This blackout page at WUWT is a protest against proposed legislation in the USA – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate – that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including WUWT and many, many, other websites. Wikipedia is of course doing a blackout, Google has banded their banner, so has WordPress. Even I Can Has Cheezburger? is going to blackout.
I see SOPA/PIPA as a threat to the first amendment of the US Constitution, as do many others.
This will mark the first time since 2006, that WUWT will not post new stories in a 24 hour period. WUWT will be this blackout mode from midnight EST (9PM PST) 1/18/2012 for 24 hours in a show of support and solidarity with other websites observing this event.
On-topic comments will be accepted on this page only.
SOPA/PIPA is not the way of free speech, nor is it going to help the exchange of ideas. It will hurt science just as much as any other venue to protect a few media conglomerates. SOPA and PIPA is a real danger to all of us who frequent websites such as this one. Imagine if you will, we are discussing the new HadCRUT4 using station data – a complaint is lodged by UEA/CRU to the SOPA/PIPA entity over some portion of that dataset they consider “proprietary” or protected by one of the non disclosure agreements they claim to have with some countries. One complaint is all it would take to shut WUWT, Climate Audit, and other websites using this data for discussion down- without any hearing or trial. Basically, “fair use” gets tossed down the hole. Science loses.
If you support a free and open Internet, let your legislators know, no matter what country you live in. This is global issue. If you live in the USA, you can find your elected state representatives here https://www.eff.org/sopacall and send your concerns.
Here is a list of legislators who support this nightmare and who doesn’t
Fight for the Future also has a page where you can send messages to USA elected representatives using a web form based on your address/zip code You can add to their starter letter here.
They also created a video which will help you understand the risks:
For more on the issue, see this excellent summary from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
If you have a wordpress.com hosted blog, you can join in as well:
The blackout portion will be in effect January 18 from 8am to 8pm EST, while the ribbon will be displayed until January 24. Here’s how to join in:
- Go to Settings → Protest SOPA/PIPA in your dashboard.
- Select if you want to join the blackout or show a ribbon.
- If you choose to join the blackout, you can edit the message that will be shown on your site during the blackout.
- Preview what your protest will look like.
- Click “Save Changes” button to activate your protest.
Thank you for your consideration.
- Anthony Watts
UPDATE: 1/18/2012 7:25AM Josh of cartoons by Josh adds his protest art here, suitable for reposting – Anthony
UPDATE2: 1/18/2012 7:50AM The founder of IcanHazCheezBurger has taken the Bye Bye Miss American Pie song and made it “The Day the LOLcats died” Hilarious…especially the pause part. – Anthony
UPDATE3: 1/18/2012 2PM PST – After sending off some communications for his attention, most notably that SOPA/PIPA would damage the cause of climate skeptics everywhere, I’m pleased to provide this announcement from Senator James Inhofe – he no longer supports SOPA/PIPA – Anthony
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: CONTACT: Jared Young
January 18, 2012 Jared_Young@Inhofe.Senate.Gov<mailto:Jared_Young@Inhofe.Senate.Gov>
Link to Release<http://www.inhofe.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=f2998e23-fbaa-5dfd-c98a-9a71c579b2b0>;
INHOFE OPPOSES SOPA AND PIPA
WASHINGTON, D.C. – On a day when many internet websites have blacked out their content in opposition to measures being considered by Congress, U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), joined the effort by announcing his opposition to those same bills. In the below statement, Inhofe outlines his opposition to S.968, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (also called the PROTECT-IP Act or PIPA). PIPA’s related bill in the House is H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA):
“While I believe that the intellectual property rights of American companies deserve substantial protection under the law, S. 968, the PROTECT-IP Act, is not the answer to the problem of online counterfeiting and piracy. I share the concerns of America’s technology companies, industry leaders, and the many citizens who have voiced their concerns to my office. It is clear to me that this bill will inflict too heavy a burden on third-party non-infringing entities and could do serious harm to one of the last vestiges that is relatively free from government regulation, the Internet. When addressing intellectual property rights, Congress must be careful to also protect the freedom of speech and flow of information that the Internet provides. Additionally, I have concerns with creating yet another private right of action, which will be used by plaintiffs to stifle Internet innovation, and with requirements in the bill that could negatively impact the Internet’s reliability and performance.”
###
h/t to Marc Morano
Rupert Murdoch supports SOPA. Need I say more?
This is the guy who thought paying millions for myspace was a splendid idea. Not exactly savvy when it comes to internets.
To lend support I will at this point forward not visit any site via the internet for that 24 hour period. There will be no electronic communication from my computer. I now blackout.
liberal fascism is a bitch…
Thank you for standing tall on this, Anthony.
Many of us believe the internet is under threat by those who are fearful of freedom and knowledge curtailing their own powers. The very advancement of humanity could be stifled by allowing such controls.
I’d blackout paying taxes (start by not buying anything in States with a Sales Tax) until the XL pipeline and offshore drilling are approved. There are both Economic and Intellectual Freedom issues at stake these days.
Obama does not support SOPA any longer so it is likely dead for a while.
Mark
SOPA seems to have been stabbed in the heart by the majority leader in the House of Representatives …
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/sopa-derailed/1897
Doing my little part .@. thixo.com … please sign the petition provided and supported by Google
A better protest: redirect all government IP addresses to a simple page telling them to contact their lawmaker(s) if they want to read your website.
I expected this.
All the evidence says that it will be getting colder soon, and at the very least, it has not been getting warmer. So what to do if your liveliehood depends on increasing warmth, and there is none to be had? Simple, shut down anyone who dares to point out how freakin’ cold it is getting lately. If they can’t come up with evidence, at least shut down any site that dares to mention that fact. If all you have is fake evidence, it won’t matter if you are the only one allowed to have any evidence.
The Medium is the Message. How many of YOU have had a comment deleted by the web police. YOU only see what’s Left.
If you have a wordpress.com hosted blog, you can join in as well:
I only have a crappy unborn proto-blog, but I can do that. It’s a participation stat for wordpress if nothing else.
Anthony, are you and wordpress 8 hours out of sync, or have you done it manually instead of using the Settings?
REPLY: manually – my design – Anthony
Truthseeker -
not so quick.
torrentfreak: That didn’t take long.
A few days ago the news broke that the pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was put on hold until consensus was reached…
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith just announced that the SOPA markup is expected to continue next month.
“To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America’s intellectual property, we will continue to bring together industry representatives and Members to find ways to combat online piracy,” Chairman Smith said.
“Due to the Republican and Democratic retreats taking place over the next two weeks, markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act is expected to resume in February…
“I am committed to continuing to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to send a bipartisan bill to the White House that saves American jobs and protects intellectual property.”
http://torrentfreak.com/sopa-is-baaack-120117/
the suggestion the battle was over was, perhaps, an attempt to stop actions such as anthony is taking. with u all the way, anthony.
Good for you. I hope more sites get involved as there are still a lot of people who have no idea about SOPA.
should have headed the torrentfreak piece with:
17 Jan: SOPA Is Baaaack!
followed by “That didn’t take long” etc… apologies.
Well !
Big Brother is coming after you or “we are all Chinese at heart”.
In Australia, the Federal Govn’t are trying to achieve the same with the National Broadband Network (NBN). Seems Govn’ts present learn nothing from Govn’ts past.
Mark T says:
January 17, 2012 at 9:19 pm
“Obama does not support SOPA any longer so it is likely dead for a while.”
And when his teleprompter tells him to support it again… What then?
Indeed…
Mark
Thumbs up.
Sort of like George Bush standing up the the global warming alarmists like the lone Chinaman in Tiananmin Square…
Looks like Skeptical Science, Real Climate, Think progress and Tamino are still up.
I am tired of a government that treats us like infants, that believes it is their duty to herd us and protect us as if it is some sort of guardian or shepherd. We are responsible first and foremost for protecting ourselves and our neighbors. We came together to form a government to do things we can’t do individually. Government is our tool to get certain things done, it is not a master to rule over us. Government believes it is our ruler at this point in our history.
The people in this country have never in history been so well educated. There are millions of people among us who are more qualified to govern than those currently in office. Government has become a Orwellian mechanism of perpetuation of political control. A party that claims to champion the rights of the poor and oppressed implements policies that ensure they will always remain poor, oppressed, and completely dependent on those policies in order to lock in their votes.
Governments install red light cameras for our “safety” and then shorten yellow lights in order to increase revenue from the cameras. They ban plastic bags for some “environmental” reason but then tax paper bags at the same time. They add ethanol to fuel which reduces fuel efficiency and therefore drives up fuel tax revenue because more gallons must be purchased to drive a given amount in a year. They lie, they cheat, they steal. The only inherent trait of government is corruption. The more powers you give to government, the more corrupt it becomes.
More airspace for the Governmental Education Industrial Complex…
█████ ██!
Breaking News: Nothing new here!
__/__/__/__/__/__/__/__/__/__/__/__/
Humanity doing its part to stop deadly CO2 production and save the world with more blackouts,
Sopa in modern greek means “stop talking” and Pipa , as an injunction, orders in argo to do oral sex!.
So as an injunction in Greece it would come out quite impossible for polite society.
feel free to cut this comment, but I thought it funny enough to post.
When will the Western schoolteachers of anti-Americanism show the slightest impulse to uplifting.
“a little rebellion now and then is a good thing” – Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison on January 30, 1787.
Beats, hands down:
“power comes from the barrel of a gun” – Mao Zedong, Problems of War and Strategy
“Rupert Murdoch supports SOPA. Need I say more? ”
EVERYBODY that had anything to do with producing content supported SOPA. I don’t believe there was a single news organization that was against it. AP was for it, Reuters was for it, New York Times, Washington Post, everyone was for it (before they were against it). What changed is someone made the people aware of it and once that happened, they all had to back up a bit. This has nothing to do with Murdoch, per se. Every content provider that produces content for profit was for it as far as I know. Chris Dodd, former Senator (D-CT and currently President of MPAA) called the blackout a “gimmick”
Sorry, I don’t feel a need to be “protected” from websites who might except stuff from a news article.
Mr. Dodd, you are the personification of government overreach. You are a patronizing, condescending fool who believes it is the role of government to rule over the people. Your voters threw you out of office recently for your role in the robbery of American homeowners. My first inclination is to oppose anything you might favor as it likely is going to take away my freedoms because that seems to be a priority for you.
Patrick Davis said on January 17, 2012 at 9:44 pm:
Governments past learned they could whip up public support with some scary news stories, then got the disarmament of the (ordinary) Australian citizenry. Governments present have merely shown the scary news stories, declared public support, then enacted “carbon” taxes/restrictions. Thus haven’t governments present learned to be more efficient than governments past?
Since Australian democracy still involves some actual citizen voting and hasn’t hit the “mere pretense” stage yet, they still feel the need to justify their positions to the ordinary citizenry so they won’t be cutting the scary news stories in the next stage. But they will feel free to declare they didn’t need to gather the support of the people before acting as what was done was urgently needed for the good of the people, and they will declare that afterwards the public overwhelmingly supported what they had done which proves they were right to act in the first place. From my side of the Big Warm Wet, that looks almost like what was done for the carbon taxes but stopped just short of it. For the next Big Urgent National and Global Issue…?
BTW, The Australian federal government wishes to preemptively thank you for your unbridled support of their waiting-to-be-enacted effort to protect intellectual property on the internet. Good on ya, mate!
NOOOO!
Not the ICANHASCHEEZEBURGER site, anything but that!
This is only part of making your voices heard by your representatives in government, both locally and nationally. Let congress know, if you remain silent, they’ll do as they please.
Protest On!
Well, you have got indefinite detention now. So it is game over for the constitution in any event. If you try to change things they can call you a terrorist and lock you away for good. No trial, no defence. Just lock you up.
Just over the last few years the US has begun to change from the “land of the free” into “North Korea Lite”.
Anthony stated:
This will mark the first time since 2006, that WUWT will not post new stories in a 24 hour period.
Anthony, please get a little R&R in this time frame, you deserve it…
Consider freedom a block of cheese. Consider legislation a chipping away at that cheese. Consider the recent, predictable, “ventilation” of all such cheese, financially.
Then read-up on the Robber-Baron period from the Civil War to WWI while reflecting on the present and see what you see.
Two things are for certain: (1) gotta pay the car off, (2) gotta pay the card off…..
:-)
In New Zealand, last September saw an amendment to our Copyright Act that basically gave power to any party to lodge objections to persons downloading any material from teh Internet.
Whilst designed primarily to target the huge music and video pirate market (a perceived problem by some), it can extend to anything – including me posting extracts from UEA e-mails.
A 3-strikes and you’re out approach, and you can be taken to a “tribunal” and fined up to $15,000.
The actual regulations are here http://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2011/0252/latest/096be8ed80751be1.pdf
and the whole Copyright Act (as amended) is here http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1994/0143/latest/096be8ed807beb24.pdf
Right on Crosspatch!
Chris
Norfolk, VA
Mark T said:
January 17, 2012 at 9:19 pm
Obama does not support SOPA any longer so it is likely dead for a while.
———————————————————-
For a while… until after he is re-elected or proclaims himself President for life, then it’s off to the Denier Gulag for all us Climate Criminals. Don’t drop the SOPA!
Very, very dangerous stuff. Among many things, I think they want to stop streaming of films.
Can you imagine first paying one actor 50 mill.$ for one movie, and next people are just streaming the movie. It doesnt occure to them that it is laughable to pay one actor that sum.
They want the easy solution via blocking IP addresses, instead of having to make solutions ala spotify for streaming movies cheap.
Without considering the dangerous side-effects. Basically it opens the door to dictatorship.
WikiLeaks comes to mind. What do you WUWT’ers think about blocking WikiLeaks?
Can you surpress your urge to block something you do not like?
That bill is a very nasty king maker. “SEC. 102. ACTION BY ATTORNEY GENERAL TO PROTECT
U.S. CUSTOMERS AND PREVENT U.S. SUPPORT OF FOREIGN INFRINGING SITES.” The Attorney General may
22 commence an in personam action against—
23 (A) a registrant of a domain name used by
24 a foreign infringing site; or
25 (B) an owner or operator of a foreign in
fringing site.
I don’t think we should burden Eric Holder with hand picking and taking action against sites that endanger the “public health.”
Sorry to sound like a complete idiot here, but whilst supporting the WUWT / Google / Wiki / etc stance, does this mean that any website – BBC, RC etc – that violates WUWT copyright could also be shutdown or does this legislation only apply to media that the government don;t like?
Is the legislation likely to be retrospective? If so, can we audit alarmist websites such as RC, BBC, Guardian, SkS etc and have them shut down as well?
The internet is too virtual to police anyway.
Anthony,
America is a common law jurisdiction.
Acts are not law, otherwise they would be called law not Acts,
more specifically Acts are the rules of the United States Corporation, Acts only apply to agents and employees of that corporation.
If equality before and under the law is paramount and mandatory how can politicians make law for the people (they can’t and don’t), the law societys’ redefination of words like ‘person’ has decieved us.
Corporations, including the federal Corporation are what is known as legal fictions (not found in nature), there is a maxim of law that states “the law gives rise to fictions, not fictions the law”.
Our inalienable rights are being ignored by big government,
governments are voted into office not power, it is time to reign in these megalomanics who relish power over service
I’m surprised, but pleased, to find this page on my regular morning (UK) visit, and support the action. I have no problem with artists protecting their IP, but these proposals are a very blunt instrument and threaten a heck of a lot more than just so-called “piracy”. Let’s not forget also that this proposal comes from the same people who are progressively extending copyright for longer and longer after the original artist’s death, to allow corporations to feast on other people’s creativity.
The IP owners seem to forget the “inconvenient truth” which came out when they were proposing a “copyright tax” on blank cassette tapes back in the day – it’s the very people who “check out” music and films (etc) “unofficially” who end up spending the most money on buying legit copies. (I used to be one of them, when my hearing was younger!) The corporations’ current business model is simply unsuited to the internet age, but they haven’t realised yet that they need a new one. Well done, and I’ll call by later for the climate news.
thingadonta said:
January 17, 2012 at 11:25 pm
The internet is too virtual to police anyway
————————-
They do it in China.
“Would SOPA Even Accomplish Its Goal?
Adding to their other problems, SOPA and PIPA simply would not work. Even if the Attorney General obtained a blocking order that stopped Verizon from letting one go directly to a pirate website, it is relatively easy to work around the block. We can reasonably predict that a host of redirector domains would soon spring up, many of them linked to ISPs outside the United States and outside the Attorney General’s jurisdiction. And after that, there would be downloadable program applications to get to those redirectors. Indeed, one such program, known as “DeSOPA,” has already been developed and deployed as a proof of concept effort and can be downloaded as a Mozilla Firefox extension.” ~Paul Rosenzweig heritage.org
MangoChutney… you make a good point. If I were in charge of the law I would shut down all sorts of sites that I didn’t like. RealClimate would be first. Then I’d go after anybody who complained about me shutting down RealClimate. Then I go after anybody who complained about me shutting down those sites that complained about me shutting down Real Climate…. Do you see where I’m going. If Al Gore had access to this law I wouldn’t even be writing this post. I’ve worked for big corporations. I know what they are like. Big organisations are no different. They are all amoral. It’s not that they don’t have any morals, rather it’s that they have flexible morals that change to suit their agenda. This is censorship by stealth. Don’t be fooled. The free exchange of ideas is what we should all strive for… as messy and ugly as it can be sometimes it is the only way we progress….
Achtung…..
“land to be freed “?
It’s a bit ironic Wikipedia crying over spilt “freedom of speech”, when they steadfastly refuse to print anything from those who are sceptical of the nonsense science written on their pages about so called “global warming”.
So, until I read about your involvement I didn’t think it was a serious threat!
Awww FFS Anthony….are we really going go down this track. Causes, idealogy…….are we really doing this
After five minutes of research, these bills look really unfree and incompatible with a 21st century free world.
virtual police?
governments / NGO’s will just create another army of highly paid organisations patrolling the internet looking for transgressors, the same way they have created the various organisations trying to police our environmental thoughts and actions
Yes he can. Or at least still thinks so.
I wonder how many people maintaining DNS servers will simply make their server authoritative for .gov with an empty zone file so everything *.gov gets NXDOMAIN responses or put in a wildcard A record that goes to an anti-SOPA site.
First of all, there is no such thing as “The Internet”. There is not a single piece of infrastructure that you can put your finger on and say this is “THE” internet. Ted Stevens was actually 100% correct when he said “The Internet is a series of tubes” though he should have used the word “pipes” instead of “tubes”. Lets say you have AT&T or Comcast or Roadrunner as your ISP at home. You are on AT&T, Comcast, or Time Warner’s network. Now lets say you want to send traffic to Google. If your ISP doesn’t have a direct “pipe” to Google (peering) then it sends traffic to whichever one of its peers has the shortest path to Google (measured in the least amount of networks in must traverse to get there, not the fewest “hops” from router to router). So lets say you are on Comcast and lets say they hand the traffic to Level3 who in turn hands the traffic to Google (but I believe Comcast peers directly with Google so it wouldn’t really take that path in real life). Your traffic crossed Comcast’s network until it reached a pipe to Level3, then it crossed Level3′s network until it reached a pipe to Google, and then it is routed within Google’s network to its destination. Not once did that traffic ever touch a piece of infrastructure called “The Internet”. All “The Internet” is, is agreements among networks to do things in a standard way so they can exchange traffic. It is basically just a set of standards. They all agree to use a common set of root name servers for finding each other but nothing is stopping anyone from creating their own root name server (and people have before!). They all agree to share routing information using BGP4 but nothing is stopping anyone from using a different protocol if they want. They agree to use certain communications protocols that behave in known ways so that their equipment will work with each others’ but there is not a single government owned wire that is “The Internet”. That went away when the NSFNet was retired.
The Internet is simply a collection of PRIVATE networks that agree among themselves to exchange traffic over links THEY OWN or have purchased/leased from a third party. “The Internet” is also global. The US Congress’ jurisdiction does not extend outside the borders of the US. If the government pisses enough people off, the root DNS servers and registrars will simply move offshore and there will be nothing the US Government can do about it or people will simply create their own “internet”. Nothing is stopping you from wiring your neighborhood into an Internet, creating your own DNS and web services, your own DNS domains with your own top level domains, etc. Of course, people who aren’t on your “internet” will not be able to see your stuff unless other networks agree to exchange traffic with you and accept your top level DNS servers as authoritative for your domains. You could create a .crosspatch top level domain in about 15 minutes if you know how to run a DNS server and can create a zone file.
I think this is the part that many people in government don’t understand. The government doesn’t control “the internet” any more than they control who you allow to cross your property and who you keep out. In the network I manage as my daily job, I connect directly to Facebook and Yahoo and MSN and others. Those connections are simply pieces of fiberoptic cable (“pipes”) strung across a data center between my routers and their routers. Not a single data bit passes through anything regulated by the public utilities commission or any other government agency. It goes from our private network to their private network. It is like running an ethernet cable directly to your neighbor’s house. How do they think they can stop two private networks from sharing data? The only way they think they can do it is by taking the domains down from the root name servers but anyone can program them back in to their local name servers if they know the IP addresses or put them in the local “hosts” file on their PC. It is sort of like the government trying to make you not exist anymore by removing your name from the phone book. If someone has memorized your phone number or stored it in their phone, removing your name from the book doesn’t stop people from calling you! And nothing prevents someone else from creating their own list of names to numbers and sharing that.
The Internet really is “a series of tubes”. It is a series of PRIVATE tubes. There really is no such thing as “THE” internet that government can shut down or turn off.
This SOPA protest thingy couldn’t have come at a better time. We get a whole 24 hours rest from the Willis v Tallbloke show… :)
Algore invented the Internet, but now he and his ilk rue that big mistake. Too much freedom isn’t healthy for the Ruling Class. Never has been, and they know it.
SOPA = garbage in swedish.
Pretty good name on it from my point of view.
We have had our share of internet supervision in sweden also via FRA.
1984…
It’s common with politicians to kill legislation up front, then introduce it via a backdoor act.
It was inevitable that this sort of legislation would be introduced sooner or later, the concept of free speech is entertaining but it keeps showing politicians in a bad light. Not to mention science.
The internet doesn’t have to be policed, the people running the sites can be policed.
Election year.
Thanks for reminding me about this Anthony and I’ve blacked out my personal website in support. What I’ve never understood is why the US government pays so much attention to the movie industry. As far as I’m concerned, the US movie industry could disappear and the only thing I’d notice is that there wouldn’t be hordes of obnoxious ignorant “celebrities” coming to Canada to protest the oil sands. The last movie I saw in a theater was Jurassic Park when it came out.
Technologic innovation is what drives the US economy and, if given free reign again, is the only thing that is going to save the US from sliding into third word status. Those interests that are supporting SOPA and PIPA are equivalent to the buggy whip industry when the automobile first arrived on the scene. Given the totalitarian impulses that most politicians have, they probably view this legislation as a means of censoring the internet which has a nasty habit of transmitting the truth to anyone who cares to know. Curious how the first amendment doesn’t even enter into their considerations.
In Canada the government is currently attempting to enact equivalent legislation to the DMCA which would be a major mistake if it went through. What I’ve seen over the last 30 years is a marked decline in the openness of both electronic hardware manufacturers and the software industry which makes me more and more inclined to go to open source hardware and software for my everyday applications. As someone who has an intense need to figure out whats under the hood, I resent having my curiosity criminalized. I don’t buy anything with DRM and use open source electronic medical records software. Unfortunately I chose VB as my main programming language 20 years ago and so the transition to Linux is going slowly but inexorably forward.
liberal fascism is a bitch…
Yes it is. However there isn’t much that’s liberal about this bill. Unless Republicans from Texas (Lamar) and Arkansas (Griffen) are liberal under your definition. Both SOPA and PIPA are bipartisan – otherwise there would be zero chance of them passing, after all.
Part of fighting something is knowing who the enemy is. And in this case it isn’t liberals. It’s people who put money first.
Try again, with better formatting.
liberal fascism is a bitch…
Yes it is. However there isn’t much that’s liberal about this bill. Unless Republicans from Texas (Lamar) and Arkansas (Griffen) are liberal under your definition. Both SOPA and PIPA are bipartisan – otherwise there would be zero chance of them passing, after all.
Part of fighting something is knowing who the enemy is. And in this case it isn’t liberals. It’s people who put money first.
It’s 4:00AM and I’m already in withdrawal.
I understand and support the stance you guys are taking, but please can you keep the noise down. The power hungry powers that be in the EU might hear and decide introduce similar legislation in Europe too.
Seriously, don’t they realise what they are planning? It is like banning the sale of alcohol, no-one would ever seriously propose that, would they?
PS There should have been a /sarc tag above but I put it in angle brackets so of course it got parsed out. Silly me.
Mooloo says:
January 18, 2012 at 12:45 am
“Part of fighting something is knowing who the enemy is. And in this case it isn’t liberals. It’s people who put money first.”
Hollywood isn’t liberal?
Mooloo, the loudest supporters of this bill that I have heard so far are Democrats.
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/01/sopapipa-supporters-blast-blackout-day.php
“What I’ve never understood is why the US government pays so much attention to the movie industry.”
Have you not noticed the absolutely huge sums that pour into politics from Hollywood and the fact that nearly all those contributions go to one party? Not to mention that those celebs are huge role models and trend setters for people so if they can portray one party as “good” and the other as “bad” in pop culture, that is better than gold. They can “shape” the psyche of the entire nation. Politicians are going to kiss the rear ends of Hollywood lest they portray that politician in a bad light in a movie or TV show. Democrats are afraid of Hollywood, Republicans are used to being kicked by Hollywood and so aren’t quite so interested in kissing Hollywood’s rear end.
SOPA is effectively dead for the moment. House Republicans have decided that it isn’t getting out of committee. That might change later, but for the moment it isn’t headed to the floor of the House any time soon. So the focus is on PIPA which is in the Democrat controlled Senate. That one would be DOA in the House, too, most likely.
Mark McDonald says:
January 17, 2012 at 11:59 pm
Are you even awake?
What crosspatch said.
AND movie and music income rises year on year despite “piracy” and even after Depp et all take their tens of millions for pretending to be someone else.
Don’t touch that dial. Movie at eleven.
Some hundred years ago musicians who had composed a piece of music had to perform that piece of music regularly before a public audience to get paid. Then technology came along that allowed the music to be recorded and sold to the public. No longer did musicians have to perform regularly to earn their crust. They now enjoyed a lot of free time and got paid for it, even when they retired into old age. That right to payment was called “intellectual property rights”.
But what about the engineer who designed your car, for instance. He used his intellectual mind. Are we paying him royalties for his “intellectual property rights” every time we use our cars? The same argument goes for anything that has been designed using the human brain like fridges, televisions, central heating boilers, aircraft, ships. Even a plumber or electrician uses his brains to do the work he does, after all, every job will be different.
If everyone got paid for his intellectual property, then after a few years everyone could retire and live of the proceeds of his and hers intellectual property rights. Oh wait, that won’t work. Now everyone is being paid by everyone else and civilisation grinds to a halt. No more progress! That conclusion makes protecting the music industry a ridiculous concept. They will have to change their modus operandi or die.
Google UK shows nothing different to usual.
Shame.
A British student can be extradited to the US to face charges of copyright infringement over a website he ran offering links to pirated films online, a court ruled today.
Richard O’Dwyer, whose site TVShack made more than £150,000 in advertising revenues, according to US prosecutors, is thought to be the first person to be extradited to America on such charges. If convicted in New York, he faces jail.
…His lawyer argued that his site hosted no illegal content but merely directed users to where it was held online, and said that his client will appeal against the extradition ruling.
Asked outside the court if he thought websites that link to other sites should be open to prosecution, Mr O’Dwyer said: “I think you should ask Google the same question, on a much grander scale.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/student-to-face-us-trial-over-tvshack-website-6289235.html
============
His actions are not illegal in the UK – court cases have proven this.- Hence the movie moguls extradite to a place where it is illegal!! Despicable!
Write to your MP – extradition makes no sense.
Mooloo says:
January 18, 2012 at 12:45 am
“Yes it is. However there isn’t much that’s liberal about this bill. Unless Republicans from Texas (Lamar) and Arkansas (Griffen) are liberal under your definition. Both SOPA and PIPA are bipartisan – otherwise there would be zero chance of them passing, after all.
Part of fighting something is knowing who the enemy is. And in this case it isn’t liberals. It’s people who put money first.”
This is very true however you seem to have falling into the very trap you warn others about. First one must understand what “liberal” really means. A liberal doesn’t support freedom or any other high ideal it simply means “alot of, large amount, extra”. Its a huge myth that liberals in the US are pro-freedom/etc. In order to understand this myth we must first look at where much of this talk comes from… europe. In europe the liberal is often applied to people seeking freedom/etc. The term conservative also applies in europe. What does “conservative” mean. Simply to conserve. In europe conservatives are your fascists/communists. This is because they wish to “conserve” the old way. Europe of coursing being control by kings and tyrannical government for pretty much… always. Thus logically speaking a conservative in europe wishes to “conserve”/return to said tyrannical governments.
In the US which was founded on the basis of freedom. So in the US a conservatives wishes to “conserve” freedom. On the other hand a liberal wants large amount of “government”.
The great irony in the fact that these simple facts escape most people leads many to believe that somehow “conservatives”/republicans are somehow anti-freedom/pro-freedom. They aren’t really either… “conservatives” in the US are overwhelming centrist in there ideology. The US has traveled so far to the left toward collectivism that “conservatives” are “conserving” freedom anymore so much as slowing the progress to full blown fascism/communism. If a Thomas Jefferson were to enter the republican party he would be shunned for being far to extreme. The democrats of course being the supporters of all things “liberal” in government pull the centrist republicans along.
People say there is no difference between the republicans and democrats this BS on its face. They are different but not by much. Republicans are spineless centrist who going along with whatever the democrats and the left of the republican party wish to do. This is why when one looks at track records of bush and obama… obama has done everything bush did but 10x. This is because bush was center-left and obama is left/far-left.
Only when people wake up to the fact that collectivism is evil(which will take another world war more then likely) will things change.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about this bill. Anthony says SOPA “would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including WUWT”. I don’t see how this is possible.
Firstly, it must be established (before the court) that a website is hosting a substantial amount of infringing material. Secondly, it be be shown that the proprietor (Anthony) stonewalled requests to resolve the issue or failed to remove the offending material. The court won’t hand out injunctions willy-nilly. They need to see evidence that your website is deliberately engaging in Piracy and a serious harm to the creative industry.
I guess it’s like an open thread then :-
‘Dr Pat Morris, who conducted the original research, said the new study could show if climate change is affecting hedgehogs.’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9020973/Hedgehog-hibernation-could-hold-clue-to-climate-change.html
And I fully support the militant action.
Put my five cents and signed up with google.
It is like demanding airlines search every mp3 player for pirated music before passangers can board. After all they facilitate the spreading of the pirated material, if they don’t. Perhaps taxi, bus and train, and ships, and cars, and trucks too. Maybe the mall should check all teenagers music players and cell phones for pirated music. Schools too! Especially schools they are heavens for training youngsters have to pirate music…..
Brilliant to see WUWT join the rest of us!
it’s just another power grab. we can stop it.
and it’s bipartisan, e.g. these opposing political newspapers:
18 Jan: UK Telegraph: Adrian Hon: SOPA is the equivalent of smashing the Gutenberg press
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/adrianhon/100007115/sopa-is-the-equivalent-of-smashing-the-gutenberg-press-and-will-unite-the-internet-against-it/
18 Jan: Guardian: Dan Gillmor: Stop Sopa or the web really will go darkThe corporations lobbying for Sopa know exactly what they want: control of online information for profit. This is a crossroads
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/17/stop-sopa-or-web-will-go-dark
Government constantly trying to control everything. We need far less government!
@JJTHoms – I have asked UKIP to make an official statement on this and they have agreed.
If SOPA/PIPA passes there will be hundreds of cases like Richard O’Dwyer and with even less cause.
Also, btw for British readers – the Digital Economy Act (for US readers, basically a cut down version of SOPA/PIPA in the UK) has now been deemed compatible with EU law. Not long before we see people prosecuted here under its aegis.
Agree with your action Anthony.
@P van der Meer on January 18, 2012 at 1:36
Aa a musician and a professional chemist I agree with you. Prior to Edison musicians got paid for performing, teaching, selling sheet music. Recording technology changed the business model. When was the last time you hired a local band to play at your party or even a wedding? No, you hire a DJ that plays the music off an mp3 device.
But this isn’t about the musician and their intellectual property; this is about the music industry. They are worse than Big Oil!
In absolute agreement.
It’s worth putting the entire www on black for a day.
cRR Kampen.
This is on topic and well worth watching for those who have not already seen it.
“Here is a list of legislators who support this nightmare and who doesn’t”
Act appropriately on it.
Bravo, Anthony!
If only 1% of the WUWT viewers protest in the way you suggest above, then that should make a few people sit up.
Governments are for all the people, not for those with huge coffers and vetted interests.
Without alternative suggestions as to what laws would be acceptable, y’all look rather petulant.
JohnM @12.36:
You are so right about that. We need to keep an eye on all politicians; I don’t trust them as far as I could throw them. They also forget that they are supposed to serve us, not the other way around.
The underlying tenet of SOPA is “guilty until proven innocent,” a chilling statist instrument.
Were it not for the protesting actions from the web, the bill would have been passed almost by stealth and would soon inflict its damaging effects upon the free exchange for information and knowledge.
Funny how the interweb gives you what the MSM doesn’t.
This ‘ill learn ya.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/17/beyond_sopa/
I just tried to use Wikipedia, to look up the Blood Quantum laws. They are definitely in blackout. Which is ironic, conidering they block skeptics from putting up information… if they wanted to make the proper point, they should redirect to Realclimate, as an example of what they are protesting.
The concept of “intellectual property” in regard to the movie and music industry has long since left the barn. Movies, music and most all media are now manufactured products in exactly the same way as the new toaster you just bought. All of these products are now more rightly considered industrial designs, not “works of art”. They should be afforded the same consideration as the aformentioned toaster.
Well it looks like for once anyway, skeptics deniers warmistas republicans and democrats agree on one thing LOL
Where does the barrel of a gun come from?
It’s always about power.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.William McClenney says:
January 17, 2012 at 10:41 pm
“a little rebellion now and then is a good thing” – Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison on January 30, 1787.
Beats, hands down:
“power comes from the barrel of a gun” – Mao Zedong, Problems of War and Strategy
Obama says he will oppose the bills as written, but supporters outnumber opponents.
Summary below.
The PIPA Bill
S.968 – Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011
The current tally of U.S. Senate members who have (or haven’t) taken a public stance regarding PIPA
(See the full list)
Support 48
Oppose 6
Unknown 46
The SOPA Bill
H.R.3261 – Stop Online Piracy Act
The current tally of U.S. House members who have (or haven’t) taken a public stance regarding SOPA
(See the full list)
Support 32
Oppose 25
Unknown 376
I am not familiar with the specifics of the bills, but given the false propaganda avalanche that we experienced as the climate alarmists tried to sell us the fraudulent globlal warming crisis, one has to conclude that giving governments any more power over our lives is a grave mistake.
A trillion dollars of scarce global resources has been squandered on global warming fraud.
I will vote for anyone who honestly says “I’m going to do a whole lot LESS for you!”
Good luck in your endeavours, Anthony et al.
No r.gates commenting? No ‘A Fizz’?
Wait, they believe in SOPA… because it would eventually lead to governments closing down sites like WUTT, which disseminate information counter to what they are saying.
I’ll be violating the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Patent number 6630507 in protest.
Check that out one day…
Good job Anthony. SOPA/PIPA bad idea.
But as others above have noted, it may be time to change the business model in the arts and entertainment communities. The technology to distribute material is changing rapidly. The changes following Edison created the current model, SOPA/PIPA seem designed to protect that model. Laws that try to protect obsolete concepts are always bad.
There is a distinct difference between a person whose only product is intellectual and a plumber who uses his intellect to install a product. The plumber gets paid on the basis of the value of the installed product. There is no comparable system for arts.
Those who create intellectual products that consumers find useful or entertaining must be compensated, or there will be no more such products. I am not convinced there is a problem now considering the number of very wealthy people in the entertainment industry and the number of young people trying to get into it. On the other hand maybe there is a problem considering the terrible quality of material delivered by the entertainment industry today.
Whatever the problem, the market system has always been the best way to find the solution and the government system the worst.
Dan Evens says:
January 18, 2012 at 3:27 am
With that statement you’re assuming that there’s a problem in need of a legislative solution. No law is needed at all, so demanding we suggest alternatives would be like the greens demanding we come up with alternative causes for how humans have caused global warming (and solutions to those causes) before abandoning the CO² hypothesis.
Dail Mail comment,
Thank goodness at least part of Wikipedia is accessible. It means that Daily Mail journalists can thoroughly research their stories in the usual way.
- The Fat Butcher, Daycare Castle, Scotland, 18/1/2012 11:26
Dan Evens says:
January 18, 2012 at 3:27 am
Without alternative suggestions as to what laws would be acceptable, y’all look rather petulant.
============
Dan why do we need ANY laws on it at all?
its ONLY the massive profiteering corps that see some cents vanishing..seriously whats copied off line or shared was at least paid for by someone before.it was shared.
Murdochs pay to read papers have nothing that a citizen journo cant also publish for free.
by the same token a huge amount of taxpayer funded research gets bought up by private corps like Elsevier and the cost to read let alone be able to download or print a page is absurd!
Just joined in. Our default page currently has one link that refirects here.
ThePowerofX says:
January 18, 2012 at 2:02 am
There is a lot of misunderstanding about this bill. Anthony says SOPA “would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including WUWT”. I don’t see how this is possible.
Firstly, it must be established (before the court) that a website is hosting a substantial amount of infringing material. Secondly, it be shown that the proprietor (Anthony) stonewalled requests to resolve the issue or failed to remove the offending material. The court won’t hand out injunctions willy-nilly. They need to see evidence that your website is deliberately engaging in Piracy and a serious harm to the creative industry.
Dear Power:
Here is what happens when you have too many laws that intimidate people.
Years ago, when John Daly died someone else took over his website.
http://www.john-daly.com/
The new administrator deleted all the articles I had written that John had posted on his site. When I asked why, I was told that the articles had been published in newspapers and were therefore copyright and could not be published.
I proved to this party that I had never been paid for any of these articles and they were my property alone – that was my condition when I submitted the articles to the papers.
This did not matter to the bureaucratic mind, and the articles are no longer on the website.
Perhaps this is not a fair analogy – you be the judge.
Regards, Allan
[Reply: Allen, Anthony is always looking for good articles to post. You might consider rewriting and submitting. ~dbs, mod.]
Has anybody noticed if E-bay or Amazon went black?
I used Wikipedia to look up Sopapilla and got a normal looking page, much to my disappointment. Then it switched to the blackout page in a second or so, so I got to see that too.
I redid the search and hit the ESC key right after the Sopapilla page displayed, and it remained up. So, I guess Wikipedia.com is still useful. I haven’t tried using a foreign gateway. I wonder if they block SOPA or let that through.
Unle Sam say’s, “We are watching you”
You can still pull up wikipedia misinformation using Google cache.
I sent this to my congresscritters listed as supporting these bills:
Please oppose SOPA and PIPA bills
(One is listed as uncertain, so I tweaked it appropriately.)
The text is pretty lame, but the important part is the title, and I wrote that clearly and succintly enough so that even Mark Twain would agree the message will be understood.
http://www.twainquotes.com/Congress.html Read it while it’s safe to link to!
Thank you for this show of support against the proposed legislation.
In Australia the Institute for Public Affairs is hosting
Mark Steyn
and
Dan Hannon
in support of Freedom of Speech.
http://www.ipa.org.au/
I trust Australians who truly know what it is to live without these freedoms, and those that support these freedoms, will support these events.
Also of interest
<The Difficult Freedom of Free Speech
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2012/1-2/the-difficult-history-of-free-speech
Mark Steyn (Canada)
http://vimeo.com/channels/ipa#25438650
crosspatch says:
January 17, 2012 at 9:58 pm
I am tired of a government …….
——————————-
But, “we” elect them.
I’m not in the entertainment industry and can’t think of anyone I know who is: I don’t have a dog in this fight Or maybe I do; I love getting stuff free on the Internet.
But it doesn’t take a great deal of empathy to take the following into account. Revenue that otherwise would be used to feed the kids and pay the mortgages of lighting technicians, wardrobe people, makeup artists, special-effects programmers, film editors, and myriad other workers are being lost, and people are being laid off, because pirates in Russia, China, and elsewhere are stealing the products those peoples’ labor makes possible.
Rather than stand aside while this theft persists, legislators are attempting to address the problem with as little burden to commerce as possible. If those efforts have fallen short of the mark, one would expect serious people to advance thoughtful alternative proposals for protecting the products of such workers, who are as entitled to benefit from their labor as any of us. Instead, we are subjected to appalling caricatures at the intellectual level of “If we passed a law against prostitution, a girl could be sent to jail for accepting a gift from her boyfriend.”
I can’t say I’m surprised at those tactics, but I must confess to a twinge of disillusionment at seeing their stampeding Anthony, too, into participating in the group snit.
People who claim to be leading governments worldwide are wasting our money and threatening our freedom. They have squandered massive amounts of taxpayer resources and now they are turning on the citizens themselves, seeking to impose censorship and limitations.
It is time to push back against this on all fronts. Keep up the good work, Anthony.
The MPAA and the RIAA has gotten congress to extend the length of copyright beyond all reasonable bounds through the use of lobbyists like Chris Dodd. Yeah, that Chris Dodd who is now employed by the MPAA. Obviously, there needs to be a copyright protection for a reasonable time. But when my patent runs out in 20 years and their copyright runs out 2,000 years after the last remnants of genome has become extinct, it is a bit tilted and excessive. Greed promotes a feeling of injustice. Injustice prompts people to ignore the law. This kind of law is an auto de fe by the MPAA and RIAA in the long run. Bonfire of the Vanities indeed.
Annie says: January 18, 2012 at 3:31 am
“JohnM @12.36:
You are so right about that. We need to keep an eye on all politicians; I don’t trust them as far as I could throw them. They also forget that they are supposed to serve us, not the other way around.”
Too true!! In fact the whole notion of “democracy” has been completely perverted by our politicians.
To put it in (a modern) context, the Greeks saw that there were three types of governing authorities:
1. Presidents … (monarchy or rule by the one)
2. Parties … (oligarchy or rule by a group which was distinct from those being ruled)
3. People … (democracy …government in which ordinary people i.e. people indistinct from everyone else run the show)
Now, you should immediately see that Greek democracy isn’t the same as what we are now told is “democracy”, and you will also see that there is no modern concept equivalent to what the Greeks meant by “democracy”.
So, why does no one seem to know that democracy means that people like you and me should be running the show, and not people like Clinton, Nixon, Obama, Nixon, and all the other money grabbing monarchs and oligarchs? …. do Turkey’s vote for Xmas? Do politicians tell the people, that we should be running the show and not them?
When will a politicians ever vote to give ordinary people power?
So how do they stop us asking for power? They tell us that there is no better form of government that doesn’t require politicians!
ThePowerofX says:
January 18, 2012 at 2:02 am
“There is a lot of misunderstanding about this bill. Anthony says SOPA “would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including WUWT”. I don’t see how this is possible.
Firstly, it must be established (before the court) that a website is hosting a substantial amount of infringing material. ”
As the www is everywhere, you can sue in any court, so you pick a court in some backwater where you know that the judge is gung-ho about blocking websites. “Substantial amount”, is that in SOPA? That’s well, I would say, one link, okay? You disagree? Fine, you always have the option of countersuing or having a retrial. In the meantime, your site is down.
In Germany there is similar law in force, so called “Mitstörerhaftung”, where the owner of a forum is held responsible for “illegal” links posted by visitors under certain conditions. And businesses like youtube or google would have been sued to the ground in Germany before they would ever have been able to earn their first dime.
That’s, BTW, the reason why we never create such businesses here.
SOPA is paternalistic and destructive, but a problem with protecting intellectual property rights still exists. Technology has made it easy to steal and use what someone else created through hard effort. This means fewer people will work on difficult problems because they won’t risk the expense for a now more likely minimal reward. That probably won’t happen in the smart phone app arena, but it could in the medical research arena. Patent and copyright protection has become a thorny issue which affects everybody.
As an Australian –
Whether the liberal left likes it or not, the USA has been the beacon of freedom for the last 200+ years. The rest of the (freeish) world has pined for the freedom of expression and freedom of association that the citizens of the USA have enjoyed. Americans are responsible for the freedom of many other countries.
My concern is that if the trend setter of the modern era starts to restrict the freedoms of its citizens, then the rest of the world will surely follow suit.
I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would think?
What we have here is dramatic fail of the RIAA suits and the Righthaven suits. The government wants to make that sort of thing work — after all, censorship is even better when exercised in the public interest.
From the HuffingtonPost:
I think passing these bills would make Cass Sunstein happy…
Sorry, Anthony, but I think you’ve been conned by the propaganda against SOPA. I don’t see anything in it that would threaten WUWT or similar sites in the way you claim. If you disagree, please give chapter and verse.
One problem with SOPA is that it is execrably drafted, so it is difficult to understand it, and easy for its opponents to misrepresent it. Key points to grasp are that its main sanctions apply only to sites based outside the USA (which I presume excludes WUWT). Some provisions do also apply to US-based sites dedicated to copyright infringement, but in this case the main sanction is to prevent people advertising with them, not to block public access to them.
A useful summary of SOPA is here http://www.copyhype.com/2011/10/stop-online-piracy-act-walkthrough/ , but note that some of the more controversial provisions have already been removed.
The difference is that the people in your examples actually sign contracts to extend rights to their intellectual property to their employer (which could be themselves, of course, but then they get paid directly for their intellect and whatever product/service arises from it).
Nor does it work for all but the fewest of musicians/artists/actors.
Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to dealing with IP. Well, simply allowing the free market to determine how those that rely on IP to make a living actually make a living is “easy,” but none of them will like that result. The answer is always more government control, force the rest of us to pay what is “fair” for their services. The government has always been a tool for lesser entities to extort from greater.
What really chaps my hide regarding such “acts” is that the problem is not really a problem. It is NOT about making sure those relying on IP get their “fair share,” it is about punishing those that wish to go around the process (and making money, gaining power, in the process). People that pirate weren’t going to buy the product anyway. The pirated good(s) do not represent any lost income, they are lost potential income, though the potential is significantly lower than any politician or industry executive will admit. This simply hands them more control over our lives, a way to back-door regulate what happens on the Internet, a way to limit our freedom.
Mark
This is nonsense. All of the people creating movies, music, books, etc. depend on royalties from the sale of their copyrighted work. Piracy is simple theft: taking something without paying for it; you are depriving the creator of the rights to the proceeds of his work.
Suppose instead of buying that nifty new toaster, you could simply download a file and replicate it in a gizmo on your desk. What happens to the manufacturer of the toaster? He’s out of business. And so are the people who work for him, including the people who designed that toaster and made it unique.
The vast bulk of creative enterprise in this country is undertaken by individuals, not big companies, and not an ‘industry’. It is true that sometimes independent artists—musicians, writers, photographers, designers, etc.—will offer their works for free download. But that is a form of marketing; the aim is to build a following, and become well-enough known to quit your day job and earn a living from your own works. Without copyright, that will not be possible.
Software that is not open-source is copyrightable. If you trade software without paying for a license, you are stealing. Yes, I know Microsoft’s ‘authentication’ regimen is onerous, but stealing from MS is no different in principle from using pirated software developed by some guy in his bedroom down the street, without paying the shareware fee.
Manufactured products are often based on patents, which is another form of intellectual property. Big companies have to resources to sue for patent infringement, but inventors often do not. If you steal someone’s patent, that is theft.
The point is, a free market depends on individuals having the right to the proceeds from their own work. That’s why copyright was invented. For all the prattling about ‘freedom’, I have yet to see any workable defense to the threat to the free market posed by piracy. If a town is beleaguered by gangs of thieves looting shops, and if the shopkeepers cannot protect themselves, then what do they do? They look to the police for help.
As Crosspatch points out above (January 18, 2012 at 12:19 am), there is no single ‘Internet’, so not one capable of policing itself. A case can be made that there is a need for government—maybe even an international treaty between governments, as already, in principle, attempts to coordinate copyright law—to step in.
Now arguably the two bills in the US Congress today are too draconian, too heavy-handed, and give way too much authority to the federal government. Lord knows we don’t want our government replicating the abuses of the Chinese. Maybe, as C. Allan Jorgenson says (January 18, 2012 at 4:16 am), there are private-sector solutions that can forestall the need for government intervention. If so, now is the time to propose them. It is not going to be enough to tell Congress, “Don’t mess with our Internet(s)!” You have to say, “Here’s how we, e-citizens, are going to police ourselves.” And then, come up with a plan.
/Mr Lynn
Intellectual property and physical property (copyright and patent) have always been problem areas. I doubt there is a remedy for IP piracy or Patent infringement, especially in a global economy where the laws are different in every country. But an intractable problem has never stopped legislators from making new law about it.
There’s an old saying: “If you can’t fix a problem, screw it up so bad that nobody can.”
A rule that governs a system, can also paralyze that system.
As Steve C wrote earlier
“The corporations’ current business model is simply unsuited to the internet age, but they haven’t realised yet that they need a new one.”
Steve, as far as music industry goes, I think they have realised that. But this looks a better short term measure to delay the inevitable. A basic problem for a long time has been that large-conglomerate earnings relying on creative/artistic IP are very vulnerable. If a “music” company needs to find the equivalent of a new “Beatles” or “Elvis” every year to maintain the stock price, then what happens if it doesn’t ?: It becomes even more important to control music distribution and retail. They are middle-men between the artist and the consumer. They create nothing. They know, that in the long term, technology threatens to make their business model very dead. Law is the only option open to them.
One of the astoundingly stupid assumptions by the entertainment and software industries is that each pirated product represents a lost sale. And so, they reason that as night follows day, if you manage to prevent piracy, the assumed billions in “lost” sales will tinkle into your waiting lap. Right. Monopolize a product, make it expensive and most people will realize that they don’t really need it and will simply not buy it. Those who do want it or need it will turn to independent productions and open source products which will saturate the market overnight. Volume and competition will see quality rise and prices plummeting.This will wallop the big producers, whose client base will be reduced to governments and corporations, and to add well-deserved insult to their mortal injury, their products will still be pirated in one way or another…a process made easier by a bitter public suddenly accessing, siding with and protecting piracy on ideological grounds.
I take great pleasure in imagining William Connolly sitting in front of his computer, drumming his fingers and waiting for Wiki to start up again
Khwarizmi says:
January 18, 2012 at 4:14 am
(had to visit Google :-))
Stopping online piracy is a noble motive. Saving the world from Global Warming is a noble motive. Come to think of it, I can’t remember any bill in Congress named for a nefarious motive. Lots of bad laws have been passed, but never a bad alleged motive.
/sarc Probably means nothing. Almost 10 percent of Americans trust Congress and can 30 million people be wrong? Sarc/
I want the internet to be and stay an open source as it is today, but unfortunately this is what the future of the internet will be. A closed source where one needs a lot of money to buy products only. Just like the old days when internet wasn’t there and one needed to go to shops in order to buy music, knowledge etc etc.
It was just too good to be true. I knew that someday this would happen. This is just the first step towards total internet control.
Temp, you clearly don’t know much. Modern American conservatism is a direct descendant of late 18th century/early 19th century British “Classical Liberalism”, which mainly sought freedom to do as you wish within a limited rule of law. Modern USA “Social liberalism” goes a couple of steps farther on the freedom scale. There are 3 freedoms – “freedom to” do what you want and to ignore the needs of society unless they benefit you, and to exploit others (modern day USA conservative freedom), “freedom of” religion, speech, the press, etc., as guaranteed by our constitution, and “freedom from” hunger, want, exploitation, deprivation (modern day USA liberal freedom).
Also when you spout about liberty, the implication of liberty is freedom with responsibility. The responsibility part is where society provides for “freedom from”.
Rupert Murdoch is a liberal fascist??? wow – who knew?? Actually SOPA is mainly an attempt by “free market” advocating corporate leaders to prevent an aspect of “free market” that gores their ox. Free marketers always want gov’t intervention when it impedes thier competition or provides subsidies or tax loopholes, and go anti-big gov’t when it focuses on “freedom from”. There is no such thing as a “free market”. You either have gov’t regulation to limit abuses or you have mopolies, monopsonies, cartels etc or unbridled irresponsibility that creates bubbles and crashes with resulting market destruction.
Thanks for doing this, Anthony. I’ve signed the petition. Cry FREEDOM!
The constitution empowers congress to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (Article I, Section 8). Anthony, it appears that you and most of your readers think that ‘any use is fair use’ and that anarchy should rule. The fact is you and I do not have the right to steal content of genuine commercial value.
IMO, a sad day for a blog I thought had a reputation for open debate and thoughtful commentary.
Strange mix of people there. Sen. Inhofe is a proponent.
What is happening to good old United States of America and the American way?
First, there’s Obama, President of a nation that has the world’s largest reserves of fossil fuels, yet his policies are contrary to Americans benefitting from cheap fossil fuel energy in the USA.
Now we see America… supposed to be the shining light and defender of freedom, democracy and free speech. Yet its greatest contribution to encouraging such principles, i.e. the internet, is being threatened by US censorship.
It’s simply un-American! But then, this is what happens when a nation is run by an administration that is very un-American and does not act in the best interests of the USA. And that’s a damn shame!
Not a question of whether it would work or not. It’s a question of who they would want it to work against. They could pretty much just choose who to go after.
Most information out there is bought and paid for by private citizens through taxes and purchases. That we would then be banned from sharing it (with proper bibliographic notation of course) is dictatorial and tyrannical rule over the common citizenry. Benevolent regulations over the people is just one letter away from total loss of freedom.
Make that three letters but you get my point.
Read Mark Levin’s book “Ameritopia”. Or if that’s too much then read the interview below: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/exclusive-mark-levin-ameritopia-we-now-live-post-constitutional-country
“Utopianism is not new,” Levin writes in “Ameritopia.” “It has been repackaged countless times—since Plato and before. It is as old as tyranny itself. In democracies, its practitioners legislate without end. In America, law is piled upon law in contravention and contradiction of the governing law—the Constitution.”
Levin’s verdict: Barack Obama and modern American liberals are firmly in the Utopian camp—pursuing a vision fundamentally at odds with limited government and human freedom.
“I believe to a great extent we now live in a post-constitutional country, where much of the Constitution is ignored or evaded,” Levin told CNSNews.com.
“What I want the readers to understand, what I want the public to understand is, this is not new and it’s going to destroy us,” said Levin. “It’s going to destroy us because it is an attack on the individual. It is an attack on the nature of human beings.”
Here come the shills. Right,Mr. Lynn?
I support this action of Anthony’s.
However Google is a bit hypocritical with how they bent over for the Chinese. Either freedom is important no matter where you live or it is not. Google went for the money as did others in China.
News Flash: the Constitution has been over for years. See; President Harry Truman and the National Security Act
I’m unsurprised to see Babs and Dianne supporting the bill. In my ten years in California I’ve never been on the same side of an issue as these two and I know that if I ever am it’s simply because I’ve not done enough research into the issue.
We can all look forward to a free exchange of (gov’t approved) ideas.
It’s ironic that when I buy a DVD and it turns out that I have to watch one minute of anti-piracy messages which cannot be skipped, it really really makes me want to download the movie from the internet so I can have a copy without that crap which wastes my time. I *bought* the DVD, so why am I the target? When they’re that clueless, they’re not qualified for lobbying for new acts/laws. Anything from that camp should be ignored until they grow up.
Thoughtful & principled stand by Anthony Watts and an excellent post by Harpo (among many). Bravo!
To paraphrase Churchill: “Like democracy, a wholly free and open web is the worst of all global information systems, except for every other one that has ever been tried.”
It’s great fun too, seeing so many long-time opponents vehemently agreeing with one another!
Another brick in the road of paved with “good intentions”. And you know where that leads.
Here come the name-callers. Right, Luther Wu?
/Mr Lynn
REPLY: No arguments will be moderated on this thread – Anthony
Mr Lynn says:
January 18, 2012 at 6:00 am
1. No, they don’t. A vast majority of musicians (& I do know hundreds of musicians who make their sole living from music) make their money from playing shows and selling physical objects at those shows. The musicians who make all, or even most, of their money from royalties are the extremely rare: less than 0.1%. Insisting that the copyright noose be further tightened on the notion that you’re starving poor bastards like Bruce Springsteen is absurd (hint: Springsteen used to encourage audience members to record and freely distribute his concerts). Pointing at some poor slob making $80 a show & saying that pre-emptively banning the reproduction of his work will put more money in his pocket is rank stupidity.
2. The inane conflation of books, movies, and music is pathetic. Lumping in software is even stupider. They aren’t written, distributed, or used the same way(s).
3. Copying an item is not theft: it never has been in the entire history of patent and copyright law. Copying an idea is not theft: it never has been in the entire history of patent and copyright law. Copying a text is not theft: theft is criminal, & until the abomination of the DMCA, unauthorized copying was not criminal.
4. Unauthorized copying is to theft, as looking at naughty pictures is to rape: they are not even vaguely comparable.
5. The large studios are trying to pass the cost of enforcement (of their copyrights) off on to me, through the immoral use of government force.
Good choice Anthony. Glad to see WUWT take a stand here.
Random thought – these bills will likely be as effective as the CAN-SPAM bill was, but with greater ancillary damage.
Perry had it right!
He named two of three Departments of the federal government that should immediately be should be shut down.
He didn’t fail to mention the third.
Any other Department would have been a correct answer…
Mark T says:
Obama does not support SOPA any longer so it is likely dead for a while.
Obama said he wouldn’t sign NDAA (the law giving the President authority to detain citizens indefinitely with no reason and no trial), but he signed it when it was given to him. I’m not putting a lot of stock in the current claim, given that.
I like to be paid when I write something and it can be a liitle frustrating when carefully crafted work appears without any permission,attribution or payment. If it is an individual, or a web site or small magazine they usually apologise and/or pay up, or take down the material. I prefer the pay up option. Done on a phone call or an e-mail or a letter. If it is ***, ++++, or any large corporation they will not even acknowledge anything less than a solicitors letter. They will demand extensive proof of copyright, drag it out for years, continue with unauthorised use, force huge legal expenses on you and run roughshod over any minor artist that gets in their way. This is not about protecting Intellectual rights, and saving the struggling artists from those nasty foreign theives, it is about power, censorship and corporate profits
Well I am from Canada, so cant take political action, but if it matters, I support the blackout. Sucks to not have WUWT for a day, but I will survive.
“It’s ironic that when I buy a DVD and it turns out that I have to watch one minute of anti-piracy messages which cannot be skipped, it really really makes me want to download the movie from the internet so I can have a copy without that crap which wastes my time. I *bought* the DVD, so why am I the target? When they’re that clueless, they’re not qualified for lobbying for new acts/laws. Anything from that camp should be ignored until they grow up.”
I totaly aggree! Nothing worse than forcing me to watch previews and anti-piracy messages.
DavidB says:
January 18, 2012 at 5:56 am
Sorry, Anthony, but I think you’ve been conned by the propaganda against SOPA. I don’t see anything in it that would threaten WUWT or similar sites in the way you claim. If you disagree, please give chapter and verse.
Personaly, I see the main problem as the acctions with no due process. All it will take under SOPA to take down WUWT (and all sceptical sites) is for warmies to aledge copyright violations, and BOOM, WUWT is down untill proven inocent. Repeat as nececary. And with the immunity clauses, the accusers will likely never face legal charges for harrasment etc.
Dan Evens says:
January 18, 2012 at 3:27 am
Without alternative suggestions as to what laws would be acceptable, y’all look rather petulant.
Dan, it is already against the law to steal private property. Surely some imagination might be used in dealing with it. They seem to be able to track down pedophile pornographers without investigating the other 99% of the population.
evilincandescentbulb says:
“liberal fascism is a bitch…”
So is it liberal or facism? Boxer and Feinstein are opposed (What would you expect?) Inhofe supports (at least PIPA. What?!), Pelosi is opposed (Who’d of thought?), Franken supports (so he’s from the entertainment industry (Does this mean we’ll be able to file a single complaint and shut him up?), Paul is opposed (Expected).
US politics is just weird.
Isn’t it amusing how American politicians give lipservice to freedom of speech, yet how many of them line up to decimate the First Amendment. They ALL need to be fired.
Corporatism: complain of unfair competition to get your competitor shut down. There are ways to prevent those viewing content from downloading it, like using Silverlight, they are just too much trouble for most websites.
This is not a liberal vs conservative issue. You see a fair number of conservative Republicans on the “For” list. This is Corporatism and it attempts to use the money and political power of the “old” media (RIAA, MPAA, NBC/Universal, Fox/News Corp (Rupert Murdoch, ………etc) to impose its will and control over the emerging “new” media. It is in effect a power-grab by those with the ability to manipulate the political system to serve their interests. I think everyone supports reasonable efforts to prevent piracy, however, these bills are a crude weapons which will effectively suppress free speech for everyone and and can ultimately be circumvented by the wrongdoers. The potential for abuse by those seeking to suppress debate on various issues is enormous.
The secret behind SOPA, the so-called anti-piracy bill
which is today the target of an unprecedented backlash with Wikileaks
and other major websites ‘going dark’ to protest the legislation, has
nothing to do with piracy or copyright theft – it’s about the formal
effort to mimic Communist China’s system of Internet
censorship.
The anti-piracy laws demanded are nothing but corporate rackteering and an assault on internet freedom. This is the sound of dinosaurs protesting about evolution.
The scope of the bill is so broad it will be used against anything and everything except piracy.
But don’t take my word for it, listen to what Joe
Lieberman, co-sponsor of PIPA, SOPA’s sister version in the Senate, said
about the purpose of behind the US government’s efforts to control the
Internet under the guise of cybersecurity.
Lieberman characterized fears that the US government
would use such powers to censor political content as “total
misinformation,” yet goes on to admit that the purpose behind the agenda
is to mimic China’s ability to “disconnect parts of its Internet in
case of war,” adding, “we need that here too”.
Of course, Communist China’s “war” is not against
foreign terrorists or hackers, it’s targeted against people who dare to use
the Internet to express dissent against government atrocities or
corruption. China’s system of Internet policing is about crushing
freedom of speech and has nothing to do with legitimate security
concerns as Lieberman well knows.
Having largely failed in his bid to use fears over
cyberwarfare, bearing in mind it was the United
States and Israel who launched the Stuxnet attack, to achieve the
ultimate goal of Internet control, Lieberman has returned with the same
agenda only under a different guise – the Protect Intellectual Property
Act – of which he is the co-sponsor.
Whether the justification is cybersecurity or
anti-piracy, the end game remains the ability to seize control over the
Internet and shut down websites on a whim.
================
Let’s check out Chris Dodd…
Former Democrat senator Chris Dodd… now a corporate lobbyist because he had to leave the Senate in disgrace.
Former Democrat senator Chris Dodd… involved in the huge mortgage scandal and bank bailouts…
No budget in six years!
The U.S. is $15 trillion in debt and they still aren’t working on a budget?
I think you should keep this protest going for a long time :)
Anthony,
Shortly after you went dark yesterday I checked your cache.
It was also dark. Did you do that ?
If so, how ?
REPLY: Yes. Vee have ways – Anthony
Black or White or
Red ?
True love is dead.
V.
A by-product to this karfaffle should be a re-examination of our entertainment choices which have become commercialized, flat-out boring and expensive. Here are some ways with which to push back:
Check out plays by schools and amateur groups. Better still, get your kids and yourself involved. Far more rewarding and healthy than forking out the big bucks for big productions, lining up at theatres or flopping on the couch with a movie and a bag of chips.
Make movie nights into a social affair at your home by inviting friends and neighbours.
Learn an instrument and form garage bands or quartets, or just get together with friends for jam sessions.
Taking your family to a stadium for professional sports has become prohibitive. Parking alone is a rip off. Local leagues and school teams may not be as “professional,” but there is far more satisfaction in knowing the players personally and in involving your kids and yourself.
Rediscover the art of conversation, the pleasure of a lecture, the fun behind board games, community to-dos, chess games in the park.
All these little measures, even if taken occasionally, are better for our flagging health, our torpid brains and our emptying wallets!
To respond:
1. I know a lot of musicians, too, including many songwriters, who depend on royalties from recordings and performances of their songs. Yes, many musicians survive by performing and selling CDs (some do well; others have day jobs). The CD is about to disappear, by the way, thanks to the Internet, which will leave “the poor slob making $80 a show” with no product to sell.
There are all levels of success (and failure) in music and other creative endeavors: the point is that the existence of copyright protects the individual’s right to the fruits of his labor and creativity. To suggest that everyone is entitled to everything is to obviate the whole concept of private property, which is to destroy the bedrock of American freedom.
2. Since books, movies, and music (and software) are all protected by copyright, conflating them is not “inane” at all, differences in production and distribution notwithstanding.
3. It may be true that copying copyrighted and patented work is not criminal theft, but under the law it is actionable, and ought to be.
4. The effect of copying work of commercial value and thereby either destroying its value or utilizing it for your own benefit is morally equivalent to theft, even if it is not punishable under criminal statute.
5. You may be right about the desires of the large (movie) studios “to pass the cost of enforcement (of their copyrights) off on to me.” This would get us into the details of the proposed laws, which I would have to review first. I can understand any citizen (or corporation) wanting to enlist government help with international piracy. Domestic piracy is a different matter, and theoretically should be encompassed by revision of existing copyright and patent law.
Do these two laws amount to “the immoral use of government force”? I don’t know; my point is that piracy is a problem, not that these laws are the best way to address it. I have the impression that many here think that with the rise of the Internet(s), there is no longer any need for copyright and patent law. Indeed there isn’t, if you want to eliminate private property—and individual freedom as well.
/Mr Lynn
Anthony thank you for standing up for freedom of speech.
Our country is rapidly descending into tyranny. Here are some examples.
The TSA routinely searches air travelers without a search warrant or even probable cause to get a search warrant. They search senior citizens in wheelchairs. They search frightened children. They search everyone. Everyone is assumed to be guilty. Bye Bye 4th amendment.
The president now claims the authority to kill anyone including American citizens just by saying they are terrorists. No Trial, no jury, no judge, no due process of law. And he has done it and gotten away with it. Bye bye 5th and 6th amendments.
The NDAA act of 2012 gives the military the authority to indefinitely detain anyone including Americans without a trial, just by saying that person is involved in terrorism. Remember who the Commander-in-Chief is. Do we really trust this president or any president with that kind of power. This is another nail in the coffin of the 5th and 6th amendments.
The internet is the greatest forum for freedom of speech, but SOPA would go a long way toward silencing it. Bye bye 1st amendment.
Thank you to everyone who stands up against this tyranny.
Police the internet? They can’t even find the climategate ‘hacker’/'leaker’……..
Looks like Rubio has gotten the message
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/01/18/rubio-on-second-thought-sopapipas-a-bad-idea/
The day AGW scepticism died – temporarily.
Make your political muppets see sense, guys otherwise the whole world’s political muppets will follow the USA’s lead and silence the only true free speech we have. Forever.
@ John in L du B, Boxer and Feinstein support
http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/
Perhaps we are looking at a problem which is only the symptom of another larger problem.
If the length of ‘Copyright’ were returned to the 17 1/2 years, with one renewal of 17 1/2 years,
rather than infinity, by moving the Goal Posts when the time of copyright is close to expiration, and then placing an additional limitation that only the author or his/her direct descendants or immediate family can opt for the renewal, then these limiting laws, such as SOPA and PIPA would not be necessary.
Oh the irony. The advertisement was about a BA degree in online marketing. You can kiss that goodby if the internet becomes regulated to the extent that businesses can’t compete in a free for all.
Why doesn’t he just go all the way and officially change his last name to Liberalman?
murrayv says:
January 18, 2012 at 6:44 am
“Temp, you clearly don’t know much.”
Please read my post since clearly from your post you didn’t bother to read it at all.
John in L du B says:
January 18, 2012 at 8:06 am
evilincandescentbulb says:
“liberal fascism is a bitch…”
“So is it liberal or facism? Boxer and Feinstein are opposed (What would you expect?) Inhofe supports (at least PIPA. What?!),”
Its much like obama was “opposed” to the detain every US Citizen Act because the Act didn’t go far enough. More then likely that is the case here or they are holding out for an ear mark or something along that line. Very few in congress ever miss the chance to vote to expand government power anymore. They only hold out for more pork before they do vote yes if they hold out at all.
DavidB says:
:Sorry, Anthony, but I think you’ve been conned by the propaganda against SOPA. I don’t see anything in it that would threaten WUWT or similar sites in the way you claim. If you disagree, please give chapter and verse. ”
Try this on for size.
http://www.seis.nagoya-u.ac.jp/sagiya/Sagiyas_Page/Canary.html publishes three axis GPS data (x,y,z) for various stations around El Hierro in the Canaries.
Given Pevolca, Involcan and IGN’s reticence to give a straight story about what is going on with the volcano, I had taken to pulling Prof Sagiya’s data, finding the trend in the GPS, fitting a quadratic sheet and piping that data over to a pivot table in Excel. Running a look-up to the pivot table for the 3D terrain points I was able to extract psuedo surface deformation data and present it as a rotating plot.
Non expert, but it gave a much more clear indication that there is some sort of intrusion happening under the old volcanic precipice of Tanganasoga. I had previously calculated an intrusion rate of about 750K to 795K m³/day which the submarine eruption south of La Restinga is has been happily venting.
I used Sagiya’s data since the only GPS data that IGN releases is lateral offset… or the distance changes from a few sites. No vertical component at all. Additional station were put in place, but IGN will not release their locations, though they state the changes those stations see. Additionally, they installed new seismic stations… but again, will not release the location, though the provide the data in the phase reports.
The only thing that comes form IGN/PEVLOCA/INVOLCAN is that “it’s almost over” (come spend your money) and the vent responds with renewed vigor.
Now a low end 0.59 Hz tremor shows up on more islands and the stock response is that there is nothing to it.
So…. I continued to plot, being very careful to not make any supposition about what will happen, only pointing out the mis-matched geophysical manifestations and the “nothing going on” response from the officials.
So.. I get this in my e-mail last night…
To:GeoLurking
Dear Sir,
The Takeshi Sagiya’s GPS data from El Hierro is not a public data and is related to a research project in progress. I would appreciate if you can delete the videos based on this information which it has been taking from Takeshi Sagiya web page without his permission. Thank you in advance for your collaboration.
Nemesio M. Pérez (Scientific Coordinator INVOLCAN)
The E-mail server that it came from matches the one used for Youtube correspondence and showed no abnormalities (yes, I know how to read a mail header) and the user channel name links right back to INVOLCAN’s official channel. So, I have to take it as authentic.
No, I was not contacted by Prof Sagiya, nor was I contacted by Nagoya University, the people who actually own the data. I was contacted by INVOLCAN… a 3rd party.
So.. I pulled the vids. No biggie, the data was stale anyway.
—
Is that a good enough example for you?
This is an illustration of exactly why “power” should not be concentrated at the top: “Federal” governments should have strictly limited scope because, gradually, and usually “for the children”, “power” is taken away from the citizens, and Federal governments overreach. Government scales very, very poorly indeed.
Citizens need to get engaged and take the power back before it is too late. They need to stop outsourcing their civic duties and wrest control of their lives, their futures, and the futures of their children from the power-hungry, self-aggrandizing, despot-wannabees who have usurped legitimate self-government not only in the US, but in the UK, Australia, NZ, and Canada (let’s not even mention poor, benighted Europe). You can recognize these proto-tyrants by their refusal to embrace the notion that decision making for a community should be done *locally* rather than centrally, and by their staunch refusal to admit that throwing ever increasing sums of money at a “problem” (that they, themselves most likely created) is only making the problem worse.
Darkness is falling, people. Light a candle.
My senators, Scott Brown is against it and Kerry cannot make up his mind. Like you, it does not appear that party politics/agendas/principles are central to this POS. I’d like to be able to declare something like the entertainment lobby or such but could it be that the people advocating these bills are just stupid and cannot fathom the extent of the damage they/it will cause?
Or then again, a law that would criminalize software that helps the Chinese people get around Chinese communist government censors – is a law that would help the Chinese communist government censors. Come to think of it, so would cap and trade or any other climate/energy limiting legislation. Hmmmm…?
Kudos to Anthony! I support your decision to oppose these egregiously intrusive, unnecessary acts.
The real problem, as I see it, is that certain large companies (whose business models rely on the continued monetization of pre-existing IP) have not learned how to adapt to evolving markets. However, times have changed and their customers are no longer content with consuming the product under the restrictions of “Business as Usual”. I believe that the image at this link – http://mfluch.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/pirated_vs_bought.jpg is a very good example of what needs to change. [Note: this is not my image, it's just a very good illustration of what's wrong with the muddled thinking in certain industries.]
Best regards,
wermet
A while back I had a brief email exchange with a well-known law professor at Stanford. A part of what I wrote then seems relevant to the current conversation:
I am wondering if anyone has raised the question of age/disability discrimination in current copyright law.. Consider the following scenario:
Two writers undertake to produce the Great American Novel. Author Brett is in his early twenties. Author Leo is in his mid sixties. Rupert is Vice President for Submissions at Herpetoleum Publishing House. Rupert receives the manuscripts from each of our budding authors. In his opinion they are comparable in literary value, and while neither pose a threat to Ms Rowling, probably both are marketable. However, Rupert has a very limited acquisitions budget, and he is forced to choose between the two.
Clearly, Rupert is going to choose Brett’s work, for the simple reason that the copyright privilege for that work is likely to extend forty years or more beyond Leo’s. Just as clearly, the law favors the younger writer.
OK, suppose that Leo’s reported age was a mistake. It turns out that Leo and Brett are about the same age. However, Rupert discovers that Brett is terminally ill and is unlikely to live more than a few months. Now the situation is reversed, and it is Leo whose copyright privilege is likely to be worth a great deal more. In this case the law favors the healthier writer.
It seems to me that any copyright protection which is defined by the life of the author should conflict with federal law protecting the elderly and disabled.
Hear hear about copyright law! Limit its time. Copyright should be sell-able and owned in perpetuity if the owner wants to, but only by renewal. And I would limit it to 10 years at the most prior to each renewal. Renewal fees should fund the public library of copyright information.
I also think it is incumbent on the owner to police his or her owned copyright and bring suit and/or file charges if it is stolen. I don’t think it is the taxpayers’ responsibility to fund watchdog action. Why? Because we don’t have enough money in our pockets to fund a large enough police department to police and go after every crime committed on the books. There are crimes that should be the responsibility of the person injured to monitor and pursue redress (it is part of the risk of product development and ownership).
Finally, placing limits on public police involvment and law making is a necessary part of frugal and prioritized public service budgeting. We haven’t the money to criminalize everything that is wrong. Truly, if budgetary constraints were a limiting requirment of every law being proposed, we wouldn’t have so many laws on the books and we could leave the internet alone to live or die under the “buyer beware” golden rule.
Does anyone have a constructive suggestion as to how to protect intellectual property from internet piracy? PIPA and SOPA are bad, but you should be leery of seemingly rational arguments that give you the right to have someone else’s intellectual property after it has been stolen.
The Constitution gives the Federal Government the right to protect intellectual property rights, and the right to enforce that right through appropriate laws. So — how should it be done?
I do not know any perfectly apt analogies. Consider: you don’t have a right to steal a few tomatoes from a farmer just because it’s easy to do so, and a few tomatoes are not much loss. When enough people steal enough, the farmer loses his or her work. It’s nearly the same when someone steals intellectual property: if enough people steal enough, it’s serious damage to the people who produced the work.
So. After this boycott works and the House and Senate slow down these laws, they will eventually go back to work on something similar, because their is great interest in their doing so. When they do, will we as a community have something useful to tell them? Or will we stick with a principle that everyone has the right to keep and distribute anything that can be stolen?
Mr Lynn says:
January 18, 2012 at 8:31 am
“Do these two laws amount to “the immoral use of government force”? I don’t know; my point is that piracy is a problem, not that these laws are the best way to address it. ”
Mr. Lynn
________________________
Quite simply, Mr. Lynn,
are you in favor of SOPA and PIPA?
Tyranny is not for everyone.
The battle against piracy, with the chinese around, is a lost battle…unless realizing that`s part of life and MARKET and apply ingenuity and equal market counter measures, as the one for selling music done by Apple´s iTunes.
Perhaps most of you americans are unable to realize it properly: It happens not because of a criminal drive, but from a market necessity. For example: It was impossible for any student in a third world country to buy software priced at thousands of dollars, then the logical market outcome: Piracy. The intelligent solution: Instead of selling a few copies at high prices, sell thousand of million copies at a very low price. That´s the practical solution of an intelligent businessman: Not to oppose the market, but follow it. Wake up to reality folks!
jhall says:
January 18, 2012 at 8:38 am
Perhaps we are looking at a problem which is only the symptom of another larger problem.
If the length of ‘Copyright’ were returned to the 17 1/2 years, with one renewal of 17 1/2 years,
rather than infinity, by moving the Goal Posts when the time of copyright is close to expiration, and then placing an additional limitation that only the author or his/her direct descendants or immediate family can opt for the renewal, then these limiting laws, such as SOPA and PIPA would not be necessary.
Good point. Back in early ’90′s Disney (read Eisner) got congress to change the copyright law again so the Mickey Mouse franchise could stay copywrited (sp). He got, I think, a 50 year exemption for Disney.
Septic,
That’s what lawyers are for. And if it’s a minor loss, small claims court can provide redress. Giving the feds the right to take over because it’s just more convenient is totally foolhardy. IANAL, but it seems a subpoena can be served on the ISP that displays the copyrighted material. And with technology constantly improving, no doubt firms will spring up providing locating services to find intellectual thieves. But given the choice, it’s infinitely preferable to take your chances in the market than to give the federal government this huge new power that will certainly be amended, expanded, and misused.
How ironic. Anthony Watts (whose labor I deeply appreciate) ‘owns’ the content to this site. He can control who contributes, and even whose comments are printed. He has paid for and registered the url. If someone hacked into the name registry and took over the url, he would want, and have the right to reclaim his hard-earned property.
It reminds me a little of the occupy wall street protesters, who were all about shared resources until the homeless came to share their free food and the sexual predators came to share their tents. I hope all of the SOPA opponents will feel thoroughly charitable the next time their online identity is stolen. After all (the argument seems to go), online ‘ownership’ doesn’t exist. And if online ownership disappears, there goes privacy. But who needs privacy?
Jeff in Calgary: Nothing worse than forcing me to watch previews and anti-piracy messages.
Here’s what’s worse: widespread theft leading to loss of earnings of producers, leading to reduced production, leading to fewer CDs for you to buy and watch.
That’s not the only worse alternative. You can think of others after a few minutes.
Intellectual property is protected by patents. That is the best way to protect important IP. Unimportant IP, that is, creative works that need public acclaim and widespread public use is protected by copyright. Trade secrecy is another way, where you tell no one about your creation, you just make it, like Coca-Cola. Violation of patents or copyright laws is subject to civil suits and substantial penalties. We need no other laws.
I’m what y’all would call a “warmista” and an “alarmist.” I visit this site occasionally, although I don’t comment, for much the same reason that I imagine many of you visit sites like Realclimate or ScienceofDoom; to see what foolishness is afoot. Just as y’all would rarely find something that you’d consider sensible on such sites, I rarely find anything that I’d consider sensible here.
But not today. Mr. Watts, I applaud you for participating in the blackout, and I applaud you for standing up for free speech on the internet. Well done, sir!
voiceinthewilderness,
There are alternative solutions. Inviting the government to set up a new bureaucracy is the worst alternative by far. I would go so far as to label it an insane “solution”.
Look at the Department of Education, or the EPA. They started on a few basic problems, but morphed into completely out of control, unaccountable bureaucracies. There are countless other examples. Giving the federal government censorship control over the internet without recourse is crazy. Only a lunatic or someone in favor of a totalitarian government would be willing to hand the government our heads on a platter with a proposal like this.
All this to make Mickey Mouse live in perpetuity.
Copywrite was originally 11 years. We need to go back to that.
anna v says:
January 17, 2012 at 10:15 pm
“Sopa in modern greek means “stop talking” and Pipa , as an injunction, orders in argo to do oral sex!.”
Spanish meanings are less colorful, but anyway SOPA means soup, and PIPA means pipe (the smoking kind), so the injunction SOPA & PIPA orders you to smoke a pipe after taking your soup. I like neither, and opt to pass on both. Nor I like the two legislative namesakes now being considered by the US Congress. Well done for WUWT and the rest of the blacked out sites!
Septic Matthews, when it’s possible to steal that farmer’s tomatoes and leave him with the exact same number of tomatoes he had before you “stole” one, copyright infringement and actual theft will be comparable. Until then, it’s all stuck in the realm of potential losses.
Copyright provides a mechanism for the creator to define how his work is copied in order to provide the most benefit to the most people: the creator has an incentive to create. It was designed to prevent people plagiarising his work and had no bearing on incidental access by third parties
Consider the scenario of a music performance in an open stadium. People inside the stadium have paid to be there – they’ve bought the right to take part in the full concert experience. People outside can still hear the music. Are they stealing?
If they find a good vantage point and video-tape the concert, are they stealing?
If I listen to someone’s CD through a window, am I stealing?
If I record it and listen later, am I stealing?
In all these cases, no; the CD is still where it was. The concert hasn’t magically been sucked into the ears of the people outside the stadium. Copyright infringement is NOT THEFT by the simple fact that the copyright owner loses no property. It may not necessarily be moral or good but it is not theft. Trying to define it as theft muddies the waters, as does the whole “internet piracy” label.
One thing to remember: neither the copyright owner nor the farmer have a right to profit. They have a right to seek profit, but they have no right to claim that the property of others is theirs to appropriate because they “lost” some “potential sales”. By the logic that assumes a right to profit, every time I decide not to buy that nice chocolate cake in my local supermarket and instead make my own at home, the supermarket has the right to pursue me for that “lost sale” and call me a “cake thief”.
The current legislative trend is propelled by people who believe they have a right to profit regardless of the quality of their produced works and who are attempting to guarantee profit via the legislative sledgehammer. The only way they can do that is by shutting down anything that competes with their business model, which would be akin to buggy whip manufacturers attempting to have the automobile banned from city streets when it was first invented, and using the power of the state to extract “compensation” for “lost sales” from third-parties who, in many cases, were not even involved in the activities they are alleged to have been involved in.
Probably not. Read what I said. I have not taken a position on these two particular bills, as I have not studied the details. But I do think it is incumbent upon the private sector to come up with viable alternatives, probably focused on modifying the existing copyright laws. It is the Constitutional responsibility of the federal government to protect intellectual property, and in the absence of rational alternatives from affected parties, you’re going to get something egregious.
/Mr Lynn
We’ve found some common ground…I usually find myself disagreeing with the views on climate change expressed on this website, but I fully support your protest against SOPA / PIPA’s attack on free speech. The internet is a wonderful enabler, allowing diverse opinions and viewpoints to be aired and accessed by all. As far as I can see, the new legislation would allow the rich and powerful to censor the internet to an unprecedented extent. Thank you for protesting against this.
“Here is a list of legislators who support this nightmare and who doesn’t”
This list seems to be entirely composed of US legislators.
If the rest of the world has to suffer because of a parochial US political spat, I think the least that should be done is to provide a list of legislators who support similar legislation in their own countries, so we can address our complaints to appropriate recipients…
Where does Associated Press stand on this issue? Have they even published the fact that these bills exist?
Thanks Mr Lynn! Good post!
I suggest we campaign to have the BBC shut down on the basis of infringing Wikipedia’s copyright by using the image from Wiki’s black out page:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16590585
plus others:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16608314
Damn, have I inadvertantly closed down WUWT?
A major point in this matter is that the Internet is unstoppable. Legislation such as SOPA will undoubtedly infringe on freedom of speech and make our lives more complicated, but will not stop people from passing information (or music, or movies) to each other over the Internet. Even with perfect enforcement in one country, the global network will always be available.
Some years ago I worked for a while in Syria, where I found that I could not access my Hotmail or Yahoo mailboxes. Soon I learnt that the democratic government of Mr Assad only allows email on its State-owned POP server, where messages can be duly scanned by minions in search of dissenting opinions. All websites with the word “mail” in it was banned. But of course there were ways out. For instance, some of my foreign friends in Syria were using webmail services lacking the word “mail” in it, such as a spanish site ending in something like correo.es; there was also a bridging website with a nondescript name, on which you can indirectly connect with any other site, including the banned ones. People always find a way.
In this era of easy and costless digital reproduction, enforcement of intellectual property rights should be done differently, and in time I expect some alternative system will evolve. But such system is not yet available. Attempts to crack on infringers is as useless as attempts in the 19th century to stop the expansion of railroads in order to protect the horse-carriage business.
I also note that the current poll in the WSJ is running 98% opposed to SOPA. While the US is not a direct democracy, that sort of level of opposition is unprecedented in my experience and must be listened to.
I also note that one of the sponsors of SOPA had a background used on his web site that would have been in violation of SOPA. It was released under creative commons license, so the site had to attribute the art work. They didn’t. Shut him down. I do not care what party he is from.
The US Constitution is under attack..We now know that nearly all in Congress are traitors to the Constitution and to We The People. These people are evil. They want to be King and you their servant. They want to decide who lives who dies. This King can now kill American citizens if he feels you are a threat, if you don’t agree with his/their way of thinking.But of course this will not happen to you , you are a nice person you do no wrong .
The patriot act
SOPA /PIPA
The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012
To name just a few.
Mitt Romney would have signed as president of the US, The National Defense Authorization Act . That makes him a very dangerous man.
http://youtu.be/njNil9M_P3M
min 12:35
I hope you now know who to vote for.
Ron Paul
http://youtu.be/3hXW6TjBeCY
Let us hope they don’t kill him like JFK
People outside the USA do not be complacent – you too can be caught by SOPA.
For example the UK has extradition agreements with the US. Someone providing links to illegal material (just like any search engine does) does not break any current UK law. However the media moguls can demand extradition to the US if there is the possibility of US laws being broken. Trial will then take place under whatever US laws they like.
See for example UK citizen Richard O’Dwyer’s case:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/student-to-face-us-trial-over-tvshack-website-6289235.html
Other court cases have proven his web site was legal in the UK.
How would a US citizen feel about a Saudi extradition order being placed on a US citizen for consumption of alcohol in the US. Where does legal vs illegal start and end? Does one search the world for the most sensitive nations and force everyone to adopt them?
If you are in the UK write to your MP – extradition makes no sense for someone who has broken no UK laws!.
http://www.filestube.com/v/v+for+vendetta+rapidshare
@juanslayton says:
“It seems to me that any copyright protection which is defined by the life of the author should conflict with federal law protecting the elderly and disabled…”
Not as far as I can see. Each author has their creation protected for their lifetime. It just so happens that their predicted lifetimes are of different lengths, and hence different values for someone wanting to exploit them.
What you have described is no different from a company preferring to employ a younger person in a trainee role rather than a person two years from retirement. They would expect to get more payback from their training with the younger person. Such a decision may or may not be legal in your jurisdiction, but if it is illegal the issue would be with the decision, not the training. In the same way, if you wanted to protect the elderly from this form of discrimination you should allow them to sue for damages from an illegally-made decision, rather than artificially maintaining the value of someone’s creation after their death.
Make no mistake. SOPA or PIPA will be used to shut Anthony down.
Liberals can’t help themselves. They will find a way.
From the man who helped repeal Glass Stegall and brought us Dodd-Frank…. (and the derivatives used by the AGW crowd)
MPAA’s Chris Dodd takes aim at SOPA strike
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2012/01/dodd-lashes-out-at-sopa-strike.html
Hollywood’s chief lobbyist lashed out at tech companies for mounting Tuesday night’s planned online blackout to protest proposed anti-piracy legislation that has pitted Southern California movie and music distributors against Silicon Valley Internet corporations.
Motion Picture Assn. of America Chief Executive Chris Dodd, the former Senator from Connecticut, accused technology companies such as Google, Mozilla and Wikipedia of resorting to stunts.
I bought a bunch of DVDs when I was living in the USA and now I cannot see them in Europe because of the freaking region code, so go figure.
Of course RON PAUL wouldn’t tolerate SOPA/PIPA for one tiny instant. And more to the point, he is for liberty across the board and CONSISTENT.
Archonix says:
Darn well put, A!
One thing that deserves being mentioned is that music and theater were around a LONG time before Edison invented a means to record performance onto a ‘thing’. Prior to that, actors, musicians, writers and composers could charge admission for a performance if they were well known and the rest who weren’t had to rely on charity and sponsorship. The explosion of Internet is not the first time that a jump in technology forced someone else to change their business model.
The RIAA owes its very existence to the technology of recording but has railed against the mass production of every improvement to that technology since vinyl.
Zeke has posted
That bill is a very nasty king maker
“SEC. 102. ACTION BY ATTORNEY GENERAL TO PROTECT
U.S. CUSTOMERS AND PREVENT U.S. SUPPORT OF FOREIGN INFRINGING SITES.”
The Attorney General may
22 commence an in personam action against—
23 (A) a registrant of a domain name used by
24 a foreign infringing site; or
25 (B) an owner or operator of a foreign infringing site. ”
But this is already happening. Last week a UK judge granted the US permission to extradite for prosecution a 23 year-old Briton who had been running a site from his college bedroom in England.
In court it was agreed by all parties that his site did not infringe any copyright or other law but it did provide links to other sites that hosted pirated material.
Lawyers for the young man pointed out that his activity did not breach any UK or EU law and that for this reason he could not be prosecuted in the UK.
Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others almost certainly are guilty (inadvertently) of the same “crime” but perhaps they are too big for the Federal authorities to prosecute.
Septic Matthew
January 18, 2012 at 9:17 am
###
It is not the purpose of government to modify society so as to enable a faulty business model. Especially when any tool used to do so will quickly be perverted by lefties as a weapon against freedom.
Most of the backers of this type of thing are actually more interested in controlling distribution channels, thereby controlling access to the market, in order to prevent cheaper and better competition.
As for faulty business models, I give you software. As a software engineer, I have found that all software really is for, is to add value to hardware. Stand alone software companies could never work without the “power of state”. The OSS movement has pretty much proven the point.
January 18, 2012 at 8:31 am
1. Not a single true statement was made in that point. The CD is not “about to disappear because of the internet”. It’s about to disappear because it’s obsolete. The slob making $80 a show has plenty of product to sell, regardless, unless you’re denying the existence of tee-shirts, posters, and other forms of recordings.
As for your second paragraph, publically performed works are not private property. Never were.
2. Rape, murder, & shoplifting are all covered under criminal law. I guess they should be treated as exactly the same, right?
3. petitio principii
4. The simple fact that you would consider theft and unauthorized copying to be morally equivalent is very telling about your own principles, but has no bearing on the discussion at hand.
5. Hi, welcome to the discussion, Mr. Lynn! glad you could join us. Please read up a bit more before you try to make a point.
The wicked habit of extending copyright & then the even more horrible habit of increasing criminalization does not protect people who create copyrighted works. It also does nothing to stop unauthorized copying. “Piracy” (another ridiculous use of a term indicating criminal behaviour where there is none) does not decrease a product’s revenue. If “piracy” really did hurt the revenue stream enough, then it would be fiscally sound policy to pursue the so-called pirates: in the civil courts (if you have trouble understanding the court system, please do some studying).
As it has proven too expensive to pursue individuals who cause essentially no loss of money (or in many cases an increase in revenue) the large studios (who create nothing) have fought for the criminalization of mere torts.
And if you think that copyright being extended to 75 years after I’m dead somehow makes for a human rights issue, you’re really out to lunch.
I wrote my Senators and Rep and posted an appeal on fb – we’ll see.
@ evilincandescentbulb “Sort of like George Bush standing up the the global warming alarmists like the lone Chinaman in Tiananmin Square…”
George Bush had the power and the legal authority to fire Hansen, to clean house at GISS, to stop Federal money going to such “scientists” as Mann et al. He had the ability to veto bills with funding for CAGW projects. He had the authority to institute REAL scientists to investigate the subject. He did not do those things.
The only real differences between the Repubs and the Dems is that the Repubs make speeches that appeal to patriots, while the Dems make speeches that appeal to environmentalists. Metaphorically, the Dems will drive the car over the edge of the cliff at 80 mph while the Repubs will only be doing 75 mph.
IT’S WORKING!
From Commentary magazine’s Alana Goodman:
“Today’s Internet blackout protesting the SOPA/PIPA bills – which would allow the federal government to shut down accused copyright violators online without due process – is already making an impact. Legislators who support the bills are being barraged with angry phone calls, and this morning Sen. Marco Rubio withdrew his co-sponsorship of the PIPA legislation….” (www.commentarymagazine.com)
Way to go, WUWT!
Luther Wu says:
January 18, 2012 at 9:20 am
Quite simply, Mr. Lynn,
are you in favor of SOPA and PIPA?
______________
Mr Lynn says:
January 18, 2012 at 9:43 am
“Probably not. Read what I said.”
______________
I read what you said: that’s why I’ve made the statements and asked the questions that I have.
You make very good arguments for the copyright/money side of the equation, but you waffle when it comes down to the issue of basic rights for everyone else.
Few would argue with the need to protect against copyright infringement, even as horrible as U.S. copyright laws have become, but your arguments are entirely too cogent and one- sided. The implications in my first post regarding your role in this matter stand unamended, not that it matters a whit.
I really feel for the Hollywood elitists who are not content with the $500 Million their movie makes, but need to make a few more $Million from downloads. For by-and-large atrocious creations, I might add. I worry that Michael Moore and their ilk are not able to buy their next mansion, really. Or Bono or Ice-Crap or whoever needs to make tens of $Millions from misogynous racist “melodies”. My heart really goes out to these A**holes. Make your money from first and direct releases and be happy you took us suckas for that much!
I worked for the only radio station in town. We were next door to the only newspaper. No one in town could comunicate with their fellow citizens unless we let them on the air or the newspaper printed their item. Then came television. I worked for the only TV station in town. We were the ulltimate gate keepers and virtually controlled the distribution of all information and opinion in a prompt and powerful manner. Then came cable. The power spread; their were many gate keepers. Finally came the internet. At last every citizen had the power to communicate. It openned access to all. Freedom of information had become a reality. It has dramatically changed the world. The internet provides true, 21st century freedom of speech. It is extremely powerful. Now come those who used to have control of media. Through their “political donations” (ie, payoffs) to our sell-out politicians in both parties they are trying to structure rules that freedom of speech away from us. This is fight worth fighting. I join the SOPA protest.
Where’s FOI when you need it?
“”"”" Dodgy Geezer says:
January 18, 2012 at 10:01 am
@juanslayton says:
“It seems to me that any copyright protection which is defined by the life of the author should conflict with federal law protecting the elderly and disabled…”
Not as far as I can see. Each author has their creation protected for their lifetime. It just so happens that their predicted lifetimes are of different lengths, and hence different values for someone wanting to exploit them.
What you have described is no different from a company preferring to employ a younger person in a trainee role rather than a person two years from retirement. They would expect to get more payback from their training with the younger person. Such a decision may or may not be legal in your jurisdiction, but if it is illegal the issue would be with the decision, not the training. In the same way, if you wanted to protect the elderly from this form of discrimination you should allow them to sue for damages from an illegally-made decision, rather than artificially maintaining the value of someone’s creation after their death. “”"”"
“”"”" What you have described is no different from a company preferring to employ a younger person in a trainee role rather than a person two years from retirement. They would expect to get more payback from their training with the younger person. “”"”"
Well you see Dodgy, there’s the rub. That company fully deserves exactly what they get with their choice.
That “younger trainee” is sheer ballast; NOT a contributing employee. The person two years from retirement can hit the ground running, and has NO NEED for any training; just a seat in the boat, and management out of his/er way, so s/he can row. Hopefully, there is a cox who presumably knows how to steer a boat.
My former “employer” preferred to employ a “younger person in a trainee role”, so they unemployed me, since I was more than a decade PAST retirement age. Two hours later, I had more work than I really need, and at a much higher hourly rate, for somebody who believes in getting what they pay for. My former “employer” now has their “younger person in a trainee role” : OOoops !! Where did the TRAINER go ??
For the past two decades of the internet being around, has it destroyed our society, economy, and existence? No. It’s created immense amounts of wealth, opportunities, prosperity, exchange of ideas, and even freedom in lands previously shackled by tyranny.
So, to those of you who in any way are defending things like SOPA/PIPA, saying that piracy is so horrible and bad, why has history not shown that? The internet is nothing new, it’s been here for nearly 20 years. Where are all these damages from it that supposedly are occurring? They aren’t.
CDs are obsolete when you can purchase music and keep it on your harddrive (more CD albums can be stored there than you can physically store!). Movies are following the same pattern now that faster internet and larger drives allow movies to be bought, streamed, and stored. We are seeing a CONTENT SHIFT, or rather a consumer medium shift, coupled with a bad economy which depresses sales of luxuries, and yet even so the music artists and movie makers are doing JUST FINE. Raking in record profits. How does that square with your piracy narrative?
I know a lot of independent artists, who sell their music on Bandcamp and other online sites, and they are doing great. Piracy is a bogyman. It happens, but not even remotely at the rate or to the extent or causing the damages that proponants of SOPA/PIPA attempt to make us believe.
Show us the proof! One look at reality immediately destroys the absurdity of these “piracy” claims. The only places where it’s been potentially dangerous have been in the realms of corporate/national espionage such as engaged by China. And these bills will do NOTHING against that, or hacking!
SOPA/PIPA punishes the innocent and the common man, it cannot stop hacking or actual pirates, or sovereign powers. It is only a form of control over the population and a complete defiling of free speech and the Constitution. It will do nothing to protect anyone’s IP, it can only hurt the economy and free speech. I don’t think SOPA/PIPA are being proposed maliciously, just incompetently.
Of course, this ignores the INTERNATIONAL businesses BUYING OFF our representatives to push these bills into the light of day. They have no interest in what’s best for the American people, they just want new ways to fleece us for money, illegitimately. To me that seems like treason, and we really need to kill off lobbying by corporations; stop them from corrupting our representatives en mass.
“I’m from the Goverment, I’m here to help.”
Check out most native American reservations, those are due to Goverment help.
Good show, this law would be horrible for a science site like WUWT. Say we do a critique of yet another trash Nature article. Under this law Nature would be able to immediately get WUWT removed from all search engines with out Anthony even given the opportunity to defend himself and this obvious fair use.
As to the blackout; I’m not a Google fan. I have a great disdain for any entity that seeks to collect everything about everybody, and then sell that information to the highest bidder, without any consideration of possible harm to their victims.
The IP laws as to copyright are markedly different from those relating to patents. The “creator” of any original “copyrightable” work gets a lifetime of protection, and even beyond; but the laws do allow for “reasonable” non-commercial private use. Patents however give a very limited protection, although they may be of vastly more benefit to mankind, than some piece of rock music du jour. And that limited protection comes only with full disclosure to everybody.
Notwithstanding any of the above, I also have great disdain, for people who “rip off” either patentable or copyright property, beyond any reasonable use boundary.
None of this excuses any government entity for seeking to interfere with the free exchange of ideas, and suppression of the freedom of speech that comes with the internet.
But totalitarian despots fully realize that the internet, and talk radio, have circumvented their traditional control via the “media” of ideas; and they will attempt to squelch that if we choose to do nothing.
So George E. Smith, is over and out for the duration of the blackout !!
Rupert Murdoch supports this, well then it must be to all of our benefit and will enhance our lives. Just as telephone tapping has done and his great newspapers sensitive reporting of the poor souls lost at Hillsborough.
Murdoch doesn’t understand, that just as the print unions stood in the way of electronic technology and were brushed aside so will he and his friends who reside in Jurassic Park and try to control the internet.
Does the US government want to be like China in respect of the internet?
I think the wikipedia blackout and WUWT blackout are a bit of an overreaction. I certainly don’t support SOPA, but blackouts are a huge inconvenience to users and is not cool. A big flashy banner at the top of the page would suffice…not the whole site. I realize the need to spread awareness, but the bill has very little chance of passing anyway.
Anthony, thanks for this post and your efforts in bringing this to the forefront. I wrote my reps today. Together, we can make a positive difference. We need to keep the pressure on in any way we can over those who would feed us lies or hinder the exercise of the freedoms endowed by our Creator. (Believe it or not, your Rights do not come from the government).
I’ll repeat what I said.
One small battle won does not mean a war is won.
The act will come back disguised as something else, that has long been the case in the UK where it is common to find legislation covering something totally different in a variety of laws. Mind you, most legislation enacted by parliament now is EU legislation.
In time, you will find that protecting intellectual property rights is just a side-effect, the real reasoning behind the law/s will surface quite soon after they have been enacted, Nothing is ever simple, no politicians reason for a law being needed is ever the real reason, or the truth.
The politicians we vote for no longer rule the roost, we need to look behind the thrones to see whose hand is up the politicians butt.
“As Crosspatch points out above (January 18, 2012 at 12:19 am), there is no single ‘Internet’, so not one capable of policing itself. A case can be made that there is a need for government—maybe even an international treaty between governments, as already, in principle, attempts to coordinate copyright law—to step in.”
Are you nuts? We ALREADY HAVE copyright law. We don’t need anyone to “step in” to anything. We need to use the laws that we already have applied in the right way. Ok, so imagine you have a movie house that is showing bootleg films for free. How would the authorities deal with that? They don’t respond by removing the sign and rubbing the address off the mailbox. They also don’t respond by holding the owner of the building responsible (in most cases, unless it is an ongoing public nuisance). One way they might respond is nailing the door shut. But there again, there must be a reasonable action. The domain pulling actions of the past have proved to be draconian. For example, if you live in an apartment building and one person is engaged in some legal activity, if they nail the door shut, that shuts out even the law-abiding residents. THAT is the problem here in this case and what people are objecting to. One user could do something that could cause all users of a domain to suffer.
Part of the problem is that people have some expectation of anonymity that they don’t have in real life. For example, when you drive on the roads, you don’t mind having a license plate that uniquely identifies your vehicle, do you? I am not talking about the name you choose to use, you can tell any person any name, but upon demand by law enforcement, you must properly identify yourself under penalty of law and the rules should be no different for life on the Internet. There should be a way that law enforcement can positively identify someone. That is where they need to focus, on my opinion, not in burning down entire apartment buildings because one resident does something illegal.
Support here from Portugal, where similar initiatives are under way
:-(
Ecotretas
(beep…..delete……snip……bleep…cut…….edit….. )
Original text were the winning numbers to the next Powerball!
“Does the US government want to be like China in respect of the internet?:”
The fundamental problem is that people DO put copyrighted material on the internet to share anonymously. That *is* wrong. You should not be able to download and watch a movie for free unless enough time has passed that the work is considered to no longer have a valid copyright just like books over a certain age. You don’t get to steal other people’s work and give away copies of it for free just because it’s “the internet”. We do need a legitimate way to protect owners of material while at the same time allowing people to freely share information they own back and forth.
If someone puts a movie on the internet for download for free, there needs to be a way that we can locate and prosecute them. Organized criminal vandalization groups such as “anonymous” need to be shut down as well. Same with sexual predators on the Internet. We need a way for authorities to positively identify who is originating traffic. Now I suppose I can get a copy of a movie, make a bazillion copies of it, and give a copy to anyone who asks for one on DVD but I will eventually be caught.
I have no problem with the concept of enforcing copyright laws. I have a problem with draconian responses such as removing entire domains from the internet when someone who might be using that domain name (apartment building) does something wrong.
Planning to vist my Congress crttter this am and personally make a statement about this to him…
He hasn’t got a position yet.!!!!
A petition to sign at Avaaz dot org
“Rupert Murdoch supports this, well then it must be to all of our benefit and will enhance our lives. ”
EVERY newspaper on the face of the planet supports this, not just Murdoch. Please stop acting as if he has some sort of special outstanding interest in this beyond anyone else. The publisher of the Washington Post supports it, too, as does the New York Times. Everyone who produces content for their business living supports this bill. We *do* need to find a way to protect copyrighted material. We *don’t* need to do it in ways where the innocent are swept up with the guilty.
If you publish copyrighted material you need to be caught and prosecuted. I have no problem with that. But if my internet neighbor is publishing copyrighted material, I don’t want my internet cut off. THAT is the problem.
I wonder if somebody has noticed that but there’s striking similarity between global warming and the intellectual property protection.
In both cases these are backed up not by organizations which actually produce something, rather by organizations who claim their aim is to “protect” something.
On one side it’s protection of nature, on other side it’s protection of intellectual property (you need to realize that people who produce music or movies don’t really do all this, they employ an organization to do it for them, even if that organization is part of the company).
In both cases it’s disputable whether the protected entities really need that kind of protection.
In both cases it’s disputable whether the protection is and ever can be effective.
In both cases they claim themselves to be acting according to princimples of higher morale which are above laws and ask for laws to follow their saying.
In both cases they position themselves above democratic institutions and politics and ask for politics to follow their saying.
See also SOPA shelved for now
John M says:
“The act will come back disguised as something else,…”
Exactly right.
Oy vay! The Git spends three days in hospital looking forward to catching up on his favourite website and… then this. Ah well; at least there’s Amanda Palmer’s Map of Tasmania to look forward to seeing tonight and PJ Harvey Saturday night. Fifty bucks well spent :-)
Have fun obsessing over politicians that don’t have the brains they were born with.
Oh yes, if you do decide to admire Amanda Palmer’s Map of Tasmania on you-tube, be aware that it’s an adult theme, kiddies… and very witty.
Mike M says:
“I’d like to be able to declare something like the entertainment lobby or such but could it be that the people advocating these bills are just stupid and cannot fathom the extent of the damage they/it will cause?”
Yeah, Mike, I’m afraid that’s most likely it. So they go with the position of the last lobbyist they talked to or, more likely, the position their handlers think will play best in their state or district.
How does binding your own mouth speak for freedom?
Regulation for thee, not for Me:
“Murdoch editors warn of ‘chilling effect’ of state regulation”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jan/17/leveson-inquiry-murdoch-editors-regulation
Agree completely that SOPA/PIPA need to be defeated, but would like to have seen the same kind of outcry over the Net Neutrality legislation. Net Neutrality (or lack thereof) could have a far bigger impact on the average internet user over the long run then SOPA/PIPA, and really gets to the core differences of perspective on allowing a few companies to potentially control traffic on the internet. When you gets the like of giants like Comcast facing off against Google, you know something big is at stake.
If anyone wants a file-sharing, totally uncensored Internet, then look to teh FreeNet project http://freenetproject.org/
Basically a mass Torrent running between fully encrypted nodes (ie your PC becomes a node in a huge mesh), such that no one node holds all teh data.
Wonderful idea, full freedom of speech – but a very scary place to dwell. Terrorist websites, poisoning and explosives instructions, as well as free exchange of porno and sad to say the kiddie-porn as well.
Whether you choose to visit or not, this is in reality the Uncensored Internet, and I doubt you would find it a nice place to be.
So as noted by many here, the Internet needs some rules – but at what point do you deny freedom of speech in favour of the sadistic elements of society? If you truly believe in free speech, then your neighbour has to be able to say the most repugnant things without being pillared by society – including kiddie-porn.
I suspect the vast majority will look for some controls to prevent abuses of teh innocent – let alone pirating Video
Andy
It is important to remember who is behind pushing this legislation – Big Media. We’re talking the music industry, the motion picture industry, the TV industry, Big Media content producers (e.g. AP, Reuters, etc.). What’s disturbing is that this legislation appears to have broad bi-partisan support. Then again, this is an election year and what politician dares to piss off Big Media? It’s enlightening to look at which politicians have received campaign contributions from these industries. Sony alone has “contributed” (i.e. bribed) a fortune to various members of Congress (even Jim DeMint!). The whole thing reeks of political pay offs and crony capitalism.
Doug says:
January 18, 2012 at 11:14 am
“I realize the need to spread awareness, but the bill has very little chance of passing anyway.
”
____________________________
The fact that his action against a free citizenry has gained any legislative support is revolting.
The publicity seems to be working:
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/204749-websites-strike-to-protest-online-piracy-bills
I disagree with most of the posters here.
I do not see this as a ‘free speech’ issue. I see it as a proposal to ensure that creative and original people and ideas get fair compensation.
I understand that the cost and effort required by web sites to Ensure that they were not involved in a chain that in some way mediated, enabled or enhanced the transfer of data between a file service and a downloader while avoiding payment to the original author or creator.
For a company like Wikimedia, Google or You Tube the cost would be significant, since they would need to ‘pre-approve’ every file, link and image that passed through their ‘link in the chain’. I think that it all about money (on both sides) and not ‘free speech’.
Unless and until their exists a way to link humans to internet actions in the same way as we link humans to automobile actions (plate-to-owner) these type of overly broad proposals will be needed. Someone must be responsible for what occurs on their bit of internet.
At some point people will need to choose between anonymity (with the associated costs and restrictions) and identifiably (with the associated liability and accountability).
Don’t bring back packages given to you by strangers.
Did you pack you bags yourself?
May I see your license, insurance and registration?
As Andrew30 I am anonymous to most of you, but the email address I provide to Anthony is real and from it the authorities could easily find me.
Does that make the above comment hypocritical?
Geolurker gives an example and asks if it is good enough for me.
No. I do not see how SOPA could be used in the case he (or she) describes.
Can he or she say which provision(s) of SOPA could be used? Again, I want chapter and verse, please, not hysterical generalities.
Ronald Reagan once told us the most frigthening words:
“Hello, I am from the Government, and I am here to help!”
They dont know or care, but they have an agressive agenda….
These folks should leave the hands off the Internet.
Peter Kovachev says:
Make movie nights into a social affair at your home by inviting friends and neighbours.
I seem to remember that group showings like that are prohibited unless you obtain a license.
Crosspatch,
We need a way for authorities to positively identify who is originating traffic.
Do we? Do we really want that? Do we need a way for authorities to positively identify the leaker of the Climategate emails? Would the world be a better place if “the authorities” were omniscient?
The US would not exist if “the authorities” in the late 18th century would have had a way to positively identify who was originating traffic. The Federalist Papers were published anonymously, and would not have been otherwise …
When yearning for the benign dictatorship, keep in mind that the only part of that you can guarantee is the dictatorship.
crosspatch
January 18, 2012 at 11:27 am
###
Concern over piracy is just a cover. The real intent is and always has been to control channels of distribution. Up until recently, content publishers had a strangle hold on distribution. Not anymore. Now anyone can write a book or record an album or write a software application and distribute it, and they don’t like it.
I am not in favor of being able to freely stream anything you want to. That is not freedom, that is stealing and in this country we have never been free to steal. What I am against is punishing an entire community of people for the actions of one person.
Of course “big media” supports this, because it is their content that is being stolen. If you made something that provided you with a living, say you write books, and someone decides to copy and freely distribute your books you might be a little upset, too. If you made a tangible item and someone else copied them and gave them away with your brand on it, you might be upset, too.
The issue isn’t “I have a right to share anything I want with whomever I want” because you don’t. The issue is “how do you stop it without punishing innocent people”.
thepompousgit says:
January 18, 2012 at 11:38 am
Oy vay! The Git spends three days in hospital looking forward to catching up on his favourite website and… then this.
______________________
What?!
Did you p!$$ off the old lady so badly that they had to get you to the doctor to get her foot excavated from your posterior?
Hope all is now fine and that you get well soon.
Wow, your dedication to this protest is quite admirable given what the administration is announcing. I salute all of you.
Is there a list of representatives who have actually read the proposed legislation?
Or is there a well informed write-up somewhere of what’s actually in the bills?
First off let me point out I am a fan of WUWT and definetly not a disiple of AGW scientology.
however
How does your opposition to SOPA square with your experiece with “the green man”, a regular content thief?
So you would suggest that we all remove the license plates from our cars and get rid of photo ID? Why do people insist on one standard for communications of one mode but demand a completely different standard for communications in a different mode? People live in a fantasy land when it comes to the Internet. They want to do whatever they please with no consequences. And as for your climategate non sequitur, there are a billion other ways of getting that out anonymously that don’t involve the Internet. What if someone on the Internet befriends your daughter, meets her and assaults her? Of course internet communications must be completely anonymous, right? Come on. If someone uses the telephone to convey a threat, where that call originated from can be found (even if the caller-id is blocked). Why should a threat by Internet be completely anonymous? The problem I have is that people want to apply a completely different social standard of conduct to a particular MODE of communications and I believe that is crazy.
@crosspatch,
I’ve agreed with many of your things before, but here we are at odds.
So how about this: give me hard facts, hard numbers, fact-checked and solid; treat this just like data in climate science, with all the same scrutiny.
What percentage of “streaming” and “downloads” is pirated? What number companies are struggling to turn a profit due to “piracy”, by how much, and are they simply being outdated by new content systems (i.e. print newspapers dying because of online news sources like CNN. CDs decreasing due to paid digital downloads and HDD storage being superior to physical objects that take up space, etc)?
Give me HARD numbers. Prove to me that piracy is a problem that needs addressing. What if it isn’t? What if it’s no larger an issue than shoplifting? And have laws, no matter how sharp, stopped shoplifting, or murder, or any crime?
These laws won’t stop actual pirates or hackers, or countries like China.
And as others have pointed out, we already have copyright protection systems like DMCA. So, why do we need THESE bills which allow full blown censorship of the internet at corporate/government will?
Numbers my friend, give me real factual numbers that show this is an issue worth addressing that DMCA and other copyright laws have failed to do (DMCA has so far been highly imposed, and you see it working all the time).
Also, by the way, by fact checked I mean numbers the MPAA/RIAA throw out are not factual. They could be full fledged lies, and how would we know? We need the actual SOURCE information that proves anything people toss around. No theoretics, no “if, buts, coulds”. That’s why I personally ask for the percentage of stream/download activity, or traffic, that is pirate rather than purchased, as that gives a real point of reference. And then, of course, how were those numbers obtained: actual known traffic, or just theoretics?
Internet kill-switch for obama:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20029302-501465.html
Silkie and Pippin oppose PIPA/SOPA:
http://www.markbuckles.com
The WordPress home page is interesting:
http://wordpress.com
Normally they post a page of new blogs. Today it’s all censored.
“Cry havoc! and let slip the dogs of war, that this foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men, groaning for burial. ”
Shakespeare, William
Sir….the WSJ this morning supports ” Braking the Internet Pirates.” or
“How to slow down intellectual property theft in the digital era.”
SOPA is already in it’s 3.0 version to address the major objections…
VACornell
R. Gates says:
Agree completely that SOPA/PIPA need to be defeated, but would like to have seen the same kind of outcry over the Net Neutrality legislation.
I would have liked to see the same kind of outcry over NDAA, but that didn’t happen either. At least this is SOMETHING.
Many outside the U.S. do not understand. Here, we are innocent until proven guilty. By allowing the someone to shut down or shut up a person without Due Process is a violation of our Constitutional Rights.
Matt, -These folks cannot leave their hands off the Internet.- The internet is a thorn in their sides and if the Internet is not curtailed now, it may be incresingly more difficult to treat us like mushrooms in the future!
Never give up any freedom. Never!
Refer to: How to catch a wild pig.
Previous point is spot on:
“Concern over piracy is just a cover. The real intent is and always has been to control channels of distribution. Up until recently, content publishers had a strangle hold on distribution. Not anymore. Now anyone can write a book or record an album or write a software application and distribute it, and they don’t like it.”
Media is instant and in my living room. Bye Bye movie theater. I can make better popcorn, drink by favorite beverage and “pause” to order pizza and dispose of last favorite beverage.
One other thing. I can’t believe I’m siding with a company that has Al Gore on it’s board.
More from the totalitarian in training:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20027837-501465.html?tag=re1.channel
Like firearms, the honest citizens will be tracked, while criminals and terrorists will easily find ways around this.
Isonomia says”It’s a bit ironic Wikipedia crying over spilt “freedom of speech”, when they steadfastly refuse to print anything from those who are sceptical of the nonsense science written on their pages about so called “global warming”.” and several others have made similar comments.
Maybe this is a bit of a case in point. The problem is that Wikipedia is doing something we don’t like. What is the answer to the problem? Is it to legislate, to make what they are doing illegal (and thus unintentionally making a lot of other activity illegal)?
The Wikipedia problem was eventually identified as chiefly being William Connolly. Once his activity was revealed publicly, his further involvement in Wikipedia became unacceptable to them, and he was banned. It took time, damage was done, but the situation is being repaired. Any attempt to legislate would surely have been disastrous.
William Connolly banned link: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/dre0m/william_connollyclimate_alarmist_has_been_banned/
but Reddit is currently blacked out in protest against SOPA.
Hang in there Anthony
Cap’n knows best.
“I seem to remember that group showings like that are prohibited unless you obtain a license.”
Tony G, the prohibition typically does not apply to ordinary social gatherings. The issue is over organized performances for profit or even charity events. Otherwise, we’d have to pay royalties for every guest who comes over to watch a game and have a beer, or perhaps even for every member of our family. One of the things legislators have learned over time is that onerous, stupid and unenforcable laws are a liability.
The music industry (in particular), the motion picture industry, the TV industry and the big media outlets have poorly and slowly responded to changes in technology. The music industry vigorously lobbied Congress to ban the cassette tape from the USA over 40 years ago for the same lame “IP protection” meme. If it were up to the music industry, music would still only be available on vinyl (or possibly 8-track tapes). That is, mediums they could control. They lost the cassette tape war but came out wealthier for the loss. The cassette tape made music really mobile. The record industry was able to market cassettes but more importantly, the availability of the cassette tape drove up demand for music in general and vinyl in particular (i.e. a high fidelity source from which to record cassettes). So they still made gobs and (even larger) gobs of money. Then came their next great windfall – the CD. There was a huge demand for this technology because it was a quantum leap in durability and audio quality. Best of all, for nearly a decade the music industry had a virtual lock on CD technology. Then the affordable home CD burner became available. They hadn’t thought this through. They couldn’t encrypt or “copy proof” their product or it wouldn’t play on a decade’s worth of consumer CD players. Still…it didn’t destroy the industry. Then along came digital MP3 format and broadband downloading and THAT really put a spot on their seats. P2P file sharing of relatively poor quality MP3s made them absolutely apoplectic. Why…they were missing out on nickels and dimes!
The motion picture industry was a little smarter. They were spooked by the VCR but they managed to pretty much control it and make money off the technology. Cable TV movie channels and VHS sales and rentals kept the money rolling in when “going to the movies” was fading somewhat. But they thought ahead before the DVD format was released. They defined “region codes” to control where DVDs could be played. They also built in some rather robust “anti-copy” features. Of course these can be easily negated today (I recommend AnyDVD from SlySoft). The motion picture industry, just like the music industry was rocked back on their heels with the advent of broadband digital streaming and downloads. They failed to anticipate the technology. Again, they feared they were missing out on nickels and dimes.
This legislation has nothing to do with protecting the “rights of artists”. It’s all about protecting the marginal profits of the respective industries. Ultimately, if passed, it will turn out like the Endangered Species Act which was enacted to prevent a few species from extinction. Who would have guessed that 40 years later the ESA would be used by environmentalist activists to allow millions of dollars of human habitat to erode into the Atlantic to protect some obscure beetle? SOPA/PIPA must be stopped dead in its tracks NOW. It requires little imagination to see where this legislation can lead.
“So you would suggest that we all remove the license plates from our cars and get rid of photo ID?”
Yes and yes. Next stupid question, please?
“…Well you see Dodgy, there’s the rub. That company fully deserves exactly what they get with their choice.
That “younger trainee” is sheer ballast; NOT a contributing employee. The person two years from retirement can hit the ground running, and has NO NEED for any training; just a seat in the boat, and management out of his/er way, so s/he can row. Hopefully, there is a cox who presumably knows how to steer a boat….”
Well, you see, George E. Smith, I think we have a problem here. You seem to have interpreted my analogy to mean something I did not mean – that the older person was already trained. That was NOT what I meant – I really did mean to pick two people, who both needed equal training, bu then only one of which would go on to continue a career with that company. I was looking for a precise match to the copyright/age issue of the OP.
If we’re talking experience vs newly qualified, I’m with you all the way. But, as it happens, I wasn’t…
Andrew30
January 18, 2012 at 12:00 pm
I disagree with most of the posters here.
I do not see this as a ‘free speech’ issue. I see it as a proposal to ensure that creative and original people and ideas get fair compensation.
###
Then how come that the only ones to benefit are the content publishers, that your beloved creative types have to go through in order to get their creations to their audience?
Dr. Dave says: January 18, 2012 at 1:09 pm
“The music industry (in particular), the motion picture industry, the TV industry and the big media outlets have poorly and slowly responded to changes in technology.”
If I choose to sell copies of my written work that I copy using a quill and inkwell, does that mean that you have the right to copy and sell my work because you have a photo-copier or a scanner?
If that makes my copies expensive, that is my choice.
If that means that it takes weeks to get a copy made, that is my choice.
If I decide to no longer make copies, that is my choice.
Simply because I choose (for whatever reason) to not ‘responded to changes in technology’, I do not forfeit my rights to you or anyone else.
The entire ‘changes in technology’ argument is irrelevant.
My rights are not defined by technology.
If I invent a wondrous new thing that makes life better for everyone, I can have it patented by national governments. That patent has a lifetime after which anyone can manufacture the things to the betterment of all mankind. My only recourse is to make the thing better and patent the improvements.
On the other hand, If I draw a mouse and copyright the drawing, I get to sell viewing rights for ever in perpetuity. This sounds grossly inconsistent to me, and it looks like the legislation is for the benefit of big entertainment business at the expense of everyone else.
Why should IP rights for entertainment be forever, while IP rights for hardware be time limited?
DavidB says:
January 18, 2012 at 12:02 pm
“Geolurker gives an example and asks if it is good enough for me.
No. I do not see how SOPA could be used in the case he (or she) describes.”
Wow, talk about … well, I won’t make this a personal attack.
A THIRD PARTY, made the complaint, not the originator, not the people that the owner works for and who by extension would own the data in question… data that was placed in to the public realm by the originator. Not held from view, not “locked” in any way.
An interpretation of that data was made and presented in a rotating view of the island and vertical deviation in the surface could be made simply by looking at the plot. In essence, the plot was a derivative work. Full attribution and source was included. Indications were made that this was just simply a plot of extant information.
Yet a government organizations… well, in truth, the “private side” of a government funded organization did not like the fact that these plots were available and took issue with it. The data still sits in full public view and is available… but having it in a format more accessible and understandable to the casual viewer is evidently a problem.
The other possibility requires one to assume a more sinister motive.
If you can’t connect the dots… well. That’s life.
“It’s a bit ironic Wikipedia crying over spilt “freedom of speech”, when they steadfastly refuse to print anything from those who are sceptical of the nonsense science written on their pages about so called “global warming”.”
It’s their site; they’re free to render it worthless with censorship. What they’re objecting to — what Anthony is also objecting to — is government telling them what to censor.
Random thought: The constitution gave congress the power to grant copyright for a limited time – the original period of copyright in the US was 25 years. You either made your money or it was in the public domain. The changes since then were mostly made to benefit wealthy corporate donors to politicians to the detriment of society.
UPDATE: A TOOL SPEAKS OUT
This is hilarious. Hey, Anthony, watch out, you’re being called out!
As reported by Alana Goodman at Commentary magazine, the former senator and music industry lobbyist, Chris Dodd, is nowon our side! Really! Standing up for us against the irresponsible bloggers and websites who have blacked-out, he sputtered, “It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and who use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.”.
Bwaha-hah! I know it’s early in the year, but my nomination for the Annual Idiocy Awards and The Tool of the Year Prize will surely go to Chris Dodd and the dinosaurs who have hired him to represent their hopeless cause. I agree with Alana’s assessment that such foolishness from the industry will only speed up its demise.
Dan in California
Around here we refer to the last copyright changes as “The Mickey Mouse Protection Act” and it has created havoc with intellectual property law.
Hint – If you use your browser to view the HTML source of a wikipedia blackout page, the article is still there. I knew there was some good in learning HTML!!!
Dodd and the MPAA are using artists as symbols to rally the masses about so that they willingly vote there freedoms away just like the greenies use the Polar Bear.
JohnM says: January 18, 2012 at 11:17 am
No politicians reason for a law being needed is ever the real reason, or the truth.
The politicians we vote for no longer rule the roost, we need to look behind the thrones to see whose hand is up the politicians butt.
————————————————————
In the US, the congressman’s staffers are the ones who write the laws, determine the content, and advise their congressmen on which bills to support. For example, when TSA was created, the voters approved the airline industry doing that task. It was a staffer that decided TSA would be a government agency.
Bob Mount says:
January 18, 2012 at 10:44 am
Where’s FOI when you need it?
======================
I would be interested in how anyone may think this legislation could be twisted to impact any publication of FOIs CC1 and CC2 release.
Beyony that I think we needed a timeout after some recent posts.
@TonyG and R. Gates
Exactly–the policies seem to always drift in one direction and the frogs don’t notice the warmer temperature. We may have already lost in some real sense:
Section 954 of the NDAA, entitled “Military Activities in Cyberspace,” states:
Congress affirms that the Department of Defense has the capability, and upon direction by the President may conduct offensive operations in cyberspace to defend our Nation, Allies and interests subject to (1) the policy principles and legal regimes that the Department follows for kinetic capabilities, including the law of armed conflict; and (2) the War Powers Resolution.” http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/10244-ndaa-would-qquash-dissentq-on-internet
Who decides what is in ‘our’ interest? and CUI BONO?, dammit!?!
The gatekeepers of information were deadly silent on NDAA. Sometimes we should look at the FCM (fawning corporate media) as a film negative–where it is darkest, there’s your fire.
SOPA! PIPA! I would love to see the issue discussed in the Greek parliament. Or in the French senate as to the second part. Comment vous dites, une PIPA, ca cera merveilleux!
The guys who thought up the acronyms are not very cosmopolitan are they!
Nik
People will still pay to see a live performance, just as they do to watch a football game even when they could watch it on TV. The artists will go to the audience, just as they do now. The recording studios will record and server the performances and get paid by the venues and by advertisers. There may actually be more money made as local groups get feeds onto the servers. Trying to stop change is not good.
Just found this cartoon, I thought you might like it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/matt/?cartoon=9023641&cc=8988527
Let’s get WUWT back to bigger issues. This bill will not fly, although it was a trial balloon that will float later.
Don’t let a closet warm-earther, and neo-Malthusian like Gingrich steal the nomination with slick rhetoric and silly, obvious, 6th grade sound bites.
Santorum is the best climate realist and the most conservative, followed by Romney. But keep Gingrich on the Pelosi love seat and off the ticket. CO2 viewed as a toxic gas has already generated the biggest government takeover in history, and it is yet in its infancy.
The Keystone Pipeline kill today is cause for great alarm. I predict, however, that Obama, the EPA, and DOE will reroute it, then approve it later, closer to the election so that Obama can say, “see, I can create jobs”. He would rather do ZERO in energy, but he will give this one up, mark my words. This will be a slick token gesture, a red herring, because the EPA and DOE will then sink everything else—offshore drilling, ANWR drilling, coal mining, gas pipelines, nuclear mining, etc.
Senator Inhofe’s comment makes a lot of sense to me – he opposes this legislation while stating that he believes “that the intellectual property rights of American companies deserve substantial protection under the law.”
Let us not be confused – a vote against SOPA/PIPA is not a vote for online piracy.
You think this is bad then wait ’til you’re only allowed two sheets of single-ply toilet paper per visit to the loo. Someone will think it’s a Great Idea… for everyone else.
No winky. I am not being funny.
Caught the updates above and on drive-time news and it looks as though the pushback is having an effect.
DesertYote says: January 18, 2012 at 1:25 pm
Then how come that the only ones to benefit are the content publishers, that your beloved creative types have to go through in order to get their creations to their audience?
1. “the only ones to benefit are the content publishers”
Not true.
The artist gets paid by the publisher, IF the artists uses a publisher.
2. “your beloved creative types have to go through”
Not true. Some ‘beloved creative types’ Choose to use a large publisher, others do not and just work the net, some start their own publishing company.
There is no law requiring an artist to use a publisher.
Interesting to see that Inhofe (R-OK), Miller (D-CA), Thompson (D-CA), and Bachmann (R-MN) are all opposed.
” Six key lawmakers remove support for SOPA/PIPA in light of Wikipedia blackout ”
” co-sponsors who say they can no longer support their own legislation include Senators Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican and Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat. Republican Representatives Ben Quayle of Arizona, Lee Terry of Nebraska, and Dennis Ross of Florida also said they would withdraw their backing of the House bill. ”
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/01/18/two-sopa-co-sponsors-remove-support-for-the-legislation/
JohnWho says:
January 18, 2012 at 2:25 pm
“that the intellectual property rights of American companies deserve substantial protection under the law.”
=================
Unless traded to China for cheap labor, and short term profit.
IMHO
Anthony,
I offer my whole-hearted support to your protest. SOPA and PIPA are simply Big Government’s reaction to what we all know as FREE SPEECH. Government cannot control this at present. It does not sit comfortably with ‘them’, whoever ‘they’ maybe within Government.
Why cannot the people of the world converse without Government intrusion?
Governments across the globe might state that this sort of legislation is to stop ‘piracy’ but does anyone remember what ‘mission-creep’ means?
This entire legislative movement reeks of Central Control of speech and opinion; it is censorship at its most invidious.
There is something wrong with the way corporations run the copyright system (and yes I mean corporations). If an author has assigned his rights to a corporation and the corporation decides it cannot make money bringing the work out, then the work is effectively censored-not even the author can publish! The companies that are pushing this bill should follow the example of Baen Publishing. Baen Publishing has discovered that if they don’t act like a dog in the manger and let people freely share (share-not sell) e-copies of their publications they actually increase sales of their hardbacks, paperbacks, and e-books.
If you want to destroy this law get a million people to break it and confess to the relevant authority on the same day and insist on a trial, the resultant court cases would clog up the system for fifty years.
Good luck trying to stifle the internet… It ain’t g’na happen. Like trying to squash a balloon, you press down here, it pops up there, you chase it and press down there, and it pops up somewhere else. So the whole fight against ‘piracy’ is lost. It’s gone, goodbye, sayonara. Anyone can get what they want off the net. Supply and demand. If you want it, someone will be there on the net to provide you with it. In California, or Taiwan, or Vietnam, wherever, it doesn’t matter.So instead of trying this, you have to take a leap and recognise the new world order in terms of copyright. What can you do to protect the creators of copyrighted material, given that they are going to be on the internet anyway? And, if the creators of this material were asked, would they say “Get it off the net?” No, of course not. This is the middle men protesting, not the creators. The abusers of creativity.
J said that, “Congress affirms that the Department of Defense has the capability, and upon direction by the President may conduct offensive operations in cyberspace to defend our Nation, Allies and interests…Who decides what is in ‘our’ interest? and CUI BONO?, dammit!?!”
Well, J, I’m not an American, but my guess would be that it’s your government, including your president, his advisors, Congress and your military who would decide. Defending the nation and its allies would be a primary responsibility of theirs and so far, they’ve done a decent job. Operations they are probably thinking of would be like the one that crashed and gummed-up Iran’s centrifuges, a brilliant cyber-attack probably conducted by Israel, whose government has authority to do such things. So, I guess you should elect a good government with people of sound mind, which means one without Ron Paul, who’d let your country burn to the ground before violating his cockamanie notions he calls “principles,” or upsetting the Iranians.
Rupert Murdoch tweet
“So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.”
http://www.deadline.com/2012/01/exclusive-hollywood-moguls-stopping-obama-donations-because-of-administrations-piracy-stand/
That doesn’t look like support to me Kozlowski .
@ JJ says:
January 18, 2012 at 12:12 pm
When yearning for the benign dictatorship, keep in mind that the only part of that you can guarantee is the dictatorship.
============================================
And we are already there in many respects. Time to rise up and be heard! To Arms, to arms! The enemy is at the gates!
“COME join hand in hand brave Americans all,
And rouse your bold hearts at fair Liberty’s call;
No tyrannous acts shall suppress your just claim,
Or stain with dishonour America’s name.
CHORUS:
In Freedom we’re born and in Freedom we’ll live,
Our purses are ready,
Steady, Friends, Steady.
Not as slaves, but as Freemen our money we’ll give.
Our worthy Forefathers – Let’s give them a cheer
To climates unknown did courageously steer;
Thro’ Oceans, to deserts, for freedom they came,
And dying bequeath’d us their freedom and Fame.
Their generous bosoms all dangers despis’d,
So highly, so wisely, their Birthrights they priz’d;
We’ll keep what they gave, we will piously keep,
Nor frustrate their toils on the land and the deep.
The Tree their own hands had to Liberty rear’d;
They liv’d to behold growing strong and rever’d;
With transport they cry’d, “Now our wishes we gain
For our children shall gather the fruits of our pain.”
Swarms of placemen and pensioners soon will appear
Like locusts deforming the charms of the year;
Suns vainly will rise, Showers vainly descend,
If we are to drudge for what others shall spend.
Then join hand in hand brave Americans all,
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall;
In so Righteous a cause let us hope to succeed,
For Heaven approves of each generous deed.
All ages shall speak with amaze and applause,
Of the courage we’ll show in support of our laws;
To die we can bear – but to serve we disdain,
For shame is to freedom more dreadful than pain.
This bumper I crown for our Sovereign’s health
And this for Britannia’s glory and wealth;
That wealth and that glory immortal may be,
If she is but just – and if we are but Free.
John Dickinson “
To all: This isn’t about climate or some BS science. This is about FREEDOM! Get out of your little box and understand what the hell is happening!
Yeah right. Making it harder for interested and intelligent people to access information on this site is a useful, policy-driven response to legislation. I thought one of the commonalities on this site was a distaste for moralising gestures of little substance.
Soz Anthony, even though I oppose SOPA/PIPA, this sort of bandwagoning is beneath you.
REPLY: Here we have an example of Freedom of Speech on the Internet in action, even though it is pointless and IMO, silly, thanks for commenting! – Anthony
I think you either need to make a reasonably effective effort at enforcing the laws, or give up on having laws on that subject. Do one or the other. If you aren’t going to advocate the legalization of piracy, then you have an equal obligation to come up with an enforcement regime that will work. You don’t like SOPA/PIPA? Fine, no problem. Come up with your own solution that you are willing to advocate in favor of, for everyone else to critique, rather than just nit-picking others efforts.
* We live in a time of selective enforcement of law, there are so many laws that we cannot enforce them all, so we select what laws to enforece and who to enforce them on.
* Government has a choice of who to enforce this on, and who not to.
*”Climate Change” is very supportive of government workers job security, power, and prestige. If “proven” true, it will greatly enhance the size and power of government.
* Therefore, government types will want to enforce this law on any site that apposes “climate change”, of which this site is chief. They will totally ignore any breaches commited by pro climate change websites, of course.
* Thus, while I am not happy with this site or any site going blackout, this time I am more than willing to put up with it, it sure beats the permanent backout this will certainly happen if these laws pass.
A few notes” The US consitution states that one cannot take away life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Due process means warrents, arrests, and a trial by jury. Shutting down this website without a trial by jury would definatly interfer with liberty, free speach gueranteed in the first amendment, and could be said to be a taking away of property also. It is therefore rather obviously unconsitutional. Who authored this bill? Have they not therefore violated their oath of office, which states that they are to support and defend the US constitution? Why are they still in office? Why have they not had their citizenship stripped?
Note also, the reason I seldom vote Democrat (this does not mean I nessisarily vote Republican) is because most (virtually all) government workers are Democrats. That is because Democrats talk socialism, and socialism means more job security, money, and power for government (and less for everyone else). Thus, we can expect this law would be used as a club to beat any site that is anto Democrat, pro Republican, or anti socialist or big government. We can thus expect it will be used to violate free political speach on a wise scale.
Finally, and most chillingly, if I authored this bill, I would want to be able to shut down any site (without due process) if any poster on, say, a forum such as this one, linked to any site or file that “violated” this law. I would then arrainge for my political apponents, sites to have just such a poster. For than matter, armies of government workers could post just such links on any site they wanted to shut down, as well as armies of any politial group that wants to shut down any other group or site. This will make it possible to shut down any site. Note, however, the above selective enforement of laws, the powers that be will select which sites to enfore this on. They will enforce it on any site that is anti big government, or which they believe is (or just people they don’t like). free speach will simply dissapear.
Anthony, just in case, backup plan, host this site on a foriegn server. Just be ready with such a plan when, not if, they try again (assuming they fail this time). If they can’t get it this time, they will try stealth aproaches (bury it in obscure laguage in a huge unrelated bill or some such), gradual approaches (get part of it in now and par later), and of course propaganda to swing people over to it (lie to them). The way things are going, with congress and president critters abviously not following their oath of office and willing to simply ignore the constitution, they may eventually try to just ram it through with, say, a presidential order, possibly declaring some sort of “emergency” to justify such.
“The only real differences between the Repubs and the Dems is that the Repubs make speeches that appeal to patriots, while the Dems make speeches that appeal to environmentalists. Metaphorically, the Dems will drive the car over the edge of the cliff at 80 mph while the Repubs will only be doing 75 mph.”
Not quite. The Repubs will drive their car over the cliff at 80 mph, just because they can. The Dems will drive your car over the cliff at 75 mph, just because they will be able to. Whether or not you’re in it, is morally irrelevant.
Crosspatch,
So you would suggest that we all remove the license plates from our cars and get rid of photo ID?
Answer the question asked of you, before asking one of your own. Is it necessary that “the authorities” have a way to positively identify the leaker of the Climategate emails? Would the world be a better place if that had that ability? Would the world be a better place if the Federalist Papers had never been published? If “the authorities” had a 100% comprehensive method of determining who is saying what?
“Why do people insist on one standard for communications of one mode but demand a completely different standard for communications in a different mode?”
Odd question, coming from someone who says this
“And as for your climategate non sequitur, there are a billion other ways of getting that out anonymously that don’t involve the Internet.”
Why do you think those “billion other ways” of communicating should not also be subject to a means of positive identification by “the authorities”? You are employing the very same double standard that you decry.
What if someone on the Internet befriends your daughter, meets her and assaults her?
That would be awful. Does it require that all communications must be identifyable? Does it require that no searches should require warrants? Does it require that every person be implanted with a tracking device that reports their whereabouts to “the authorities” at all times? All of those things would greatly assist in identifying the perpetrator of the assault, and would certainly result in the capture of some assailants who would otherwise go free. Must we do these things? Or are there some things that we might do to prevent some crimes, that we should not do?
Of course internet communications must be completely anonymous, right? Come on.
Of course, internet communications must be completely traceable, right? Come on.
If someone uses the telephone to convey a threat, where that call originated from can be found (even if the caller-id is blocked). Why should a threat by Internet be completely anonymous?
If someone uses the internet to convey a threat, where that information came from can often not be found. Why should we require traceability of phone calls?
If someone uses the mail to convey a threat, where that information came from cannot be traced. Why should we require internet communication to be traceable?
If someone makes a threat via a printed handbill, where that information came from cannot be traced. Why should we require internet communication to be traceable?
The problem I have is that people want to apply a completely different social standard of conduct to a particular MODE of communications and I believe that is crazy.
Yet you are doing it yourself. Or do you think that we should have to present ID to mail a letter? Or do you think that we should have to present an ID to purchase paper that is tagged to our identity?
This issue is more complex than you wish it to be.
Are the only freedoms to which we are entitled the ones that cannot possibly be used for criminal purposes? What would make that list?
Is every crime, against every state wrong? Would it be a good idea to have a state against which no crime could possibly be committed?
Jasbo,
What do you propose? Turn the other cheek?
An interesting article on zerohedge highlights that the research underpinning SOPA/PIPA may be entirely bogus. REF http://www.zerohedge.com/news/numbers-cited-sopa-supporters-may-be-fictitious
Andrew30 says:
January 18, 2012 at 2:34 pm
There is no law requiring an artist to use a publisher.
Completely right about that, because even publishers can be downright criminal when it comes to contract terms.
A few days ago overhere in the Netherlands the publisher Malmberg presented their new contract terms for illustrators working for them, they will pay a maximum of just 35 euro’s per illustration and all your intellectual property rights right have to be handed over to them, and that means all of it. I call that downright theft.
I have a blog on WordPress but I’ve been too busy to actually use it since setting it up. I’ve changed the settings in a show of support.
It’s a disgraceful attempt by giant media corporations etc… to carve the internet up into proprietary networks and pay-wall everything, try commenting on any media site like the bbc or the many ‘gruardian’ type sites, if you disagree with their party-line you’ll be censored.
The open-source and other communities are going nuts over this censorship, the development of the internet has been based on the freedom of expression and it’s many forms, it has enabled everyone including giant media corporations the ability to access information and skills that would have cost them billions to develop by them selves, which they have NOT.
If these laws had been in place 20 years ago, there wouldn’t have been the rapid development in the technology. So now, that it is available to everyone and huge, they want it for them selves. Do they know that the technology they use to compile sell and play their media are all open source based systems, including the Linux based servers they use, meaning that someone else did the unpaid development work and released the source that these corporations use, they are spiting in the face of every programmer and every contributor that has an item of open source property freely available online.
It was on the new today here that this law was to prevent online sites from selling cocaine. I kid you not!!
Doug says: “I think the wikipedia blackout and WUWT blackout are a bit of an overreaction. I certainly don’t support SOPA, but blackouts are a huge inconvenience to users and is not cool.”
Guess what Doug: IT’S HIS WEBSITE.
Anthony: My support for all you are doing here.
Mike Jonas says:
January 18, 2012 at 12:58 pm
“The Wikipedia problem was eventually identified as chiefly being William Connolly. Once his activity was revealed publicly, his further involvement in Wikipedia became unacceptable to them, and he was banned. It took time, damage was done, but the situation is being repaired. Any attempt to legislate would surely have been disastrous.
William Connolly banned link: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/dre0m/william_connollyclimate_alarmist_has_been_banned/
but Reddit is currently blacked out in protest against SOPA.”
Connolley is back, and his droogs Stefan Schultz and Brigade Harvester Boris were never banned.
bubbagyro says:
2:21 pm “Don’t let a closet warm-earther, and neo-Malthusian like Gingrich steal the nomination with slick rhetoric and silly, obvious, 6th grade sound bites.
Santorum is the best climate realist and the most conservative, followed by Romney.”
Romney is clearly and demonstrably the global warming candidate here. He supports worldwide carbon emissions reductions, a carbon tax, and investing 20 bn in energy and “car technology.” I do not need to point out to the intelligent readers here that this kind of federal “investment” is just to get you into worthless wind turbines and green cars. He is no stranger to mandates: 1. He passed Romneycare, which forces people to buy insurance in Ma. That program is running billions of dollars past projected costs – which we pay for – but he has still said it is a “good plan” for his state. 2. He founded and funded RGGI, which forces people to buy electricity from worthless renewables, and called it “good business” for his region. (Did not sign it at the last minute. The next governor did.) He passed co2 emissions standards for cars in Ma that were 30% stricter than federal standards. His past an present political positions are consistent: he believes in regulating greenhouse gasES. It is possible that he could save the carbon market, while Obama has failed to do so. A carbon tax in the US could be key, which, again, he supports.
By comparison, Newt Gingrich’s position is to “Finance cleaner energy research and projects with new oil and gas royalties.” This is an exceptionally clever position, and one I think that is acceptable until the global warming scientific fraud collapses in a year or two. Gov. Perry has been consistent and outspoken in his opposition to AGW. He is a flat tax candidate.
Graeme says:
January 18, 2012 at 5:12 pm
An interesting article on zerohedge highlights that the research underpinning SOPA/PIPA may be entirely bogus. REF http://www.zerohedge.com/news/numbers-cited-sopa-supporters-may-be-fictitious
===========
From your link;
From the GAO:
“First, a number of industry, media, and government publications have cited an FBI estimate that U.S. businesses lose $200-$250 billion to counterfeiting on an annual basis. This estimate was contained in a 2002 FBI press release, but FBI officials told us that it has no record of source data or methodology for generating the estimate and that it cannot be corroborated.
Second, a 2002 CBP press release contained an estimate that U.S. businesses and industries lose $200 billion a year in revenue and 750,000 jobs due to counterfeits of merchandise. However, a CBP official stated that these figures are of uncertain origin, have been discredited, and are no longer used by CBP. A March 2009 CBP internal memo was circulated to inform staff not to use the figures. However, another entity within DHS continues to use them.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
It’s like what rock have you been living under ?
When one sends it’s manufacturing to China, it gets counterfeited !!!!!!!!
Don’t come crying to me about loses, with labor and benefit charges at 2 magnitudes less than your last labor market.
Andrew30
January 18, 2012 at 2:34 pm
###
BZZZT! Wrong Answer. Sorry, but almost all (99%) of content creators get less then 1% of the wealth their works generate. Many members of my family are in the content creator category. You need to get you facts straight. Piracy has little impact on the bottom line. Its all about distribution. The MPAA is rabidly desirous of maintaining its stranglehold on distribution. One of my relatives is actually taking home almost twice, self publishing. Its not just about money. The MPAA and friend enjoy the control they have on public discourse. They HATE that movies like Atlas Shrugged get made. You obviously know very little about the subject.
I am a civil/environmental engineer who has worked as a consultant for 25 years. To do my job well I have to read the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations regularly (as well as many state regulations). There is no question, many if not most regulations exceed their statutory authority and have been violating people’s liberties, providing barriers to entry and in general putting every aspect of our lives in the hands of bureaucrats. I too am against SOPA/PIPA but find it sad that the public has not risen up in anger long before this.
Thank you for taking this stand.
And thank you for providing the instructions to blackout other WordPress blogs. I’ve shut down my own small site as well.
Carbon Tax: “A fourth incentive system, a tax swap, has been proposed…Under this approach, a gas or carbon tax would be paired with a reduction in another tax, such as the payroll tax, creating no greater burden for taxpayers and no new revenues for government. The higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens.” No Apology p 262 Romney’s actual position on carbon tax.
bubbagyro says:
Santorum is the best climate realist and the most conservative, followed by Romney
You’re talking about this guy?
“they have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do. Government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulation low and that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues, you know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world”
[SNIP: If you have something to say, say it. -REP]
In the “Who woulda thunk it?” category we have:
Best evidence showing we need SOPA based on ‘govt studies’ that never existed
Content pirates not nearly the profit-gutting force of nature lobbyists describe
By Kevin Fogarty at ITworld.com
January 18, 2012, 5:21 PM — No one disputes very seriously that there is a lot of content piracy going on, especially online.
The hip-but-surprisingly hidebound music industry lost it’s booty during the late ’90s and early 00s after Napster, KaZaa, LimeWire, Morpheus and half a dozen other fixed and P2P ad hoc file-sharing networks turned music appreciation into an all-you-can eat buffet rather than the budget-busting one-course tapas restaurant it had been when music publishers controlled both price and distribution.
The movie business didn’t take quite as big a hit, mainly because its distribution people spent more time looking for new sources of revenue and venues for their products, rather than trying to hunt down every potential customer who’d ever used the product for free, as the music business’ RIAA copyright-enforcement thugs did.
The movie business never got in as much trouble as the music business, largely because it was able to find lots of other outlets through which to sell movies – cable TV, Netflix and other online services, ISPs, hotel-TV-movie services, Blockbuster, Red Box, yada, yada.
Still, the numbers quoted by both music and movie companies and their lobbyists are not only unrealistic, they’re almost impossible, completely indefensible and based on three major government studies that may never have existed in the first place, according to Julian Sanchez, research fellow at the conservative Cato Institute, who has analyzed and written about the loss-estimates several times.
For years the entertainment industry has cried poor mouth on the whole piracy issue by citing government studies estimating pirated content costs the U.S. between $200 billion and $250 billion per year in revenue and kills 750,000 jobs.
Except, Sanchez found while trying to verify the numbers, the studies from which those numbers came can’t be found even by the government agencies that first cited them and may never have existed at all.
[bolding mine - _Jim]
- – - – -
More – see: http://www.itworld.com/security/242587/best-evidence-showing-we-need-sopa-based-govt-studies-never-existed
.
I am rarely in agreement with adding more laws, so I am not particularly a proponent of SOPA. However, I read it, and I don’t see the boogie man. And it is not the first legislation I have read. Further more I believe intellectual property laws are important, much as property laws are important. The wonderful evolution of the internet has torn down a lot of fences; and that can be a problem. I want every potential producer of IP, and therefore beneficiary of IP laws, to have as much incentive as possible to keep producing the IP. That is what makes the world advance. I suspect that ignoring the erosion of IP protections will generate problems, as it will undoubtedly get worse.
… oh but I do believe SOPA is dead. A hard political death.
@Peter Kovachev
I think you’ve misunderstood Ron Paul, which is not surprising since the fawning corporate media is doing their best to make him misunderstood. Maybe you simply don’t agree with him, but most people are as disinformed about Paul as they are, say, on climate. For example, the NYT actually called him a pacifist (maybe he should sue them for libel!) The anti-Ron Paul bias in the media has been documented by scholarly research, but more enjoyably by Jon Stewart. As with climate, the truth is out there, at least until SOPA or its permutations pass.
If Israel wants to pick a fight with Iran, that is their business. Iran is clearly no threat to the USA or Canada. But we have already started another war with them in sanctions and covert ops, as you point out. We are the aggressor, as we were in Iraq. If they sign the NPT, why shouldn’t they be able to enrich for reactors? I don’t think they’ll accidentally get highly enriched uranium, and neither does our DOD. I find the voices left, right and center at antiwar.com to be helpful in sorting through the lies. Think of it as the WUWT antidote for the military industrial complex. (would Eisenhower even believe that our news comes to us from the manufacturer of jet engines for warplanes?) They also support the blackout today: http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2012/01/17/sopa-and-why-were-not-blacked-out/
Even the MSM in OZ is talking about this. Here is a well reasoned article that highlights the dangers of this legislation;
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/planned-us-antipiracy-laws-a-draconian-mess-20120118-1q5z0.html
DesertYote said @ January 18, 2012 at 5:46 pm
99.99% correct. The Git received $10k for his first book rather than 25% of gross as per the contract ($100k+). Legal advice was to take the money and run. The writers who didn’t ended up with nothing.
Yes, self-publishing is the way to go :-)
Internet Censorship Is the Wrong Answer to Online Piracy (Cato Institute)
Thank you for “going black” to protest this with many other sites today. SOPA and PIPA are genuine threats, though I worry that 24 hours is not enough time to garner enough opposition. ClimateProgress couldn’t be bothered with it, it seems.
TonyG says:
January 18, 2012 at 6:00 pm
Out of context.
You mean Ron Paul is your ideal? The one who wants to get rid of age of consent laws? So a 70 year old man can do what he wants with a ten year old boy or girl?
If he is doing that, I say break down the door to his perverted bedroom. Ron Paul would prevent cops from stopping child molesters. [SNIP: Bubba, that is really a room too far. -REP]
Copyrighted but an artists view.
He makes his money on performances!
Folks will learn to protect their intellectual property.
We had best avoid asking government for “help”.
I often wonder if JFK had a bit of tongue in cheek when he said “Ask not what your country can do for you…”
Thanks for the CATO video. If, as the speaker claims, SOPA and PIPA allow prior restraint, then I think he has a point, and it should be back to the drawing board. I guess if these dragons rear their heads again, I’ll have to read the damn bills.
I should say “Congratulations,” to Anthony and others for mounting a very effective (because dramatic) short-term campaign. You got a passel of legislators, including sponsors of SOPA, to rethink their positions. I wish we could have done something similar back when the Congress passed Obamacare!
I do think, however, that the problem of copyright infringement is not, as too many allege, a ‘free-speech’ issue. Copyright has always had a ‘fair use’ provision—a grey area, to be sure, and often disputed, but an essential legal concept. And I still think that the extreme advocacy of ‘electronic freedom’, meaning everything is free for everyone to use, smacks of nothing less than communism—which ultimately undermines the real freedom on which our Constitution is based.
/Mr Lynn
Peter Kovachev says, “So, I guess you should elect a good government with people of sound mind, which means one without Ron Paul, who’d let your country burn to the ground before violating his cockamanie notions he calls “principles,” or upsetting the Iranians.”
Unless you consider the U.S. Constitution a “cockamanie notion” then there is nothing to fear from a Ron Paul presidency. So long as congress declares war Ron Paul would fight it, win it and get out. There is absolutely nothing in his foreign policy positions that does not include national defense. If Israel wants to attack Iran (which they are more than capable of) Ron Paul would not stop them. Iran is a joke and has no real Navy while the U.S. can deploy 13 aircraft carrier battlegroups. Pakistan and North Korea already have nuclear weapons and have not used them because it would mean their obliteration. A single U.S. Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarines (SSBN) which carries 24 MIRV warheads could obliterate Iran. Israel has enough nuclear weapons to obliterate Iran. It is all fear mongering.
Lots of people miss the piracy side.
Most of these people would never have bought the CD/DVD anyway but in the case of CDs, they may have been opened to a band they would never have considered before & thence tempted to a concert.
As for anonymity, Anthony has my essentially static IP which can be traced to me.
Israel is a tiny state, which could be destroyed by just three nuclear bombs. The Iranian mullahs are religious fanatics who value martyrdom more than life. Achmedinijad has vowed to perpetrate a second Holocaust and to “wipe Israel off the map.” It would be folly to assume he doesn’t mean it. Deterrence doesn’t work against zealots. If Rep. Paul thinks it does, he is a dangerous fool.
(Off-topic, but I couldn’t let this pass.)
/Mr Lynn
An observation, if I may; re the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation. I think the lobbyists pushing the legislation are suffering from acute commercial myopia. If all replication of copyrighted work, even for criticism, is banned by whatever means, how will the copyright owners sell their no doubt extensive back catalogue of material?
Without expensive marketing, such material will simply become dead money. Stock without value. The various fan clubs will age and dwindle, and the items, be it a song or movie, will eventually become forgotten. Only a few will survive.
What they forget is the extensive free marketing the Internet offers to their holdings. Shutting down or curtailing blog sites and Social Media over ‘copyright infringement’ simply ensures that the copyrighted material in question drops into obscurity when the ‘next best thing’ hoves into public view, thus losing much of its commercial value. Copying and posting actually keeps the material alive and in the public eye, and thus saleable, which would not happen if no-one was allowed to replicate it.
WOW! Google is even preventing links to YouTube! At least that is what I perceive.
Throwing a hissy fit is childish and stupid. I don’t mind reading argument, but most of what I am reading borders on childish ranting. It would help if you would explain with direct reference to the act’s provisions what it is that is will do. Otherwise, it sounds like you guys and many of the others would come out defending pawn brokers selling goods. What alternative to the act do you propose to support a legitimate goal of preventing theft for profit of intellectual property? Alternatives, please.
More bogus ‘science’……
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/numbers-cited-sopa-supporters-may-be-fictitious
And a strange foible of this is that if I link to a specific comment, the YouTube links become visible!
(a) SAVINGS CLAUSES.—
(1) FIRST AMENDMENT.—Nothing in this Act shall be construed to impose a prior restraint on free speech or the press protected under the 1st Amendment to the Constitution.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr3261ih/pdf/BILLS-112hr3261ih.pdf
bubbagyro says, “You mean Ron Paul is your ideal? The one who wants to get rid of age of consent laws? So a 70 year old man can do what he wants with a ten year old boy or girl?”
No one is endorsing any such thing. He simply does not want a federal age of consent law and to just leave it up to the states, which already have them on the books and varied between 16-18 years old not 10. Worldwide these vary even more – Spain (13), Italy (14), Puerto Rico (14), Denmark (15), Sweden (15) ect…
http://www.avert.org/age-of-consent.htm
@bubbagyro
I’m left to wonder if you would be any worse off with SOPA.
The Santorum quote stands alone pretty well, I think. I either heard him say that, or something a lot like it in an interview. Anyway, if your claim is that the quote is out of context, don’t you need to say why it doesn’t mean what it seems to mean?
It does not seem too much to ask that people notice that Paul is not against having laws that prohibit this and that, just that it not be done at the *federal level*. Is it necessary to have a federal law against murder? Apparently not. If North Dakota wants the age of consent to be 36, fine. Do you really think that Utah will lower it to 10?
What I mean by my first sentence in this comment is that maybe you, and maybe a lot of people, are not suffering primarily from a lack of availability of information. SOPA is about availability, and is a thinly disguised effort by the establishment to get the horse back in the barn. But if we prove impermeable to new information, and eschew careful and thoughtful reading and dialogue, the availability of information won’t matter.
Wow… This begins too much more soon than i thought…
Just put an ad for WUWT’s participation onto groklaw:
http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&sid=20120118113455360&title=The+INcomplete+list%2C+with+links%2C+is+on+SOPAstrike.com.&type=article&order=&hideanonymous=0&pid=950921#c951065
@populartechnology
Yesterday I discovered that you (poptech) had put in an effort on a thread I started here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/Has-Climategate-20-just-started
Where you had to engage with at least one willfully ignorant or purposefully deceitful person on the subject of your list of skeptic position supported list of peer reviewed papers.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
I had to abandon the thread I started there at a developers site for Microsoft products due to health reasons (blood pressure ;-) ). I don’t know how Anthony does it.
When a moderator and others thought the thread should or would be locked soon, that upset me. What is it about Climate Science that is so different from every other science that has ever existed, does exist?
At least, to Microsoft’s credit, the thread was not locked or censored, and I believe that some people learned something new, including some from within the Microsoft organization.
Duane Freese says:
Boy is it ever easy to spot the trolls! Simply dripping with giveaways.
Here’s a hint for those who don’t understand government power (or worse, who would deliberately misuse it against us): It isn’t up to us to analyse a huge, poorly worded tome to explain how it can malfunction. It is for the supporters to prove to us that it cannot.
As for the final two weasel words in the above quote, how about: existing copyright law.
And PS: copyright violation isn’t theft. (Look it up in a good dictionary.) Period. Neither is it piracy. Semantic inflation is the eternal tool of the deceiver.
And PPS: What have you got against pawnbrokers?
My note on the subject, left on the Web site of a midwestern Congressman who had a menu of issues you could choose from:
I have picked “Second Amendment” above because it’s the closest to the real subject of this note:
FREEDOM!
For more than 40 years I’ve been a campaigner in a dozen states to maintain our Second Amendment freedoms against the encroachments of an ignorant and powermad political elite, which based its claims on propaganda and lies.
I now find that I must fight against control of the Internet by the same gaggle of power-hungry loonies, who are using exactly the same tactics. Is this still America, or is it not?
I have never downloaded or watched a pirated anything, but I spend a lot of time on the Internet and the thought of politicians having any control over it AT ALL fills me with nausea. They took over the banking system in 1913 to save us from recessions and in less than 20 years gave us the Great Depression. They promised to fix the recession of ’29 and extended it for a decade. They promised to control health care costs for the elderly in 1969 and costs have skyrocketed since. They are delusional.
Frankly, if I want to watch a good movie for free at home, I just wait six months and check the DVD out from the local Public Library. I’ve done that with countless good movies, and the “waiting period” it enforces gives me time to read reviews and avoid the dogs. This imbecile, Fascist Internet legislation is yet another idiot attempt to solve a nonexistent problem.
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO on SOPA. No. Never. No. No!!! Keep their stinking bureaucratic hands off my beautiful free Internet!! (Is that sufficiently clear and unambiguous?)
Sincerely,
Craig Goodrich
SOPA
Airport searches and seizures reminiscent a fascist police state
Defense Authorization bill amendments which clearly violate Constitutional protections
DOJ (Eric Holder personally) extorting millions from backs in the name of minority communities
DOJ selling automatic weapons to Mexican insurgents
DOJ attacking states trying to protect their citizens from armed Mexican insurgents
Mandatory ownership of health insurance by all citizens less those friends of the Administration receiving wavers
Large corporations allowed to retain their profits while small businesses and individuals are forced to carried the burden of large corporate failures via government bailouts
Runaway FED counterfeit money printing used to buy US debt which no one else wants
Politicians and their friends receiving multi-hundred million dollar loans to spin up corporations to fight AGW, which simply doesn’t exist outside of the political science which spawn it.
This sounds like some odd concoction of socialist totalitarianism, doesn’t it to you?
Duane Freese says: January 18, 2012 at 8:00 pm
Duane, before I can even hazard a answer to your plea, please clarify the situation for me — please explain how the rights of IP holders are not currently being protected under the EXISTING laws. The RIAA and MPAA seems to have been successfully suing under existing laws. Sites like YouTube and VEVO remove or restrict content whenever the IP holder brings it to their attention.
You need to keep in mind that it is not the state that needs to police IP violations, it is the IP holder’s responsibility. It has always been the IP holder’s responsibility. I do not want the government policing the world to protect my IP rights. If it is important to me, then it is and should be my responsibility to keep tabs on the world around me. That’s how life is supposed to work under US law. No prior restrain and no (formal) law enforcement action unless a crime has already taken place.
Now, if you want to live under a regime that requires you to get permission every time you want to speak, I can suggest many other places you might want to live.
BTW, I really do want you to answer the question.
Being that Senator Inhofe is my senator and I sent him a scathing email about his support for PIPA and now seeing that he has backed off in his support, I’d like to think that I had something to do with his change of heart.
REPLY: We all did, we all played a part. Thanks Dr. Joice – Anthony
J, thanks for your civil reply to my curmudgeony post in which I gratuitously made a swipe at a politician you appear to favour. Ron Paul may be misunderstood by the MSM or maybe not, but he isn’t shy about expressing his views on the US role in the world. In any case, he is a side issue to the topic, one I brought up when addressing your conflation of clearly intrusive bills, SOPA and PIPA, with other government activities.
I’ll forgive anyone who jumps down my non-American throat for this broad assumption, but as I understand it, classical American conservatism holds that the federal government should be responsible mainly for the essentials, one of the most important being national defense and the pursuit of national interests. SOPA is clearly not about national defense and appears to be primarily about protecting narrow commercial interests which are of little relevance to the defense of your nation. The cyber-warfare doctrine, which you paired up with SOPA and clad in a sinister coat, is an entirely different, and most likely a bi-partisan issue as it pertains to the defense of your nation and its allies.
I will counter your assertions by saying bluntly that the notion that the US can remain a free and prosperous while retreating into a domestic-focused cocoon is a suicidal one. Thus, a nuclear-armed Iran, which the Paul’s crowds excuse or shrug away is, in the world as we know it, no less an existential danger for the US than it is for Israel. In fact, I’ll put to you that the delivery of a nuclear weapon to Tel Aviv by the means of a missile may even be harder than shoving one into the New York harbor by the means of a commercial container ship. This is what irks me about the yester-year cocktail of libertarianism and isolationism which contrary to all evidence,proposes that if the US leaves the nasty types alone, they’ll leave it alone in return. It may have been a harmless ideological sophistry in the age of trans-Atlantic clippers and grape shot bombardments, but it cannot work in the 21st century. So, one should not imagine that the conservative opposition to things like the UN’s climate scam, attempts at world governance and creeping internationalism, or petty corporate shenanigans like SOPA and PIPA, are a cheer for radical libertarianism and American isolationism.
Anthony,
Much that I love your blog, your dedication for good science and you (along with your sense of humour), politically we don’t see eye to eye. You belong to the Right, I belong to the Left.
On this SOPA/PIPA issue however I have to congratulate you for your militant activism, comrade. :)
REPLY: The threat is bigger than any sectarian viewpoint, any political bent, or any religious preference. I find myself in odd company agreeing with Greenpeace. – Anthony
Ignoring, momentarily, that the U.S. has already adopted international law which seeks to curtail online piracy (see, e.g., DMCA), and that these new bills seek to do little more than enact what amounts to police powers over foreign companies, it looks like the studies cited in support of piracy-gone-rampant may have never have existed. Julian Sanchez, a researcher at the Cato Institute, did his level best at tracking down the research behind the near-absurd numbers (the industry claims nearly $250B lost in revenues a year, and 750,000 lost jobs), but instead found only circular references.
So then, you may be asking yourself: how much does piracy actually cost the entertainment industry? $89MM. What’s the U.S. Taxpayer cost to enact new legislation (SOPA)? $47MM, by Sanchez’s estimates. That’s 52.8 cents of U.S. Taxpayer money spent for every dollar in private enterprise saved, if the system works (which it won’t), when there already likely exists a private remedy (private action in the host country).
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/numbers-cited-sopa-supporters-may-be-fictitious
Mr Lynn says, “Achmedinijad has vowed to perpetrate a second Holocaust and to “wipe Israel off the map.” It would be folly to assume he doesn’t mean it. Deterrence doesn’t work against zealots.”
He said no such thing. A direct translation of his words is,
“The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, October 25, 2005
http://antiwar.com/orig/norouzi.php?articleid=11025
Israel is more than capable of taking care of themselves. If they want to attack Iran, let them.
I’m afraid Geolurking just hasn’t understood my challenge. All he has done is to quote a case where someone *may* have tried to use copyright law to suppress release of information. ( I say ‘may’ because it is not at all clear that that is what they were doing.) I don’t doubt that this sometimes happens. But my challenge was to show how SOPA would apply to such a case. I don’t see how it could. Maybe Geolurking does, in which case could he please tell us? For a start, sanctions under SOPA are initiated either by the US Attorney General or by a US Court. Contrary to some of the wilder scaremongering, it simply isn’t possible under SOPA for a private individual or corporation to just yank material off the internet. (There is a legitimate argument as to whether action by the AG’s office, as distinct from a Court, gives sufficient ‘due process’, but that is a secondary issue.) Secondly, action can only be taken against sites that are substantially dedicated to copyright infringement (the Pirate Bay would be an obvious example). Again, one can argue about the details of the definitions, and I think this is one of the weaker points of SOPA. But it is a far cry from some of the misrepresentations by the BIg Tech lobbyists. Some of the anti-SOPA propaganda would really have Dr Goebbels gasping in admiration.
FYI
————————————————————————–
Numbers Cited By SOPA Supporters May Be Fictitious
Ignoring, momentarily, that the U.S. has already adopted international law which seeks to curtail online piracy (see, e.g., DMCA), and that these new bills seek to do little more than enact what amounts to police powers over foreign companies, it looks like the studies cited in support of piracy-gone-rampant may have never have existed. Julian Sanchez, a researcher at the Cato Institute, did his level best at tracking down the research behind the near-absurd numbers (the industry claims nearly $250B lost in revenues a year, and 750,000 lost jobs), but instead found only circular references.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/numbers-cited-sopa-supporters-may-be-fictitious
———————————————————–
How Copyright Industries Con Congress (Posted by Julian Sanchez)
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-congress/
————————————————————
ocker says: January 18, 2012 at 5:48 am
As an Australian –
Whether the liberal left likes it or not, the USA has been the beacon of freedom for the last 200+ years. The rest of the (freeish) world has pined for the freedom of expression and freedom of association that the citizens of the USA have enjoyed. Americans are responsible for the freedom of many other countries.
My concern is that if the trend setter of the modern era starts to restrict the freedoms of its citizens, then the rest of the world will surely follow suit.
I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would think?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/15/sense-and-sensitivity-ii-the-sequel/#more-54790
“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”
– Thomas Jefferson
Source:
The Week That Was: 2012-1-14 (January 14, 2012)
Brought to You by SEPP (www.sepp.org)
The Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
______________
I wonder if Thomas Jefferson could have ever foreseen this age of billion-dollar-funded enviro-radical groups and their lapdog scientists, all loyal fanatics of “the Cause”, lying, cheating and fabricating false evidence to gain fame, fortune and political power through the fraud of catastrophic humanmade global warming.
I wonder if Jefferson could have foreseen otherwise respectable leaders of government and industry meekly acquiescing to these falsehoods, for fear of harsh but nonsensical criticism from utterly ignorant enviro-radicals and their odious fellow-travellers.
I am sure that Jefferson would have had a great deal of difficulty believing this could ever happen in his America, but then, in those days men were made of finer mettle – that is why they were worthy of being called men.
The Republicans are likely to lose. The idiots still don’t get it. Ron Paul supporters do not share neo-con ideals and in all likelihood will be takeoff votes. I couldn’t blame them one bit. Bill, spin that one!
I would like to see the prissy Sean Hannity whining and Dick Morris’ lips exploded.
Poptech says:
January 19, 2012 at 1:55 am
There is a translation question, but in context and on many other occasions, it is clear that the Iranian leadership means to eradicate Israel, not just ‘the regime’. See here:
http://www.jcpa.org/text/ahmadinejad2-words.pdf
Look at the photos of banners on missiles and buses on pp. 13-14, with slogans like this:
“Israel should be wiped out of the face of the world.”
Remember Chamberlain: “Peace in our time.”
/Mr Lynn
@Peter Kovachev
Thank you for continuing the dialogue
I feel that we are not making good progress because we are merely exchanging assertions, not exchanging arguments with supporting material. Others have continued the conversation here on whether Iran is a threat. Paul is still being misunderstood if terms such as “isolationist” are being used for him–clearly our wars have isolated us more than anything else. Commerce seems to be a better route to influence–seems to have helped more than our bombs in Vietnam, for example. I don’t have the time and energy at the moment to argue–we have a long way to go to find common ground to base our discussion upon, but I do commend to you the use of antiwar.com for a variety of thoughtful perspectives. I also think that two movies available online are very challenging to our status quo: War Made Easy, and The War You Don’t See. Thank you for the exchange.
faithandphilosophy at hot mail
Mr Lynn says, “There is a translation question, but in context and on many other occasions, it is clear that the Iranian leadership means to eradicate Israel, not just ‘the regime’. [...]
Look at the photos of banners on missiles and buses on pp. 13-14, with slogans like this:
“Israel should be wiped out of the face of the world.””
I do not believe it is clear at all and it is disingenuous to misquote what he actually stated,
“The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, October 25, 2005
“Regime” can clearly mean the current government. When Bush said he wanted “regime change” he did not mean annihilation of the people of Iraq or the country of Iraq. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not post any such banners and I could not find a single news story reporting on those banners. There is no doubt there are groups of people in Iran who do not like Israel but that has nothing to do with what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said which was wildly distorted.
Regardless, if Israel feels so strongly about this then let them attack Iran – they have the military capability to do so.
Jan 18: 80 supporters and 31 opponents.
Jan 19: 65 supporters and 101 opponents.
“SOPA Opera Update: Opposition Surges”
http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/sopa-opera-update
Graphic:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/propublica/assets/images/sopa-opera-count.png
To Ron House, practice what you preach: “The Principle of Goodness is an exciting new understanding of ethics that takes account of the welfare of every sentient being. A new, gentler, caring future is in store for humanity and for our non-human friends who share the Earth with us. This site explores using the Principle of Goodness to bring about a new and better future for us all.”
To Wermet, a respectful question, but this law is not a new application in the domestic realm but the application of such domestic law to foreign violators. Now, if foreign violators are fronts for domestic agents, it may circle round.
For those who don’t think the taking of intellectual property is theft, maybe from the point of thieves it isn’t. But if there is no access to government to enforce one’s rights, well, then should we maybe drop into the war of the frontier? Or the solution of Howard Roark to the taking and abuse of his work in The Fountainhead?
I love the freedom of the Internet, and SOPA may be a bad bill, but some law will come, and if there aren’t better alternatives, then something worse may well make it through..
http://mashable.com/2012/01/20/sopa-is-dead-smith-pulls-bill/
world ‘s need free knowledge .