MPAA/RIAA lose big as US backs copyright "limitations"
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Prior to SOPA, resistance against increasingly insane copyright legislation was considerably more widespread than it was in the US, partially triggered by events like the trial against the Pirate Bay, Sarkozy's three strikes sell-out etcetera.
There's a reason why we're the ones with the Pirate parties. We didn't need major corporations like Google campaigning to wake us up. Yeah, the defeat of SOPA was a major encouragement and inspiration, but the fight was already on.
This isn't to say it isn't a US centric thought- honestly, I don't know enough about Europe to say definitively. But I do know that it's nigh impossible to meet someone under 30 in the US who doesn't think copyright law is a joke.
Are you serious? I'm genuinely interested. I'd claim this is simply not true. But dear lord I hope it is! That would be fantastic.
I think this is true of most people under and over 30.
> there is just no way to portray limited terms of 120 years as being reasonable
Exactly. Most informed people conclude copyright law is a joke because it is a Mikey Mouse joke.
Historically, the content industry has been paranoid of any new technology, and it took legislation to drag them into the new age. Were the consumers of the late 70s and early 80s entitled because they wanted to own VHS players to record their TV show and rent VHS movies?
Reddit users did about 100 times more than Google all by themselves.
People I know who know nothing about copyright and don't know what Reddit is were coming up and asking me to explain what Google was talking about.
What SOPA did was drag Google and Wikipedia, two of the most used sites in the world, into the battle. That put more eyeballs onto the problem than a decade of smaller skirmishes. This galvanized a previously uninvolved but large part of the population. The flood of calls and email to our congressmen was far above and beyond anything that happened before.
The other reason I believe SOPA was influential is because the US has a disproportional amount of control of the Internet in the form of ICANN, which could do more destruction even if the offending site wasn't in the US jurisdiction.
Edit: RE Money Throwing, never mind, there's a big orange Subscribe Now in Ars' nav.
As for Ars, probably subscribing: http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/
And yeah, in for a year on Ars, now. I'm hoping one of the ID's in the URL (in the 800's) isn't their number of paying subscribers...
Anyways, in case you read french and wouldn't mind getting regular info on the IP side in Europe and the US.
E.g. manufacturers that badly wanted the relatively non-controversial anti-counterfeiting measures in ACTA must now be furious at all the lost effort and the years wasted because of issues largely unrelated to their own concerns.
If more and more of these companies see RIAA and MPAA's lobbying as increasingly a threat to their own interests, it is going to have very interesting effects.
So even without the article 27, it should have been stricken down (with small exceptions like brand protection etc). Let's not have a fight just to save what concerns us most directly, but for a new conception of copyright, patents and the entire intellectual property landscape.
In other words it allows nations to pass laws relating to what constitutes fair use. I would assume that absent this sort of thing the Bern convention would allow the WTO to impose sanctions on any nation that decided we were right regarding Oracle v. Google, Sony v. Connectix, etc.