The Obama administration is still voicing support for SOPA.
a.fightforthefuture.org
a.fightforthefuture.org
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comme...
Or let you believe you've actually done something, so now you can direct your attention to other things.
Is there any evidence to show that signing a petition makes a person more inclined to take additional practical action?
Yes, there is some evidence. In Chapter 3 of Influence: Science and Practice, Robert Cialdini discusses this kind of self-image effect, citing several studies including one in particular about petitions[1]. These kinds of "commitments" (even though they are not actually binding) really do affect our behavior, although the end results are not necessarily particularly issue-focused or predictable.
One thing we can say though with some certainty: if you convince someone to sign their name to a petition that says "stop X", it will take significant mental effort for them to later decide that they actually support X.
Remember, these were innocuous requests from a non-profit group with relatively non-controversial goals. This technique may not produce the same results for more political or more controversial requests.
[1] https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/how-why/frequently-a... 'What is the purpose of We the People?'
[2] https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/response/were-listen...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/14/obama-administrati...
It sounds like the president is supporting SOPA, but in actuality he is speaking in some law professor dialect where words do not mean what they seem to mean.
IIRC, Reagan's "shorthand" descriptions were directly on point and were not mis-understood by even foreign countries.
I guess Obama isn't the great communicator everyone thought he was...
Consider back when Clinton wanted to change healthcare many Republicans advocated for 'ObamaCare' which directly copied a host of republican ideas. Republicans did not actually mean what they where saying, they just wanted to shift the debate without saying we like the current system. Which is why you can find so many old speeches that are at great odds with what the party is saying today.
I know it's 7 years ago, but Mitt Romney is probably the next Republican presidential candidate and it's not like the party penalized him for his past stance. Or even really talks about it. And if you really want to dig into it, look at who voted for in in that states legislator.
I think it's a bit self-defeating of groups like fightforthefuture.org to label any type of support for increased copyright protection as "pro-SOPA", as there is nothing in this statement that says "the Administration supports protecting copyrights even if it means blacklisting DNS entries".
Seems like the author of the petition assumed the reader would thing tl;dr and just assume it was accurate.
Nice. So if I sign the petition they are allowed to sell my data?
And that also seems to be standard verbiage for online petitions. See this one (http://civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet/):
Petitions and Surveys
For petitions and surveys you've signed or completed, we treat your name, city, state, and comments as public information - for example, we may provide compilations of petitions, with your comments, to the President and legislators, other targets, or to the press. We will not make your street address publicly available, but we may transmit it to members of Congress and to the President as part of a petition. This is a standard industry practice in such situations. In no such case will we disclose your email address or phone number without your permission. We may also make your comments, along with your first name, city, and state available to the press and public online. Under circumstances where we determine that members may be misusing our systems for malicious purposes (for example, using the numbers we provide to make harassing phone calls), such activities may be reported to law enforcement agencies. In such cases, MoveOn may release personally identifiable information, including name and address, to those agencies.
When I saw that Obama picked Biden as VP I knew that something this would happen. He has been a friend of Hollywood's for a very, very long time.
Furthermore he and Obama agreed to the Carter/Mondale model of how to run the VP office, where the VP is in the white house, in every meeting with the President and is the last man in the room. That gives Biden zero visibility..and a finger in every decision. Hence real power. (As opposed to the way that Reagan/Bush reportedly did things, where Bush's job consisted of checking each day that Reagan was still alive, and then taking the rest of the day off.)
She'll be on her way out soon enough. I'm sure she'll land in MPAA land or somewhere equally gross.
there needs to be a campaign to make them pass a law or even an amendment to the constitution to prevent them from trying to slip by when noone is looking
they only need to get lucky once...and its a 100x harder to repeal a law than it is to implement it.
The White House supports it because it is the White House.
It actually makes me proud of humanity that more people want to petition for "stop expanding trade with vietnam at the expense of human rights" than stopping ACTA. the latter being somewhat of a #firstwordproblem and the former dealing with human slavery, death, etc.
so when you go sign the petition, sign the "stop ACTA" one AND something else that is, in the grand scheme of things, more inportant to human life.
Society as a whole is much better informed now, yet a handful of rent-seeking assholes are running a scorched earth campaign to protect their obsolete sacred cows, potentially at the expense of all of society being better informed about what matters in the world.
If you can vote for both, by all means do it. But if you have to choose one or the other, then I'd argue it's not so black and white which is more important to human life and liberty.
Speaking to the philosophical issue that pg raised, I believe people have a right to attempt to make money from their efforts. I also believe that they most definitely do not have a right to be successful in that attempt, regardless of how much effort they have put in. They also do not have a right to continued success if the world around them changes. What works on Monday may not work on Friday, and the fact that it worked Monday should not serve as a guarantee that Friday's endeavor has a right to success. If the effort it takes to secure a number of the size required to represent a 3 minute song becomes a burden on society, then I do not think they have a right to be successful in doing so. The same goes for the software I produce. If my securing it from copying that I do not approve of becomes a burden on society, then I do not have a right to be successful in securing it. Personally, I interpret a circumvention of due process and an attitude of "guilty until a successful appeal is filed" as a burden on society.
>If the effort it takes to secure a number of the size required to represent a 3 minute song becomes a burden on society, then I do not think they have a right to be successful in doing so.
That is only true after the law has been changed, at least from a legal standpoint.
> If my securing it from copying that I do not approve of becomes a burden on society, then I do not have a right to be successful in securing it.
Same as above.
Most responses on HN have been something like "if you want to make money from your creation you should use kickstarter and give it away after that". This is a very foolish attitude both realistically and philosophically. I have every right to use the current laws to my advantage and an obligation to my investors to do exactly that.
I have no problem with flouting laws if they are truly unjust, but I have no sympathy for piracy profiteers like Kim Dotcom because he knew very well what he was doing. Copying between friends can never be stopped but if you make enough money from it you are a valid target.
It's worth making the distinction between legal rights and natural rights. Obviously, if a particular draconian and unjust law were passed that guaranteed the right to secure your 3kb of data, then you have the legal right to do so. That fact has mostly no bearing on your natural right to do so.
It's also worth noting that sharing between friends and someone making a large profit off of sharing are not the only options. It is not hard to envision a situation with a large amount of sharing and no one profiting directly the way kim dotcom did. It has the scale of the profiteers, but the intent and profitability of the between-friends sharing. I think it is a lot harder to find someone worthy of being called a criminal in such a situation.
I'm curious who is going to run as the Republican candidate for Senator this year in California. Because if they manage to pick a relative moderate (like Meg Whitman, but not Carly Fiorina), I'll be voting Republican.
Next subject.
You can't stick your head in the sand and hope they go away.
That we cannot comeup with such ideas are åroperly a good thing but it is also a pretty large handicap when we are up against people like the MPAA (who, granted may not be playing as dirty as these suggestions).
The only way to win is to do what they cannot do: Innovate and build platforms and technologies for sharing information so quickly that it becomes impossible to stop the sea change. If we spend time and brainpower trying to compete in their arena we will get crushed just as surely as they would if they tried to compete in ours.
(Hmm, someone didn't like that quoteback. Okay, here's another one, from yours truly. "Gentlemen, I'm just as concerned as you are about those Redcoats overrunning our town! I just don't think my front yard is an adequate, let alone optimal, place to defend it.")
What probability do you estimate that anything (clarification: anything significantly benefiting "our interests") is going to happen conditional on every HN user having heard about this?
On a scale of 1 to 10, "hardly" to "very", how surprised were you to hear about this?
Edit: And one more, since the downvote police haven't gotten this one yet, what probability do you estimate that by HN ignoring the political world for two months any of your nightmares will come true?