Sorry about my rage post earlier, here’s a more reasonable post about my feelings on SOPA amd PIPA…
Gabe Newell, the head of Valve, which I believe is one of the greatest video game companies in existence today, had this to say about the problems of pirating:
“The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates… . If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
Why do these large corporations seek shelter from the government when they have no on else to blame but themselves if piracy is a problem to them? These music and movie industries are in trouble because they’ve put themselves there. These people who think they can overcharge for movies and music, then get completely defensive and offended when others offer their services at a better rate and quality than they can provide.
Do they really think that they can stop pirates? I don’t believe even they’re stupid enough to believe so. The internet has millions of ways to share files outside Megaupload. All the government has done is mildly inconvenient pirates and captured seven people, in comparison to the millions of providers and the billions of downloaders that are out there. They did it for show, I believe, wanted to flex their big government muscles and act like they’re in power of the situation. They essentially cut off the head of a Hydra in an attempt to scare away the Hydra later.
I believe the motto of capitalism and especially the United States is: ‘Competition is the life-blood of the economy’, right? Well, Hollywood, you’ve met your largest competitor. It’s up to you now, do you adapt or do you die?Accurate. Piracy won’t go away. Most of us who do download, and those who share the files know lots of different ways to transfer them. The hydra is a good metaphor, because if you don’t know a hydra is a mythological beast with many many heads, and every time you cut off a head more grow back in it’s place. So they cut down Megaupload. Does the government really think they’ve even touched the tip of the iceberg?
A more-detailed explanation of ACTA
WATCH THIS. Just watch.
WATCH.
THIS IS LAST ENEMY.
This is V for Vendetta, this is EVERY big brother horror story, every dark future written by any author, imagined by any artist… and it’s happening now.
Sorry to flood your dashes but we need to get educated, get signing and get awareness… Wiki and Reddit and everyone need to do for Acta what we did for Sopa.
(Source: thisisbrucebanner)
Let’s be honest, the people behind SOPA/PIPA are smart, very smart. They know without a doubt the bill will not put a dent in piracy. The kind of people who pirate and run piracy services are far too smart to be brought to heel by mere legislation and have continued to elude the best efforts of the US and it’s lackeys. SOPA/PIPA exists for one reason, to protect an aging and crooked business model, dominated by large corporations who are slowly but surely being eroded by people like you and me. These corporations want to stifle the internet because the internet is the biggest threat to their dominance that has ever existed. For decades, through control of radio stations and television channels, corporations have made bank, but now, all the money in the world can’t save them from guys in their bedrooms and home-made studios creating content that is more relevant to the current generation. The variety the big media corporations refused to provide because it “wasn’t profitable”, is now being provided by hundreds of thousands of amateur, semi-pro and professional independent creators and directors and we’re all competing for the most important currency of all, time. The time you spend watching our material is time you don’t spend watching theirs. It’s money directly out of their pocket that they could have been earning before the internet came along and that’s the hilarious thing about this whole deal. Piracy is not what’s killing their profits, completely legitimate competition from the internet is. They use the cause of “fighting piracy” as a trojan horse to force through bought and paid for legislation to kill independent content creation for good because they can see the end is nigh for their aging and increasingly irrelevant business model. They know they cannot win legitimately, so they do what they’ve always done, exploit a corrupt political system to bully and extort their way to what they want.
This is what SOPA/PIPA are really about and that is why you should oppose them. You are standing up for what your generation represents, just as previous generations have done the same on a slew of different issues. As much as those in power would like us to believe we are the apathetic, lazy generation. The truth is we are anything but and that scares the shit out of them.
(Source: cynicalwitch)
Did anyone else see this on Reddit?
It’s not a waiting game, it’s a game of poker. Lamar Smith has a royal flush and few people know it.
SOPA may pass. It may not. He doesn’t care, and it doesn’t matter. The MPAA and RIAA started working on their legislative strategy to pass a new anti-piracy bill in late 2010. SOPA was designed to raise the noise. Everyone is playing right into the entertainment industries hand. The lobbyists are laughing manically at the ignorance of the mob. Even Wikipedia and reddit have played into it.
What people don’t know about is the ace: H.R.1981, the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 which is lying in wait. It’s not complete. You see, PCIP is not contestable because it’s about protecting children. They can, and very well might, copy and paste the full text of SOPA to the end of PCIP. That’s the backup. That’s the deal that was struck with entertainment industry lobbyists. We will try to push this anti-piracy bill. It probably won’t work. Don’t worry, we can pass it under an anti-child pornography bill.
There are two things which no Congressman will risk supporting: terrorism and child pornography. There can be no opposition, no discussion. Any anti-piracy law can ALWAYS be reframed as an anti-child pornography bill and it will pass, without even discussion. It will have the full support of the House (minus Ron Paul), the full support of the Senate, and most importantly the full support of the American people. NO ONE wants to risk being called a pedophile.
The entertainment industry has finally caught up with technology. They understand how it works. It took them 15 years, but they know what DNS is. They are going to exploit a fundamental problem with the way DNS is centralized and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. They have found an error in the very architecture of the Internet. The solution, from a free speech standpoint is not to fight it politically. The solution is the fix the error.
We must move to a decentralized system of DNS. It is not impossible. It requires some new thinking and a re-architecture of some web services, but it must be done if we want the Internet, as we know it today, to exist in 5 or 10 years.
and they mostly talk about the things they won’t be able to watch or listen to, but it’s much more serious than that.
- You will be punished for any copyrighted you share, even if it’s accidental (That means that all of those recording artist that got started by singing covers on youtube would have been in violation, Beiber. If you post a video of anything and there’s a popular song in the background, censored. )
- Fortune 500 companies, Big Pharma, and Hollywood would have the power to demand small start-up companies online be shut down or fined into oblivion if they feel that they’re not doing their censoring correctly.
- Sites will be held responsible, or even shutdown, for anything that any user posts.
- With ACTA, governments will have the power to monitor you and your family’s actions through your internet provider to make sure that you’re not violating copyrights.
These things are serious and they’re being kept quiet and voted on today. SOPA/PIPA may only effect US companies, but ACTA will effect 39 countries. ACTA is scary. Take action and stay informed.
(Source: superkianagalaxy)
ThePirateBay’s press release in regards to SOPA and PIPA.
