To: The profit mongering companies with lobbyists and idiotic politicians who cause legislation like this to be created.
We'd like our internet back now.
Sincerely,
The Compter Scientists, the group of people who invented the internet.
We'd like our internet back now.
Sincerely,
The Compter Scientists, the group of people who invented the internet.
The old world of media had a price for each viewer/reader of various mediums. The new world of media also has a price too and the old price doesn't apply. Readers are now usually worth substantially less then they were. An online news impression is worth less than a print one. In parallel, the democratisation of the web has created additional competition that has taken away some eyeballs, especially in the juicy parts of the business (eg classifieds). The effect of aggregators as competitors is an example of the type of effect that hurts them and is related to copyright somehow. This last is a very small & insignificant part of why they are failing.
In some cases, copyright enforcement might theoretically recover some or all of their revenues. Music is an example of this. If people couldn't pirate music, they would probably buy more of it. The move to digital probably affects sales somehow, but it is not necessarily negative. Film, TV, Books etc. are also examples of these cases.
The first type of company has business models made obsolete by technological & cultural changes. The second kind have business models that fail because the lost the ability to enforce copyright. Companies of the first kind usually think that they are of the second. Both types of companies would be happy if the Internet just went away.
I believe the preferred nomenclature is "profiteering gluttons".
I did "The Hacker's Manifesto" for a speech contest in high school...it was just funny and a bit painful when that movie came out.
On a larger scale, organizing a sort of free internet seal of approval for all representatives could be even more powerful. If representatives know that voters would be more likely to vote for candidates with the seal of approval, then they might be persuaded to earn that seal.
Edit: I just wanted to add that while generally I agree that writing letters has little to no effect, I think it's important for people to start DOING something. If it starts with writing letters, maybe the upshot will be that people are embolded to participate in bigger future actions, like taking part in demonstrations and more when the time comes. Cynicism and defeatism aren't the right starting attitudes for a fight. Just my two cents.
edit: I'm specifically talking about in-the-streets-marches kind of thing.
"According to the French academic Dominique Reynié, between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war.[3]"
Protests don't seem to have a very good track record.
if not, maybe what we need an organization to lobby on our behalf.
maybe a new startup could somehow do this? i don't know how it would get the money to do so...
If you believe you can stop this by writing to your congressperson or protesting: why do you think this is being done in secrecy? Obviously, they are fully aware nobody is going to like it. It will be enacted regardless.
That being said, I would still like to do as much as I can to prevent it, or in the case that it's enacted, circumvent it or corrupt it to the point of uselessness. At this stage, I don't think there's much we can do just yet. We also can't be sure this report is accurate.
Once the worm is in the field then how will they tell who are real pirates or hapless victims?
This wouldn't require violating anyone else's machines, but would have much the same effect. (presenting the ISP with the prospect of cutting off a huge percentage of their customers, i.e. revenue)
With today's media, it certainly wouldn't take more than a handful of towns. Most of us probably have enough people in our personal social graph to pull it off.
Hey, maybe you could invent some technology which actually provides some privacy and security instead of all this 80's tech?
Sincerely,
The Users, the group of people who use the Internet on a daily basis.
Edit: What I'm really saying is that if there would have been an implemented, 'universal', solution that takes civil liberties into the digital world, then it would be much harder to take these liberties away. I really don't think most politicians understand neither technology nor the fact that they are in effect infringing civil liberties like anonymity protection, freedom of expression and secrecy of letters. Who's to blame for this? Probably no one and everyone, still sad to see though.
The last time you checked must have been in the 80s then. If researchers still controlled the development of the internet, would we be having a debate about net neutrality?
Politically I agree with you, but you vastly overestimate the power of researchers.
Sweden rocks as far as a lot of privacy issues go. Sweden (along with a couple other countries) were early adopters for DNSSEC. I wish we could be more like Sweden; the US is not so quick. Verisign (a for profit company) wont deploy DNSSEC on .com and .net until 2011. By contrast domains administered by the US government and a non profit (.gov and .org) are supposed to have it done by the end of this year. I think these differences illustrate nicely the point I was trying to make. Security can sometimes take a back seat on the priorities list, and even the US government and a non profit are far behind countries that choose that make it a priority.