Netflix creates super-PAC
rt.com
rt.com
This is amusingly confusing.
Maybe the featured story on mind control weapons that are about to turn us all into zombies that's there today will change people's minds?
Or maybe we do want to discard troll stories from here and The Weekly World News since they aren't opinions but just link bait.
Not so confusing when you understand that RT is a Putin mouthpiece.
I thought we as a society figured out that this is an entirely wrong reason to shut someone off. First of all, you can be honestly mistaken.
I guess I had this one wrong.
RT is not an opinion or a perspective, they are a source that lacks credibility. It is not that their opinions are "wrong" to me, or that I disagree with them, it is that they fabricate, sensationalize and mislead people. As is the case with this article and many more.
Those are not characteristics of a debate in which all participants and opinions are given a fair shot -- you know, the ones dissidents fight for.
By the way, this is a private website, not a public space, and I have no problem with Hacker News outright banning whatever they want. Especially if it means I have to read less made-up crap. And if they end up banning legitimate sources, I can go elsewhere. Or if they're like reddit and refuse to police themselves -- letting the community's cynical attitude pervade the entire website's content, skewing the news and making it an unreliable representation of current events -- I can go somewhere else too.
You might have a hard-on for calling me a hypocrite, but really you're just making yourself look like an ass.
http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2012/01/netflix-to-testify-tue...
EDIT: just to clarify... I torrent the hell out of movies and CDs. I just won't ever claim that doing it today is legal. Would I be sad if it all went away? sure. But I don't think I'm entitled to any of it. And I don't buy the "I'm poor... so I have to pirate it" argument.
Just to illustrate what I mean: I personally oppose women's right to have abortions -- no holds barred -- I think that it's always morally wrong to pursue the termination of pregnancy as an end and practically always wrong to pursue it as a means to some other end (although there are cancer treatments etc that jeopardize the well-being of a fetus that people should not be barred from pursuing simply based on the potential harm).
On the other hand, it is very clearly a cultural issue. I believe that on a practical level, to attempt to police abortion would require a Stasi amount of government effort. If the people want the right to abort, the horse is already out of the barn, and the job is not the government's to swing the pendulum back, it belongs to magazine article writers, philosophers, and op-ed journalists. If they should fail, that's okay. It is more important not to live The Lives of Others than to save those children's lives, simply because saving them would not represent a noble Arthurian quest, it would involve spying on pregnant women and assassinating doctors. Disgusting.
Intellectual property is a patently less important arena of human activity, but I think in a similar way the policing of the internet should be cultural. There ought to be a cultural directive not to steal things over the internet when you're not a college kid anymore. When you can afford something, and it's reasonably available, I think this cultural directive already exists.
This cultural approach is successful and that's the reason that -- for the most part -- torrenting and music sales are weakly correlated. Most of the people that think it's okay to steal things, would not be customers anyhow.
I believe that most of the time torrenting represents charity on the part of movie studios and textbook publishers and music labels, providing their wares to those who would not have otherwise been able to afford them, which is not a bad thing, they're hiring cheap brand ambassadors. The ability to work subtle complicated questions like this one out is the power of cultural motivation.
TL;DR : When you're talking about the decision to terminate a pregnancy, or the decision to commit online piracy, the power is entirely in the hands of the citizen. It is so easy to pirate, it is so distasteful to set a woman's body against her will. Law-abidingness in these cases requires the cooperation of the potential "criminals". You cannot pursue justice in these cases through traditional law enforcement.
So now let's talk about piracy in the same terms. Spying on internet users to see what they download would be sort of like spying on pregnant women (disgusting). Assassinating doctors... well... I don't think there was any clause in SOPA that involved killing anyone caught with torrents so we'll skip that part. ;) Shutting down the torrent sites would be along the same lines as shutting down the clinic/doctors. If that could be done without spying on your Internet usage, then it seems we have a winner.
I think is about as far as I'm comfortable taking that analogy. Sorry.
As much as they are the darlings of our young people, sites like sidereel etc exist solely to exploit the creativity of others for the purpose of gathering eyeballs. Do you have ideas for how you could make these sites difficult to run without harming the infrastructure of the internet to the extent that it isn't worth it to put the law on the books?
The trouble is that the government can already shut down sites like these in many cases, so the goal isn't to write a law that helps to catch them at all it needs to be enough of an improvement over what we already have to justify the work to create the law and enforce it.
Just to throw out there, (because it's easy for me to do, I'm not the one who has to come up with the ideas) but any law that offshore's all of these sites to more lax countries, but leaves sites standing that are easily accessible from the US aren't very effective. At the same time, other nation's sovereignty should not be violated by these laws.
The basic situation is that the ease of communication that the internet provides means that law enforcement is facing a sisyhean challenge if it plans to fight this criminality with sticks. The problem is already being solved by the availability of legal alternatives. Adults feel uncomfortable flaunting the law and if somebody allows them to avoid that, they will earn attention.
Illegal is whatever Congress says is illegal. It's not easy to derive an "ought" from an "is". So the fact that X is illegal, on its own, makes no difference when it comes to the question of whether Congress (or anybody else) should combat X. (Pot is illegal in most parts of the U.S., but a lot of people strongly believe that the government should stop trying to combat it.)
It's entirely possible that some subset of X should not be illegal, and therefore Congress should not combat it. I think such sentiments are a major aspect (though not the only aspect) of the debate surrounding SOPA/PIPA. Should it be illegal to post a link to a link to some copyrighted material?
ADDED: I don't think there would be anything crazy or wrong about being against some appropriately defined subset of "piracy", but simply being against "piracy" doesn't seem to be a position that someone who understands all the complexities of the issue can reasonably hold.
1. Posting a link to a web page that contains a link to a torrent that contains directions for downloading a song that was copied without permission.
2. Breaking the DRM on an e-book, song, or video stream so that I can enjoy it on another device that I own. I bought the song, goddammit. I should be able to listen to it whenever and wherever I want.
3. Copying a book, song, film, or game whose original author has been dead for 20 years, provided that no publisher, record company, or film distributor has obtained from the author the right to print or distribute the work commercially. In other words, the work is out of print.
4. Copying a work whose copyright owner appears to have no intention to license his work in your country anytime soon. This is less of a concern in the U.S., but a huge concern in the rest of the world. You can't lose any profit here if you have no intention to make a profit here, can you?
5. Creating a derivative work (e.g. YouTube remix) that cannot reasonably be expected to eliminate a person's desire to purchase the original work. Nobody who sees a YouTube remix of 90 seconds of excerpts from Inception and thinks it's cool will then think, "Hey, that's enough Inception for me. No need to go see the actual movie."
The whole point of copyright is to encourage creative endeavors by allowing creators to have a monopoly over the distribution of their works for a limited time. Therefore, any behavior that does not hurt the creator's actual (not hypothetical) profits should be permitted by default. So if the causal link between my action and loss of profit is really sketchy (#1, #5), or if I have already paid the creator (#2), or if the creator clearly cannot expect to derive any monetary benefits from my consumption of his work (#3, #4), the whole rationale for copyright protection falls apart.
Just the other day, I read somewhere that Shakespeare wrote King Lear (one of his best works) about a decade after seeing, and even possibly acting in, a similar play staged by a group that would later become his major competition. Some of Shakespeare's other plays were also based on stories that were published only a few years previously. Any law that would have made it illegal for Shakespeare to adapt these works into his masterpieces, I think, has absolutely no reason to exist at any time or place.
Right now "combating piracy" is a bad thing just like "combating evil thoughts" or "combating hateful speech" is bad, because the only possible way to do it causes much more harm than the stated enemy is causing.
But even if someone did... it seems like all the pitchforks would still come out against it. We don't even know what the Netflix PAC is aimed at yet we're already supposed to hate Netflix for it. It just seems like people just don't want to lose their access to torrents.
BTW, combating piracy is not just like combating evil thoughts or hateful speech. Piracy can be defined a bit more clearly than the others. Yes, there are some grey areas of fair use and the like, but it is pretty clear that if you just downloaded a TS of the still in theater "Titanic - 3D" then you have a pirated copy.
I'm not sure the pitchforks would come out against it, some would, some wouldn't but it's impossible to say since most people who have thought about it are very confident there is no solution in this class. If something can be digitized then it can be shared over the same channels as private communication. To "combat piracy" you need to control what people can say, what people can hear and how people can read. To do that you need to examine everything.
You need surveillance and censorship, because anything that can be made digital is now either no different from protected speech or can be presented like protected speech to confuse the watchers.
It's not great for our artists or our economy that the internet made this a reality but it is. The internet came with a tradeoff for our culture. Large scale calls to "combat piracy" fall into the same bucket as "stamp out communism" or "win the war on drugs" or "stop pornography" or "eliminate blasphemy". Any entity that could do this would either be terrifyingly totalitarian or unable to enforce the rules. So they are either cartoonishly evil, ignorant of the problem and therefore unlikely to help anything or are raising money/political capital using some buzzwords.
So someone has to figure out how to support artists that are suffering through this disruptive change and Netflix is actually in a decent place to try innovative potential solutions. Hence the pitchforks coming out when people hear they have decided to support SOPA-style political posturing. I'm not sure they actually are, this is a Russia Today article, it's right next to a story about mind control weapons that will create real life zombies. This site is famous for hilariously innacurate stories.
(sorry!)
Can someone explain why they would want to do this?