might weigh in on their side if they weren't so eager to make average joe a poster boy for their legal matters.
"Information" should not be property under any circumstances except to protect our basic human rights (i.e. privacy of an individual)
Ironically, I think your criticism here does the same.
At the end of the day the question really is: "Is someone able to earn money from labor X?" If the answer here is "yes" then they'll keep doing it. If the answer here is "no", they'll do something else. Can we at least agree that it would be a good thing to have music/movies/software/"creative works" available in some form?
The ability to freely duplicate and share creative works make it difficult to produce a "yes" answer to that question. How we as a society currently produce and distribute creative works make a "yes" answer even more difficult than it otherwise might be.
Something of a historical importance has happened this week, and we all were part of it.
Something I'm constantly reminded of is the haste Congress showed in trying to reach a final vote. I sat through 11 and 4 hour SOPA committee sessions (video), and if it hadn't been for strong opponents like Congresswoman Lofgren and Congressman Issa, who literally forced a count for each amendment vote made as a way to help put the brakes on, SOPA probably would have advanced another step.
I'm thankful for the time they helped buy, that ultimately gave opponents the chance to produce the response that we did. SOPA may not be truly "dead", but it's reassuring to know that our voice can have an impact.
This is a problem that actually needs to be solved, not just routed around. Like the folks in DC, we need to regroup and strike again. This time, it needs to be proactive. And that's for the simple reason that you can never win by concentrating on defense only.
At this stage, we all understand that it's about the money. Control of Congress is a political football, and it's what's in play between the anti-republican (small 'r') forces of special interests, and people who want to live as free citizens. Most real-world fights don't neatly sort themselves into black and white, but this one comes pretty close.
So far, the sharpest white-side organization I've come across is this one: http://www.getmoneyout.com/ There may be others. In any case, they're all pointing at the same reality: Congress owes its primary loyalty to whoever underwrites its elections. In a free republic, that should mean citizens, and citizens only.
This is over when that's what we've permanently lost or won.
I think they are going to find it much harder to sneak things past "the Internet", though.
They will eventually work out how to do it, given enough time, but I do not think "business as usual" will actually cut it. We have the many eyes that make bugs shallow.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:HR01981:@@@L...;
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.It is theft, but it's not quite the same.
If somebody downloads a movie that they could have gotten on a Blu-Ray disk for $20, that doesn't mean the industry is out $20 -- if the person had to pay full price, they might not have gotten the movie at all. Downloads probably do displace purchases to some extent, so it's fair to say that this costs the industry some lesser number, say $5.
This has to be seen in the context of the ecosystem too. I've neither bought nor stolen music in the last year -- I just haven't been looking for music than I haven't already got. This is bad for the music industry, but I'm not stealing from them.
If a person goes to the theatre with his kids every other week and buys an optical disk every so often and also illegally downloads a movie from time to time, the movie industry might not be getting 100% of the cash they want, but they've got an engaged customer who's spending $80 a month on their products and who's always telling his friends about movies he likes. If the music industry tried to tighten the screws on this person because they think they can get $120, they may end up getting $0, just like the music industry ends up getting $0 from me... not because I'm a pirate, but because I'm disengaged.
The phrase "intellectual property" is a misnomer. It's like saying "corporate personhood".
If you copy a movie, that's not the theft of the IP (i.e. the underlying copyright), it's infringement.
Piracy isn't like the theft of a piece of land, it's like trespassing. You don't say someone squatting in your lawn is stealing your lawn, you just say he's a trespasser.
Using any analogy actually decreases the understanding even for the layman.
I get told it's not theft, or piracy, it is copyright infringement. Now there is no intellectual property.
While I can understand wanting to re-frame the argument, reframing it in terms of terms much longer (copyright infringement) than the terms everyone current uses (piracy, theft) looks like a pure attempt to downplay the issue.
Not entirely sure what my point is here. Come up with a short (1 word, no longer than 7 letters) alternative for copyright infringement, and I might start using it. I'm not going to start talking about copyright infringement when having this discussion with my uncle. I'll say piracy.
It's as simple as that. Thinking that you own any creative works is misunderstanding the law and society. Thinking that copying something is theft of it(or indirectly theft of anything else) is a misunderstanding of the same.
I don't really understand the difference you place between physical property, and intellectual property. My ownership of both is imposed by the government. Without government support, I am sure I would lose control of both my physical and intellectual property very quickly (unless, in both cases, I started shooting people who tried to take them).
That the copyright holders try to perpetuate this fantasy is all the more galling because they often try to attach more limitations to their products via licenses than they would be legally able to if what they sold was not largely predicated on it not being property.
I think he'll have a much greater chance of success if he waits until there is larger agreement on the problem. Both sides seem very confused as to what this legislation was trying to solve - building a real consensus depends on building that broad understanding before looking for solutions.
There really aren't two symmetric "sides". Seriously.
There is one faction attempting to impose a draconian, repressive intellectual property regime at the expense of Internet functionality, free speech or whatever else.
And there are all the people who oppose this for whatever reason, whether to save the Internet, save free speech, prevent a repressive regime or even to preserve piracy. These are "a side". The mouth-pieces of the Hollywood rackets want to attribute some position to SOPA/PIPA opponents but you really can't. All you can say that they are opponent for one of the many good reasons for opposing it.
So just stop.
My point was simply that the chief proponent of this presumes that we already agree on what the problem is and that we should therefore focus on finding the solution. I think he's either deluded or disingenuous (perhaps misled or naive? Possible, but doubtful).
My personal belief is that any SOPA-like legislation in advance of copyright and patent reform attempts to solve the wrong problems.
"“The problem of online piracy is too big to ignore. American intellectual property industries provide 19 million high-paying jobs and account for more than 60% of U.S. exports. The theft of America’s intellectual property costs the U.S. economy more than $100 billion annually and results in the loss of thousands of American jobs."
I would really love to see him break those numbers down and describe how they got to those exact numbers. Many of the politicians are throwing some big numbers around so surely they have some type of formula that led them to that result. If anyone here has any idea please let me know!
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/defend_our_freedom_to_share...