Sopa and PIPPA

[BWPS]

I go on reddit.com a lot, the worst website ever made ever, don't go. So I am non-stop hearing people are mad at Hollywood for trying to fight this massive theft of the things they make. SOPA and PIPA are bad bills, but this whole stopping of piracy thing isn't something they just need to soak up. It's way too easy for anyone to steal every movie, show, and game they want. They'd be fools not to stop it. Why are people mad at them?

Hollywood makes the best stuff in the world (other than love and relationships) and charges a very good price for it. I saw so many incredible movies on a giant screen in HD this past year my face is still exploding. They charge very fair prices for it, too. Like Tomato said, I buy all the blurays of movies I enjoy (though definitely for action special effects movies the HD quality is worth it). They pushed some really vaguely worded bills to try to stop piracy. When they come back with a fair bill that lets them try to fight back against the spawn of the entitlement age feeling they have the RIGHT to download anything they want without paying, those jerks will scream against them and rally their pitchforks and do nothing because they obviously have no work ethic, they won't have good guys like Jimmy Wales and the Google Brothers to stop bills that only affect piracy. I'm not saying Hollywood isn't too tough, monopolistic, or anything like that, I know nothing about it. But people stealing are the bad guys in this fight, not the hardest working people in the world who put out amazing stuff that covers almost everyone's preference of entertainment. I mean I hate having to wait 11 seconds to get to the menu as much as anyone, but that's just one of the stupid justifications people use to help them feel better about stealing.

For people who used Megaupload to upload their stuff and lost it, that sucks. But it's a website  primarily used to help people mass distribute files to one another illegally, and the owners got rich off of people stealing and they knew it. Good riddance.

[Randomdays]

I half agree with most of that. Stealing is wrong, it should be stopped - true.

But that goes both ways. When you mention games, I don't know how many times I've bought a game that was buggy as hell, where it was admitted the publisher knew it waS buggy as hell, but was released  early to meet  deadline with the "we'll patch it later" mentallity. The installation of antipirate software, even before the EULA, that stays on your computer even if the game is uninstalled without your permission, and in most cases without your knowledge its even there. The new limited installs and always online needed even for solo play, turning the buyer into a renter. Lawsuits have been filed by the consumer and have been won - the courts saw who was in the wrong there.

Misleading the customer and treating them like crimianls is wrong as well, and we all know that 2 wrongs don't make a right.


For music, it never bothered them to overcharge you and force you to take what you don't want to get what you do. Luckily, the days of $20 plus full cds is gone.

I have the least grief with the movie industry, but calling them the "hardest working people in the world" seems a little overboard. there are good and bad folk everywhere, but overall, along with major sports, I think a lot of them are way overpaid and have too much ego. There are a lot of people in less glamorous professions working harder to just make ends meet and who receive little recognition. You might send some of your appreciation towards some school teachers buying supplies with their own money, or some of the military putting their lives on the line only to come home to a dismal job prospect.


Sorry, but I guess your post pushed a couple of buttons.

End of rant

[stumpy]

FWIW, I certainly don't condemn the entertainment industry for wanting a way to combat piracy. What I condemn is the use of heavy-handed tactics to push through a law that will have negative consequences for people who are not pirating others' IP while having relatively few consequences for the paradigmatic pirates whose business model is to make money by illegally streaming Hollywood movies from their Russian pirate sites. Doing something that's ineffective against the pirates when everyone knows it will be ineffective is pathetic. Using the force of law in a way that makes non-infringers deal with all sorts of negative fallout just to do something is, at the very least, irresponsible and, IMO, very wrong. The combination of the two is reprehensible and the pushers of SOPA/PIPA deserve much of the criticism they are getting.

(BTW, just to clarify a potential issue of bipolar fallacy here: The fact that the pirates are doing something wrong doesn't make SOPA backers into heroes and the fact that the SOPA backers are doing something wrong doesn't make the pirates heroes. As in many cases in the real world, the actions of both the Hatfields and the McCoys in a given controversy can be wrong and it logically consistent to condemn both of them while endorsing neither.)

Meanwhile, though I don't claim to be familiar with all of the case, and not speaking for anyone else, my problem with the megaupload situation is the lack of due process. And the fact that that lack of due process has already been adopted (even without SOPA/PIPA) in such cases is worrisome. Megaupload may well be dedicated to illegal downloads. If so, charge them civilly and criminally (if materially criminal behavior can be proven), then have a trial and, if they are convicted, then shut them down and do whatever can be done to make them reimburse those whose stuff they pirated. But, they were shut down and their domain names seized by the U.S. government without a trial. Basically, they were shut down on the basis of an accusation, and accusations are easy to make, even if this one turns out to be true. Lest anyone harbor the illusion that the government is careful and doesn't shut down sites unless they are certain they have violated the law, it is not at all hard to find cases where they have shut down sites that have done nothing wrong and even shut down sites on the basis of only allegedly having links to infringing sites. I can't condone a policy that allows that sort of presumption-of-guilt process, whether any given site is ultimately proven to be guilty or not.

[edited a typo]

[Figure Fan]

Apparently there's more to the Megaupload debacle than previously thought:

In December of 2011, just weeks before the takedown, Digital Music News reported on something new that the creators of #Megaupload were about to unroll. Something that would rock the music industry to its core. (http://goo.gl/A7wUZ)

I present to you... MegaBox. MegaBox was going to be an alternative music store that was entirely cloud-based and offered artists a better money-making opportunity than they would get with any record label.

"UMG knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations directly to consumers while allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings," MegaUpload founder Kim 'Dotcom' Schmitz told Torrentfreak

Not only did they plan on allowing artists to keep 90% of their earnings on songs that they sold, they wanted to pay them for songs they let users download for free.

"We have a solution called the Megakey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free," Dotcom outlined. "Yes that's right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works."

https://plus.google.com/u/0/111314089359991626869/posts/HQJxDRiwAWq

[vamp]

https://www.eff.org/issues/acta

It appears our work isn't done yet. Same goal (if what I read is correct, it could be worse), and a broader reach.

[BlueBard]

https://www.eff.org/issues/acta

It appears our work isn't done yet. Same goal (if what I read is correct, it could be worse), and a broader reach.

Considering that treaties trump Federal law and are harder to reverse, I would be rightly concerned.  Treaties are a good thing, but not when they are wrongly used to circumvent due process.  I despise politicians who try to use treaties to destroy individual liberty.

All of these "schemes" have the same thing in common:  IP holders having the right to summarily demand ISP's to police content which they are not directly responsible for, with no compensation and no due process available to either the ISP or the alleged "pirate".

ISP's already have the right to restrict access based on their own Terms of Service agreements.  What they do not have is effective means of proactive enforcement or any effective means of establishing the truth of an infringement complaint.  In other words, they do not normally "snoop" on their customers' communications,  and they are not staffed to investigate infringement.  This is an expensive proposition, and somebody has to pay the price for it.

Unfortunately, I can't envision any good way to protect IP holders in a way that keeps big money from winning regardless of the merits of an infringement complaint.  The court system is the best recourse we have, but it's not perfect.

[vamp]

http://graphjam.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/acta.png

A little graphic to help explain ACTA. Yeah, it does seem much worse than SOPA or PIPPA.

[BentonGrey]

Man...this is rather horrifying.  We manage to defeat two pieces of dangerous legislation in our own country, only to immediately discover that another dangerous piece of legislation is already being put forward on the larger stage.  The fact that it is beyond our control and that this was happening in secret has me more than a little troubled.

[stumpy]

ACTA is awful, the fact that it is a result of policy laundering is even worse, and the notion that such a broad piece of legislation can be negotiated in secret and enacted without congressional debate or approval, instead sneaked in under the auspices of an "executive agreement", is completely toxic to the democratic process.

BTW, I am at least encouraged that many who professionally make their livings creating content have the broader perspective to see how harmful some of the proposed legislation is. From musician Jonathan Coulton's blog on SOPA (which I think is generally a good read):

I believe in copyright. I benefit from it. I don't want it to go away. I love that we have laws and people to enforce them. But if I had to give up one thing, if I had to choose between copyright and the wild west, semi-lawless, innovation-fest that is the internet? I'll take the internet every time.

[BentonGrey]

There may yet be hope in the ACTA debacle:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17125469