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Reddit
Founder Alexis Ohanian on CNBC: "Why is it that when Republicans and
Democrats need to solve the budget and the deficit, there's deadlock,
but when Hollywood lobbyists pay them $94 million dollars to write
legislation, people from both sides of the aisle line up to co-sponsor
it?"
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/ol56z/reddit_founder_alexis_ohanian_on_cnbc_why_is_it/
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SOPA protests planned by Google, Wikipedia and others on Jan. 18
Though the Stop Online Piracy Act has the support from the
likes of Hollywood, the music industry, and the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, many Silicon Valley firms say it effectively amounts to
censorship. To show their opposition to the bill, some sites are
planning a service blackout on Jan. 18. Hayley Tsukayama reports:
Wikipedia, Reddit and Boing Boing are planning to black out
their services Wednesday to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and the
Protect IP Act by showing users the bill’s effect on Web companies.
These companies object to language in the bills, which are aimed at
stopping online piracy on foreign Web sites, that grant the U.S.
government the right to block entire Web sites with
copyright-infringing content on them from the Internet.
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Floor
vote on S. 968 (Protect-IP Act/PIPA) is scheduled for January 24th.
Here is a list of all the senators' phone numbers. Give your two a call.
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/oktmo/floor_vote_on_s_968_protectip_actpipa_is/
Video recorder will be on, start talking and see how long the internet will remember.
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Chris Dodd’s emphatic 2010 pledge not to lobby once he finally left
the Senate after 30 years was prompted by widespread speculation that he
spent the last two years in office blatantly shilling for corporate
interests in order to ensure a prosperous post-Congress career.
Particularly during the 2010 financial reform debate — when it became
increasingly apparent that allegations of improper benefits from Countrywide Financial would make his re-election close to impossible — Dodd served on multiple occasions as chief spokesman for, and defender of, the interests of Wall Street and corporate America. Though sleazy and grotesque, it was therefore entirely unsurprising when it was announced
last March that Dodd would “be Hollywood’s leading man in Washington,
taking the most prestigious job on K Street”: Chairman and CEO of the
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), “whose perks include a
$1.2 million-a-year salary and getting to attend the Academy Awards
ceremony.”It is in that capacity that Dodd has become the leading public
spokesman and private lobbyist for the truly dangerous PROTECT IP Act
(PIPA) in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House,
bills craved by the industry that pays him. These bills, which vest the
power in large corporations and the government to seize and shutdown
websites with little or no due process in the name of stopping piracy, pose the greatest dangers
to Internet freedom of any bill in the last decade, at least. So
serious are these threats that they have prompted a rare — and inspiring
— protest movement from numerous large Internet companies and blogs in the form of an Internet “blackout” today.In his SOPA advocacy, Dodd has resorted to holding up Chinese censorship as the desired model, mouthing the slogans of despots, and even outright lying.
Like virtually all extremist, oppressive bills backed by large
industry, SOPA and PIPA have full bipartisan support; among its
co-sponsors are Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and GOP Rep. Lamar Smith,
with many Senators from both parties in support and Harry Reid pushing it forward (to its credit, the White House expressed opposition to several of the worst provisions, though has not yet issued a veto threat).http://www.salon.com/2012/01/18/chris_dodds_paid_sopa_crusading/singleton/
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Sopaman, Defender of Copyright Crooks and Gasbag Congressmen
RIAA Reminds Us Why We Hate Them With Obnoxious Smartass Tweet
The One Wikipedia Page You Can Actually Read Today
This Is What an Internet Protest Looks Like
Microsoft Now Opposes SOPA, But Only 'As Currently Drafted'
The Day The LOLcats Died: The Ultimate SOPA Protest Song
How To Access Wikipedia During Tomorrow's Blackout Protest
The MPAA Says Blackout Protests Are an Abuse of Power
'Retreats' Delay SOPA Hearings To February -
Money, power, and Congress: how lobbyists will determine the fate of SOPA
I used to be a lobbyist.
When I first strolled the long halls of the Rayburn House office
building, a marble monolith of bureaucracy, I was overcome with a
surreal feeling of wonderment. There's a lot of history here, and
occasionally I found myself swept up in what felt like the entire span
of democratic civilization. Tourists stand, mouths agape and camera
shutters firing, witnessing the same veneer of mythical magnitude. In
D.C., romanticism often trumps reality.This, I thought, this is where everything happens.
This is where noble members of the public trust harness enlightened
traditions and institutions to advance the common interest.But then I met the members of Congress.
I quickly learned that our elected officials are not demigods solely
focused on the collective good — they’re just people. To inflate them
into anything else trivializes their real accomplishments at best, and
blinds us from the reality of Congress at worst. Lawmakers may have
their own parochial interests or lofty causes, but first and foremost
they're always looking for votes. To get votes, they need attention and
money -- something that corporate lobbyists can dish out in abundance.
The end product of this system is lawmaking that's less about making
good public policy and more about appeasing the hands that feed — as a
result, powerful corporations with deep pockets gain unparalleled access
to members of Congress, and they help set the agenda. That agenda is
why bills like SOPA and PIPA gain such traction — they were delivered to
Congress in return for money and votes.
You don't even have to dig deep into the history of SOPA and PIPA to find blatant conflicts of interest: According to Politico,
Allison Halatei, former Deputy Chief of Staff to House Judiciary
Chairman Lamar Smith, and Lauren Pastarnack, a Senate Judiciary
Committee Senior Aide, just accepted jobs with two of the lobbying firms
backing SOPA and PIPA. Halatei and Pastarnack helped write the bills.
Halataei is now the National Music Publisher's Association chief
liaison to Congress, and Pasternak is now the director of government
relations for the MPAA.It gets worse: Chris Dodd, who served as a senator for thirty years, is
now the Chairman and CEO of the MPAA. As a senator, Dodd swore he'd
never take money from lobbyists, but he now reaps a $1.5 million base
salary and a $100 million lobbying budget. Lobbying is one art form the
entertainment industry doesn’t mind investing heavily in: SOPA’s 32
co-sponsors received four times more
in campaign contributions from the entertainment industry than from the
tech industry. We shouldn’t be surprised that SOPA is as bad as it is;
we should be surprised it’s not worse. -
The sole argument Dodd has here is this, and I'm not kidding: You,
internet websites, are engaged in an "abuse of power" by taking down
your own websites. Only the MPAA gets to decide when to take down your websites. So shut up.That's what the whole law is about: giving the largest entertainment
companies themselves the right to preemptively shut down any effing
website they want, under unproven claims of "infringement", and leaving
it to the poor pisser on the other side to try to prove their innocence
in court battles after the fact. And why shouldn't they try for that?
We are for the most part there already, after all; Congress has steadily
been ceding government authority and mandating court deference to
private industries over and over again, so getting it over with and just
letting a top handful of companies preemptively decide who they think
might be breaking the law, then giving them heightened
government-assisted abilities to destroy the "offender" in question before
actually having to prove their case—well, that seems like a logical
next step, doesn't it? The true genius of it, however, is the added
bonus of being able to threaten any internet site that even has a link
to the supposed offender, or that allows users to post content that is
not properly pre-censored to remove "potential" copyright claims
according to whatever guessed criteria these companies later come up
with. If the MPAA decides you haven't been taking explicit steps to
"confirm" that no users or commenters are posting things it deems
naughty, that's it: you're shut down as well. That's the real kicker,
the call for preemptive, universal monitoring of all posted
internet content. Forget the technical incompetence of the bill; the
intent and logic alone is a megacorporate fantasy come to life.
Preemptive shutdowns! Seizing assets! A required level of user policing
that is objectively impossible for most sites to reasonably meet (including, hilariously, the sites of the MPAA-belonging, SOPA-supporting studios themselves, you unrelenting dipshits), thereby ensuring a rich and unending stream of new criminals! -
how can we effectively boycott the entertainment industry?
ohhh .... now this might get interesting...*rub palms in evil way* -
Talk about everything that is wrong with government.Leo Hindery, a major Democratic donor whose New York media
private equity firm owns cable channels, said Obama might have reason to
worry about his entertainment industry fundraising base.“[The bill] is an issue that has no business being decided
politically – by anybody on one side or the other – and the fact that it
might be becoming a political issue is unfair to the content
producers,” said Hindery, who’s contributed more than $3 million to
Democratic candidates and groups.I got the feeling, this is going to turn into a political money scandal soon. The net starts sniffing money trails and pulling thread. Soon documents, emails, servers contents are going to be posted.
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In Fox exclusive,
ex-Sen. Dodd -- Hollywood's top lobbyist -- is threatening to cut off
campaign $ to Obama 2012 over anti-piracy bill #SOPA
https://twitter.com/edhenrytv/statuses/160082134516772864?_escaped_fragment_=/edhenrytv/status/160082134516772864#!/edhenrytv/status/160082134516772864
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Recreating famous Abbey Road scene could violate new UK copyright ruling
A ruling in the UK Patents County Court this month has deemed
it unlawful to copy "a substantial part [of] a photographic work," even
where the copying article is actually a separate photo taken by a
different photographer. Such were the facts in Temple Island Collections Ltd v New English Teas Ltd and Another (No. 2),
where Judge Birss QC found that you don't have to have a "facsimile
reproduction" of a photograph to be in breach of its author's copyright.
In that case, New English Teas commissioned an image for use on its tea
containers, which the judge deemed was too similar to an earlier
photograph the company had tried to license. In both cases, a red
Routemaster bus is crossing Westminster Bridge in front of the Houses of
Parliament, with some post-processing work done to blank out the sky
and desaturate the background (you can see both images below, with the
"copy" following the original).http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/26/2736010/uk-photography-copyright-ruling
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What's really odd about this case is the defence didn't raise the Creation Records 1997 case as precedent...In 1997 The Sun newspaper pretty much recreated (almost identically) the front cover of the latest Oasis album cover (the one with a white Rolls on it). Creation Records claimed that this recreation was copyright infringement, but the court held that it wasn't as no actual copying was done of the original - they rebuilt the scene from scratch.These photos don;t even look the same, and the "recreation" is a Photoshop amalgam of four different photos created specifically to not infringe the copyright of the original. It doesn't even look that similar. It appears that in the time between 1997 and 2012, the copyright lobby’s money has been well spent on convincing people that copyright extends far further than actually started in the law.This is utterly unworkable in practice (whatever side of the copyright fence you sit on), so I imagine it will be overturned pretty quickly
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How are they going to enforce this? What happens if somebody creates a database of all common camera angles of all city landmark, wouldn't that person practically owns entire city image copyright?
Heck, i for one will run around and taking picture of every London city bus (registration number) and claim all images with london city bus is mine. The background image is merely generic additive.
...whoa..that is seriously evil...
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So the ACTA negotiations and "manoeuvres" have been so completely corrupt in the EU that the their own rapporteur for ACTA has resigned over the ordeal. Another great example of our politicians siding with the citizens then...
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