And what if something like “conservapedia” is your main source of information? Let’s go beat up some people (I’m meta today).
How many have actually read the bills? And how many are getting there information from some third party?
add ?banner=none to wikipedia urls.
I have. It’s a pile of horse-shit. Not that that is rare with new bills.
It’s especially obvious with stuff like the internet when nobody seems to have a clue how things even work on the internet.
Majority of U.S. congressmen and congresswomen are old, and many just recently started using the internet. George Bush didn’t even use the internet as president, and he was president until 2009.
Their mental-model of how the internet works was made famous by the quote “It’s a series of tubes!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8XSo0etBC4
For them the internet is either Wikileaks, Google or where congressmen go naked on cam.
These people don’t care about the internet. For them it’s of as much importance as microwave popcorn, or LED lightbulbs. They have no vision of how the internet is changing and will change society. The internet is communication, information sharing, an information highway, if you start building walls in the middle of that road the traffic won’t go as it used to.
The people in congress don’t have a clue what they vote on most of the time, never read any of the bills. Technocrats, assistants and lobbyists write all this stuff, all with their own agenda, then the congressmen are told “this is what you should vote for because it gives you this”, and thousands of pages of legal nonsense text are approved into law because it either sounds patriotic or gives that politician some prestige.
Congress should be dissolved, all laws negated, and start from scratch.
As vile, nasty, and corrupt as Stevens was, and as funny and crotchety as that remark sounded … am I the only one that talks about a network link as a “pipe”? I mean sure, it may add capacity easier than a sewer or water system, but it is more like tubes than a big truck…
Grumble grumble how do I embed youtube videos in this chatty-gizmotron pinup-board thing again?
Okay, this is just fudging annoying.
English Wiki: Gone.
Practically all my anime sites: Gone.
The Daily WTF: Blacked out in FAVOR of SOPA. -_- (EDIT: Seems to be a joke?)
Information on almost all other pages.
At least make the fudging “blackout” optional, at least for non-Americans! Stop forcing the SOPA meme already!
Yeah Jesse Ventura also said this, that is also impossible to read it all, because its just so much; they bombard the guys with bills - and most of it just gets through.
+9000. Absolutely.
Many people have pointed out anyway, that most of the laws are just there so that there is more work for lawyers and politicians and whatnot. Bureaucracy to the max D=
So I guess almost all laws today are about more bullshit bureaucracy, more surveillance, more governmental control, less freedom or a combination.
Of course written in ambiguous/vague english, so that on the one hand the bill can pass, and later they can abuse its power. Like with SOPA.
The scariest thought is…
They know exactly what they’re doing.
OR
They don’t have a clue what they’re doing.
I don’t know which one is scarier.
Yeah. Most likely a bunch of stupid opportunistic ignorants and a handful of clever puppet masters.
What gets me is how the US are trying to drag the rest of the world into managing their domestic political affairs. I can’t stress this highly enough but apart from being nothing to do with us, most of the rest of the world find it ethically challenging to perform a “dirty” protest against a foreign government’s domestic affairs. (The US, of course, famously doesn’t find it ethically challenging, which goes a long way to explaining how this rather crazy state of affairs has come about).
I always enjoy sticking my neck out with an opinion that everyone else flames, but I don’t do it naively or just to wind people up.
Bottom line is, for me, SOPA is not really a bad thing. With any luck if (by some quirk of democracy) this bill gets passed in the Senate then hopefully a few European - or even UK! - rivals will spring up to fill the void. So hurrah for us.
Cas 
The fact of the matter is that if the bill passes, it will become illegal to link to sites referring to “illegal material”. It’s hard to imagine how any internet company is supposed to operate under those restrictions. I mean, good bye Google.
Most likely a bulk of the internet companies in the U.S. will emigrate out of U.S. jurisdiction. But then again, U.S. does control ICANN, so google.com could be confiscated. And that’s where I worry about region-splitting of the internet, Europe would create it’s own ICANN level agency, and Google could register there. But I guess that wouldn’t be any better, because it will always be under politicians control.
Perhaps we’ll be run underground with our internet, like people in the Soviet union were run underground with their political beliefs. In 10-20 years it will even be illegal to own a computer, because you might be pirating. That’s where we’re heading? How far will this go?
Well a distributed version of DNS can be done and there is even one out there now based off cash hashing aka bitcoin (different set of coins). However it can be even easier. Locally we can just stop using US top level name servers… cut them out of the loop and just have EU nameservers or something, even US folks could use them.
Either way if such a thing was really needed, alternatives would happen pretty fast. I think sometimes people forget that the internet is run by lots of people. We a very adaptable and can be very inventive when the need arises.
BTW in NZ we had the 3 strikes law pushed through under emergency powers granted to deal with the Christchurch earthquake. What the hell does copyright have to do with a frikken earthquake.
No, that’s not going to happen. Just scaremongering. As far as linking to infringing content is concerned - as if I care. I could do with Google being taken to task over it. Have a look at the situation from four perspectives:
US based IP holders
Non-US based IP holders
US based, er, “non-IP-holders”
Non-US based “non-IP-holders”
Now Google for a torrent of the full version of Revenge of the Titans. Which group do I fall into and what do you think I’d like Google to do about it?
The way I see it is that the internet was like one big Woodstock. The drugs are wearing off now and everyone’s got to go back to work.
Cas
While I totally support the view that piracy does not help authors or game writers at all. I also believe that there is no amount of laws that will fix or even deter all that much piracy.
So as developers (ok so I haven’t released anything…Yet) I think we just have to accept the reality of the internet and the reality of piracy. We cannot stop it, as indies devs we can’t afford to use whatever legal frameworks the big corps push, so either we need fans that pay anyway, or we need to work some clean almost not DRM, DRM. In particular I think always online type games are going to be our longer term future.
Personally i don’t really like it all that much. But i would prefer this to some “pirate tax” that then get distributed like broadcasting copyrights do (aka legal cartel). Since we are small we will never be fairly represented this way anyway. And even if we are I hate the idea of government supported “art”.
I also want some sane copyright terms. Life + 50 years or whatever, is just plain ridiculous.
And don’t get me started on patents.
You have my sympathy over RoTT being pirated, but do everyone else deserve to lose their freedoms over it?
I see piracy from two angles. There’s the unjustifiable one, and then there’s the justifiable one.
RoTT being pirated is unjustifiable, because anyone can actually purchase it legally online without hassle, and you’re not withholding it from anyone.
However, when it comes to content like movies and TV shows, I know from own experience being located in remote Iceland that trying to watch your favorite TV show means you have to resort to something … filthy as bit torrents. TV shows are usually shown a year late here, in reduced quality because the couple of broadcast channels here still broadcast in SD, and they don’t even broadcast 10% of the shows available to the American public. So, I cannot view my favorite TV show here legally, and I cannot purchase it legally, it’s made inaccessible to me because of the distribution model. If I try to access sites that allow Americans to watch the shows online for free (like Hulu) I get “Sorry, you’re not in the frigging United State”. Even trailers are made inaccessible to me because of my geographical location.
So, pirating content from someone withholding it is fully justifiable in my mind. Unfortunately, this is the case in (probably) majority of the torrent traffic. This is the studios/distributors/copyright holders own fault for sticking to an outdated distribution in the digital age, they could be streaming this online, they could be selling all those TV shows online on Youtube for couple of bucks a piece and make much more money off of it than they do today. But they don’t, because they think in regions, countries, broadcast channels, distribution rights, etc. etc. The internet doesn’t care about that, and that’s why they hate the internet.
Thought I should add, my computer teacher just said she was in favor of SOPA.
-Nathan
Appel, I don’t think you made a very good defence there.
Cas
From what I’m seeing in the responses, many people are making assumptions what these bills (SOPA & PIPA) are, and making quick knee-jerk reactions. (which isn’t unexpected of any group).
From what I’ve gathered from the bill (not very good a legalese), this is Hollywood’s attempt to get pirated material in other countries. They would prefer to shut down sites like bit torrent (but they can’t), so they want to cut off access to the site, and be able to go after the holder of the account that is posting the pirated material. This is more of an anti-bit torrent bill then destroy the internet.
off topic - Getting rid of Congress will throw us towards a dictatorship. Giving one man all that power is bad. You should look up how the US government is suppose to work before you says stuff like that. It’s the abuse of power and changes of how government works that is the problem.