SOPA is the problem and not the solution

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by brownday • 15 years ago

50 14 15 years ago

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milkshakes• 15 years ago

(ashton kutcher) -- have other actors spoken out against sopa yet?

biturd• 15 years ago

Bieber has. Kutcher could do with a spelling and grammar check and actors shouldn't use the words "bad actor" dammit!

blhack• 15 years ago

If you're curious why Ashton Kutcher is commenting on this: a couple of years ago he got into tech venture funding. He has a financial interest (and also hopefully and ideological one) in seeing SOPA fail.

tomhoward• 15 years ago

Though as film/tv actor, he also has an interest in seeing it succeed - if SOPA will help the film/tv industry as its proponents claim.

It would be great to see some film/tv identities with more clear-cut loyalties to come out in opposition to SOPA.

Natsu2• 15 years ago

We need more people like him.

twainer• 15 years ago

SOPA is a disaster but there seems to be far too much groupthink going on to consider an obvious point: if people treated their internet with more respect we wouldn’t be ending up here.

Forget ‘copyrights’ - forget boogeyman #1 RIAA and boogeyman #2 TPB -- if there was even a modicum of respect for treating others - people who work hard to produce content - fairly, treating them the way you’d want to be treated yourself, things like SOPA would never have seen the light of day.

But instead we get movies posted to streaming and torrent sites before they are released. Entire albums leaked before they drop. iPhones jailbroken so apps can be ripped off. Game-consoles hacked so that people can play games without paying for the service. The list goes on and on and on. It’s a culture of petty thievery. The definition of sharing needs to change, for sure, but it's new definition will never be like the start of this paragraph.

What we have now is a totally unbalanced system. As noted elsewhere, it is like the older generation who thought a one-way relationship with planet earth was as reasonable as it was convenient - take whatever you need, dump whatever you don’t - nothing bad will ever come of it and if it does it’s always someone else’s problem.

“I don’t need to pay for this movie - plenty of people already have.” “I don’t need to recycle - so many people are already doing that.”

“So even if some bands don’t make it, there’ll always be other bands. They need to adapt” “We’ve got so many species, is it a big deal if we lose some? That’s evolution isn’t it?”

“I don’t feel bad ripping stuff off - I spend plenty of money on media anyway.” “I don’t feel bad about dumping garbage in the woods - I pay my taxes.”

When you live like that, you live with the consequences of having no regard for the balance of the system - and you reap the whirlwind you whip up.

I don’t support SOPA - but I also think the total lack of respect for the side of content-producers is a miserable state of affairs - and amounts to a enacted prejudice against people who produce content, shamefully defended with the language of equality and freedom. If one wants to release stuff for free and seed their own torrents - they have every right to choose that ‘business model’ - but to force that choice, to force artists into situations that make them into sharecroppers - is consumerism every bit as wicked and morally empty as capitalism has been. “Let them eat cake!” [Let them sell t-shirts] Does it make it okay because Ashton Kutcher says so? To cover his investments and enhance his street cred?

I don't have a solution for SOPA. I do have ideas about how to ease piracy in a positive way - but no idea stands up when most people don't give a damn - and they don't. Reading some of the exculpatory comments on SOPA/piracy threads has made that embarrassingly clear.

marshray• 15 years ago

if people treated their internet with more respect we wouldn’t be ending up here

No this is not clear thinking, here's why: it only takes one person to upload the prerelease movie. Any system where a 99% "respectful" rate of content-consumers is insufficient is unworkable under any scheme. Perhaps downloading is rampant among certain demographics, but there are open questions there (e.g. about the degree to which that may simply represent a pricing failure in an artificial monopoly-supply market).

Sorry to tell you this but, no, most people don't have a shred of respect for the handful of media conglomerates or their business model. They're notorious for ripping off the artists they supposedly "represent".

iPhones jailbroken so apps can be ripped off

I'm sorry to ask this, but are you just trolling? Everyone I know jailbreaks their iPhones and none of them are ripping off apps.

SOPA/PIPA represent a choice we have to make. Are we better off as a civilization with a happy entertainment industry and censorship-happy government or with a well-functioning and free Internet where an entrepreneur can start a website (and maybe even make a buck) without an army of lawyers?

It's pretty obvious to me it's the latter.

neilparikh• 15 years ago

By making a law like SOPA, the USA is making a decision on the behalf the entire world and forcing people in other countries to deal to deal with it, with no say in the matter.

I did not have say on the representatives in Congress (I'm in Canada), then why am I effected so drastically by laws made in the USA? Just because the ICANN is in the USA, does not mean that the USA should removing an entire website from the worldwide internet for failing to notice one piece of infringing content that was user-submitted.

SOPA is just too vague and not only targets sites which are specifically made for piracy, but also those simply made to allow user submissions, such as Youtube, where there a great amount of original content, not made for copyright infringement. This also targets new sharing platforms, including those not yet made. Launching a new sharing platform as a startup is going to be almost impossible under this law. If SOPA was more specific towards the sites that took part in rampant piracy (and did not discard the notion of innocent until proven guilty), I would be far more supportive of it than I am now.

The idea of the "internet" being disrespectful towards content creators is an uninformed generalization. The internet is a community anyone can be part. There are no formal requirements to be part of it, and as a result of that, there are going to be people, who will take part in such activities. Due to the fact that there no requirements to be part of the internet, it is not possible to make a claim about the internet as a whole.

Lastly, iPhone jailbreaking and game-console hacking is so the owner of the device has the freedom to use their device in the way they choose. On the iPhone, you can only install apps that are approved by Apple. There are quite a few apps that are really well made and innovative, that are not on the appstore because they did not fit Apple's guidlines. Jailbreaking is the only way to get these apps.While jailbreaking is often used for piracy, saying the entire practice is wrong is taking away the ability for users to control what they can use on their own device.

earbitscom3• 15 years ago

I couldn't agree more. The closer we get to overreaching legislation like SOPA, the angrier I get that the future of the internet I use is in jeopardy because other people can't stop acting with a misguided sense of entitlement.

I pay for what I want. In my world, people who create things of value get value in return. And yet, I have to live in a world where everyone is treated like criminals, while listening to people who contribute to the problem complain about evil "media conglomerates".

earbitscom3• 15 years ago

Ashton may be right about SOPA but he's wrong about the DMCA, and failure by the tech community to recognize the shortcomings of the DMCA is why media companies continue to take it upon themselves to propose new legislation that overreaches. The first step toward avoiding bills like SOPA is to recognize that the DMCA is not working, and then work together to fix it.

The problem with the DMCA is that not only are you asking artists, authors, independent labels, publishers and others to police the entire internet for their content, but there is no penalty for sites based on widespread infringement across multiple parties. Most of these companies and content creators do not have the means to sue these companies individually, nor would it be equitable. So, you get sites like Grooveshark who respond to takedown requests, then let the content go back up, then take it down, then let it go back up. No individual content creator or independent label has the means or motivation to sue them, and there is no penalty for infringing on a massive scale because there are only civil penalties. Only when the major labels no longer find it funny is there potential recourse, and then only for those labels, even though a massive amount of the value that was taken was from other creators. In the meantime, a massive business was built on the backs of copyrighted material - and they're right here in the US.

The route to addressing the shortcomings of the DMCA is two-fold:

- Centralize the way in which takedown requests are issued, tracked, processed and tallied. Score companies based on their compliance history and penalize them for repeat violations of the same content without requiring the content creator to drag them into court. Leverage government resources to penalize these companies and distribute the monetary penalties to all those who had to issue multiple takedown requests.

- Recognize that there are companies whose sole purpose is to provide access to infringing content, and that protecting the rights of content creators is more important than protecting the rights of these low-value companies. Once you've defined a very high threshold for identifying these parasitic companies, be prepared to shut them down.

Until these things happen, and also until the tech community stops defending piracy under the misguided banner of "free information", you're going to keep getting SOPA in its various forms year after year. Let's stop waiting for that to happen, and fix the DMCA.

I wrote more about that here: http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/a-real-alternative-to-s...

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

I wish I lived in the dreamworld where the primary problem with the DMCA is that it's too hard on IP owners.

earbitscom3• 15 years ago

It's too hard on everybody, and equally ineffective. If you don't think it's too hard for IP owners, talk to a couple independent labels.

SOPA is the problem and not the solution

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