SOPA lives—and MPAA calls protests an "abuse of power"

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/sopa-livesand-mpaa-calls-protests-an-abuse-of-power.ars

by john2373 • 15 years ago

447 155 15 years ago

Helianthus2• 15 years ago

Now that we're playing their game, it's only natural that we get hit with the political soundbite insults that survive not a moment's scrutiny. Battle won, war ongoing... but maybe we can start shouting insults too.

Only ours will have the weight of truth.

nkassis• 15 years ago

Yeah and what does Dodd and the MPAA call those stupid warnings and crap they add at the beginning of every movie telling us we are thief etc. ?

If you don't know what I mean, here is a funny parody of these warnings: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

The Hypocrisy is at an all new level.

scott_w• 15 years ago

Oh the irony...

Remind me, the next time I write to my MP, that I'm abusing my power and trying to subvert democratically elected representatives.

bad_user• 15 years ago

The democratic way to get your voice heard is through lobbying and huge donations. Everybody knows that.

Lagged2Death• 15 years ago

What would be the other reasons to have power?

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1997-08-04/

sek2• 15 years ago

The bully plays the victim....

joering1• 15 years ago

well, the founding fathers were called terrorist too -- both by English establishment when singing DOI on 7/4, and even recently by FEMA trainers.

I think its good to see them being angry. It shows we getting somewhere while they can't get anywhere other than bitch about the whole thing.

spudlyo• 15 years ago

The dung-stained dog reproaches the chaff-stained dog.

polemic• 15 years ago

"some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users..."

I wonder if the MPAA has heard of DRM. Of course, said 'interests' have evaluated the cost of annoying their customers against the social and economic cost of SOPA and make their own decision.

"... or turn them into their corporate pawns"

Because, in the eyes of the MPAA, information is bad and/or people are stupid.

"It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today."

Using their market freedom to protect their market freedom? How dare they!

Etc.

"...designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals."

Yes, the poor and weak American elected official must be protected from the wrath of the informed populous.

Le Sigh.

dgreensp• 15 years ago

Your comment is obviously just a gimmick designed to punish Congress.

jfoutz• 15 years ago

Ya know, for a 30 billion dollar market (disks: http://www.degonline.org/ + tickets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_the_United_States), they're getting a lot of special attention.

jlcx• 15 years ago

"Abuse of power," say the people who are bribing politicians to break the Internet in an attempt to preserve their outdated business model.

chernevik2• 15 years ago

"It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests."

Man, I HATE it when companies do that.

nostromo• 15 years ago

What I love about that quote is it could clearly be used to condem the PSAs they've been playing in theaters and tacking on DVDs quite some time now. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE9-W9JNjio

X-Istence• 15 years ago

That anti-piracy ad makes me want to put a bullet through the brain pan.

Nothing in that ad is going to deter me from pirating. Just like the you wouldn't download a car commercials that are made fun of. If I could download a car I would do it in a heartbeat...

elithrar• 15 years ago

> What I love about that quote is it could clearly be used to condem the PSAs they've been playing in theaters and tacking on DVDs quite some time now. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE9-W9JNjio

Those lovely, piracy prevention notices/copyright infringement notices on the Blu-Ray's I've purchased. That can't be skipped.

felipemnoa• 15 years ago

The cheat will always cry that he's being cheated.

pyre3• 15 years ago

But the 'honest man' will turn the other cheek?

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

Wasn't it the users that strongarmed most sites into publicly protesting?

andrewflnr• 15 years ago

Shh. You'll break the reality distortion field.

SeanDav• 15 years ago

Anyone here think they managed to write that line with a straight face?

chernevik2• 15 years ago

I do. The most frightening effect of political rhetoric is the disruption of the rhetorician's ability to think.

See Orwell, "Politics and the English Language."

rpedroso• 15 years ago

I thought that bit was really interesting. The MPAA and other SOPA supporters adamantly maintain that the law would only serve to enforce copyright infringement. Is Chris Dodd trying to say that Google, Wikipedia, etc. have an interest in preserving piracy? Or, more likely, is this simply a rhetorical contradiction?

libraryatnight• 15 years ago

I know there are blackouts, and boycotts of other SOPA supporters, but I would love it if there were a significant boycotting of the going to the movies and purchasing dvds/blurays.

I know it's unlikely, but this organization could use a reminder we're not just political opposition, we're part of their customer base.

daemin• 15 years ago

Well that may just play into their hands instead, as they (the MPAA etc) would be able to go "look, sales are down, see how much damage these foreign pirates are doing to our companies!".

Currently the statistics say otherwise, but good luck getting anyone in a place of power to acknowledge them.

darkane• 15 years ago

That's a double-edged sword. If a significant portion of the population adamantly boycotted any particular industry, their response would be to claim piracy as the cause and use it as ammunition for their argument.

It's nearly impossible to win an argument when one side is so willing to not only lie, but engineer those lies to manipulate a population that doesn't know any better (including the folks making decisions on behalf of that population).

stonemetal• 15 years ago

I know there is RIAA-less music and people have made RIAA-less music discovery services. Is there a MPAA-less movie industry?

icebraining2• 15 years ago

Most non-US based movie industries? MPAA is composed of just six studios:

    MPAA’s members are the six major U.S. motion picture studios
    Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
    Paramount Pictures Corporation
    Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc.
    Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
    Universal City Studios LLC
    Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

sdkmvx• 15 years ago

Making good music can be done by a few sufficiently talented people in a garage, and good enough microphones to record that aren't that expensive. Making good movies requires hundreds of people to cooperate, a huge time commitment, and equipment (cameras, film, lighting, sound, editing software/hardware, actors(!), et cetera). There is the indie movie industry, and it can certainly be done for significantly less than what Hollywood spends on feature films, but making a good movie is still significantly harder than making a good song.

Your best bet for MPAA-less movies are non-US movies and independent movies. However, I don't think indie movies will ever become as widespread as indie music.

shingen• 15 years ago

It's about time to actually begin punishing Hollywood for the evil shit they're doing. It's not enough to just respond in defense when they try, time and time again, to destroy the Internet.

It's time for a boycott, along with a large campaign, something along the lines of: Americans against Hollywood. It's necessary to turn their public image into a giant black mark that nobody wants associated with.

sek2• 15 years ago

The first comment on ars was very interesting, lets lobby for transparent accounting practices in the Movie business.

It is incredible what they do, they almost never pay taxes this way and a lot of people at the bottom get screwed. It is really painful to hear when they argue with the poor workers and blame the internet.

schwabacher2• 15 years ago

You know they can turn that right back around on the tech industry, right?

walru• 15 years ago

Good grief. Have we gone back to third grade?

Funnily enough, this is the same attitude GoDaddy copped just as the shit started to hit the fan.

Tomorrow should prove to be fun.

tytso• 15 years ago

Hmmm.... what about the abuse of power by the Copyright Lobby pouring millions of millions of dollars into the legislator's campaigns and PAC's? That kind of lobbying is OK, while net.lobbying isn't?

Sigh...

gojomo5• 15 years ago

The 'abuse of power' claim will not seem absurd to many of the casual users of blacked-out sites.

Take Wikipedia, for example. To the extent users are aware of Wikipedia as a cohesive unit, they probably assumed that its highest value was to inform people, always working through controversies/technical-problems/legal-problems/etc. to achieve that goal. Wikipedia has been granted credibility via that understanding.

In a way, it's a bit like a doctor's duty, to treat even those they dislike. Or a lawyer's, to defend even criminals.

The blackout sends a message that, for at least 24 hours, lobbying on one topic is a higher duty than informing people about everything else.

Of course, as an entity sovereign over its own operations and property, Wikipedia has the "power" and right to do what it wants.

But Wikipedia has earned another dimension of "power" that's been freely granted to it by readers, based on their estimation of its mission. That power is somewhat conditional, and it's that power that even a well-intentioned blackout could be seen as abusing and undermining.

As of the day of the blackout, Wikipedia is no longer providing information like air, free to all. It's rationing information as power, to be withheld occasionally for political advantage.

kingkawn2• 15 years ago

Your point about information rationing as power is valid, but there is a fundamental threat to the existence of the internet as is, and I think given that wikipedia relies on that freedom its important for them to make this point firmly.

I don't think law and medicine are good comparisons here.

Lawyers should defend people they dislike because they believe in the value of the adversarial system in teasing out justice from subjectivity.

Doctors treat all people because there is no credible way to value one life over another that does not ultimately trace its source to prejudice.

Wikipedia sees SOPA as a fundamental threat to itself and the internet in general. Users of the internet should be made aware of the stakes. Nobody will die or lose their freedom from Wikipedia strongly making this point to its users.

(A slight caveat being that most doctors I know turn to wikipedia/google multiple times a day for clarifications of diagnoses or to provide hypotheses for a given set of symptoms that they hadn't previously considered. I guess someone could die from the absence of this resource, but mostly doctors use them because its easier than logging into one of the medical databases and more up-to-date).

gojomo5• 15 years ago

'Making aware' does not require withholding service.

I tend to think any line of reasoning that begins, "this is such a fundamental threat to our survival that normal practice must be discarded" is a signifier of panicked groupthink, most common in war and campaign season, but that's just me.

As of today, Wikipedia is an always-on information utility. As of Thursday, it will be also understood as an occasional lobbyist/information-withholding-disciplinarian.

And I hadn't thought about the effect on medical/safety reference during the blackout period until earlier today. Given the large numbers of professionals and laypeople who rely on Wikipedia (far more than they should!), it's possible someone somewhere will die because of the blackout.

updated to add:

The health risk applies via the Reddit blackout, too. For some people, this is the support community from which they get urgent life guidance. See for example: http://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/nzfow/my_life_was_sa...

tikhonj• 15 years ago

This is more like a lawyer not taking a client that plans to sue the lawyer's firm. A lawyer is not going to defend a criminal if said lawyer is the victim. This--on a bigger scale--is similar.

MetallicCloud• 15 years ago

I have to give it to Wikipedia, they're blackout is having the desired effects.

Ever since they've announced the blackout, it's been all over Australian newspapers and radio. I hope it's having the same effect in America.

robryan• 15 years ago

Yeah, this whole issue pretty much got zero Australian media attention before the wikipedia blackout was announced.

bitops7• 15 years ago

> A so-called “blackout” is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals.

This statement, in my eyes, shows just how ridiculous the whole thing is. Regardless of your political leanings, I think most folks in the US right now agree that Congress is doing a pretty shoddy job of representing the people's interests. It's basically a joke, on both sides of the aisle at the moment, when politicians claim to be doing what's best for the public.

There are a lot of things that go right every day, and we don't hear about them, which is unfortunate.

But the things that politicians are beating their chests over right now are so obviously in the interests of lobbying groups and "big money" that it's ridiculous. Lady Gaga might lose money to piracy, but she is hardly a starving artist. And those artists that are usually are happy to get ANY kind of exposure, even if it's through piracy.

Also, and this is lost sometimes in the debate, piracy is responsible for the spread of a lot of ideas. And almost everyone does it at some point in their life. Even Lars Ulrich from Metallica - he and James bonded while Lars was at James's house, ripping LPs to tape. Times have not changed much.

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

Most people are dissatisfied with Congress, but I suspect that if you asked them to compare America to anywhere else in the world, they'd immediately jump to America's defense. My favorite line I've heard from some of my friends: "Our system may not be perfect, but it's the best we've got."

bitops7• 15 years ago

Absolutely, I'm in the same boat.

The reason it's so upsetting is precisely for the reasons you state. I (perhaps foolishly?) believe that America has the opportunity to be a role model for the rest of the world in terms of how a society can work.

America has its problems. I will be the first to agree with that.

But for all its problems, America has a lot going for it. It's a relatively free society, there is social mobility (more for some than others, it's true) and it's a nice place to live, even just in terms of its geography. (I live in California and so that of course will make me biased).

Consider - America is a country that, despite all its problems, people risk their lives to get into. There's a simple reason why America continues to attract illegal immigrants - it's better than wherever they came from. So much so that they'll pay sleazy people to transport them across borders under the cover of night. It sounds dramatic, but that's because it is!

So - America is great and I'd personally like it to stay that way. That's why it's the responsibility of the people living in America to keep their backyard clean and their politicians in line.

Nick_C• 15 years ago

I suspect you're talking in generalities, but from an outside perspective the US is far from best practice.

Three things that you could implement that other democracies already have:

- electoral boundaries are controlled by a statutory independent body, not the government.

- voting and counting are controlled and supervised by a statutory independent body, not the government. The Bush-Florida mess could not have happened here.

- all political donations over a trivial amount, say $5000, must be reported.

As well, Ministers cannot take jobs in their portfolio's area for some period of time, from memory it is 5 years, after leaving politics.

lolcraft• 15 years ago

Not to mention the sheer bigotry of blaming piracy on "foreign criminals", which makes this the pure nuts. Is the average US pirate kind of tanned, has a really tacky foreign accent, or conveys in any other way a vaguely menacing ethnicity?

patrickk• 15 years ago

" Is the average US pirate kind of tanned, has a really tacky foreign accent, or conveys in any other way a vaguely menacing ethnicity?"

You forgot to mention the parrot on the shoulder and the peg-leg...and the gratuitous usage of Google Pirate:

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-pirate

endersshadow• 15 years ago

That part is actually relevant to the bill. SOPA's intended purpose is to close the foreign loophole that the DMCA leaves open, in that there's no recourse for a US holder of copyright to stop a foreign-owned/operated site (a la Pirate Bay) from giving pirated content to US users. So "foreign criminals" is actually what we're talking about, here. There's a lot of other things you could pick up on, but xenophobia probably isn't the best tact to take.

barce• 15 years ago

tl;dr - Pot calling the kettle black: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot_calling_the_kettle_black

suneilp• 15 years ago

Alternative link for tomorrow: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pot%20calling...

fufulabs• 15 years ago

Yessss.. make it easy for more people to hate you. Please spout more nonsense.

schnaars• 15 years ago

"...stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns"

But totally cool to pay for government pawns.

MartinCron2• 15 years ago

Just to be clear, I don't support SOPA/PIPA, and I'm all in favor of the blackouts. I don't think it's an abuse of power. As a display of power, it's a little bit unsettling. Ask yourself, if Wikipedia went dark over something you didn't agree with, would you be OK with that? Along the same lines, are you OK with them not going dark about other things you may care about?

Dylanlacey• 15 years ago

Yes. I would. Whether it's something I agree with or not, they're an independent entity. It might change whether I'm willing to do business with them, but I'm not going to wail and rant and piss and moan. They're under no obligation to provide service to me NOR are they a necessity.

devs1010• 15 years ago

The bill threatens the existence of Wikipedia itself, its their right to do whatever they want to protest it. I think your're misjudging the situation a bit. This isn't the same as protesting some random cause, its something they believe can directly affect their organization's continued ability to serve its users.

MartinCron2• 15 years ago

Again, I don't support the proposed legislation, but the rhetoric of "this bill threatens the very existence of Wikipedia" is a bit hyperbolic and may harm the cause.

I know it's not just some random cause, but it makes me think of questions like, "what would happen if Wikipedia (or similar entity) were to go dark until we got marriage equality?"

adrianwaj• 15 years ago

I'd be happy to see the RIAA and MPAA blackout forever.

draggnar• 15 years ago

What would really be the reaction if, in protest over - lets say legislation written by lobbyists from Silicon Valley that would make any variation of SOPA illegal - the big media companies had a one day blackout. Why aren't they considering this? Would people flip out because the new episode of Jersey Shore was supposed to be on? Would they understand the motivations and join in protest by contacting legislators?

mynameishere• 15 years ago

"A boy testifying in court after murdering his parents, begging mercy on the grounds of being an orphan."

Canonical example of chutzpah.

toyg2• 15 years ago

This sentence is often abused, but it does look incredibly apt in this context:

"First they ignore you (the 90s - "internet what? here, buy some CDs instead")

then they laugh at you (2000s - "we can shut down those nerds in seconds!")

then they fight you (2010s - "let's write laws all over the world to criminalize new technology")

then you win." (2020s...?)

Helianthus2• 15 years ago

let's just win now.

jsilence• 15 years ago

Is there any usable decentralized DNS system right now?

Such a system would not have to handle all the DNS resolutions, only those where the Domain owner thinks the Domain is beeing censored. He'd then inject the real Name/IP into the alternative system. The alternative DNS could be decentralized. It only has to make sure the list is not beeing tampered with.

Like dnsmasq mutated with Bitcoin.

toyg2• 15 years ago

I wish, but the cartels won't give up right now for sure... the necessary culture shift among their ranks has only just begun.

waiwai933• 15 years ago

"It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services."

You (i.e. Mr. Dodds and cohorts) are more than welcome to support the book industry, who, like you, are having some difficulty adjusting to technological advances (though not as much), and purchase a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica for information to replace Wikipedia, which, as we all obviously know, is made up of copyright thieves (just look at all the [WP:Copyvio]s that exist!). But obviously that's not the solution, since you want free (as in gratis) information. /sarcasm

I'll admit it's not hypocrisy yet, but I'd say it's bordering on it.

Shenglong• 15 years ago

He has a valid point. Blacking out in protest is obviously an abuse of power, while bribing politicians isn't at all. Shame on the tech companies.

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

You missed the memo?

Protests: Unethical Bribes: Ethical

RexRollman• 15 years ago

So protests and black outs in protest of a bad bill are an abuse of power but funneling millions of dollars to create a bill that censors the Internet isn't? I don't think I could detest the MPAA more than I do at this very moment.

electromagnetic2• 15 years ago

There's an easy way to protest the MPAA. Tell your friends and neighbours; they're called Torrents.

jmduke4• 15 years ago

If you want to rationalize your piracy, awesome, but torrenting isn't going to compare to actual protest of an issue.

If you're passionate about SOPA, tell people; write a blog post; write to a congressman. Slacktivism needs to go away.

notJim2• 15 years ago

No, they actually both are. Just because one of the abuses of power is in our favor in this instance doesn't mean it isn't an abuse of power.

pyre3• 15 years ago

In a world where corporations are people and 'donating' to politicians is part of their free speech rights, why would be an 'abuse of power' to a corporation to protest a law that threatens it?

wwweston2• 15 years ago

What exactly makes it an abuse for Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit to tell the people who use their site the likely consequences of a given piece of legislation and to ask them to engage their legislators on the issue?

As far as I can tell, these sites are distributing correct information, they're not asking for any special status under the law, and they're not asking people to do anything illegal.

fourspace• 15 years ago

How is a company exercising its freedom to deliver whatever product it wants to deliver an abuse of power? Any power that Google or Reddit has is the outcome of providing value to their customers, and in return their customers providing dollars or time. Any such "power" is not the result of legislation and enforcement at the point of a gun. No legislation forces you to use Google.

On the other hand, the MPAA/RIAA paying millions of dollars to buy off politicians and write legislation is very obviously an abuse of power, power that was never voluntarily granted to them in the first place. If this law passes, you will absolutely be forced at gunpoint to conform to the will of the MPAA.

maeon3• 15 years ago

Politics by the numbers, wound a politically motivated entity and it uses every tactic at its diaposal to destroy you. Lets show them that we can play politics too.

defen• 15 years ago

Chris Dodd? That name sounds familiar. Wasn't that guy a U.S. Senator for 30 years? Oh right...

> In February 2011, despite "repeatedly and categorically insisting that he would not work as a lobbyist," Dodd was identified by The New York Times as the likely replacement for Dan Glickman as chairman and chief lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The hiring was officially announced on March 1, 2011.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Dodd

Between this and the "debate" on MSNBC the other day, it makes me despair when the other side has that kind of firepower and disregard for fair play. Classic example of regulatory capture (in this case, of the US Congress, which is explicitly designated in the Constitution as having the power to establish copyright).

fuzzylizard• 15 years ago

So voluntary blackouts in protest of SOPA are to be stopped because they are dangerous gimmicks, but a bill that will allow the government to blackout websites isn't?

How exactly are these people so blind to this kind of obvious contradiction? It completely baffles me that any intelligent human can see this bill as a good thing.

It also scares me that politicians and lobby groups are using the idea of protecting "American" jobs as one of the main selling points for getting this bill past. It is far to obvious that American hasn't realized that to survive in this world one must join the global community and not either separate oneself from it nor try to rule it.

pyre3• 15 years ago

  > How exactly are these people so blind to
  > this kind of obvious contradiction

It's being spoken by someone that jumped from Congress to top of the MPAA. I don't think he has much in the way of scruples.

sage_joch2• 15 years ago

Chris Dodd went from being a senator in 2010 to being head of the MPAA in 2011... and he calls political protest an abuse of power? He is the canonical example of what's wrong with our revolving door political system.

cjensen• 15 years ago

Yup that one.

This financial mess we're in which started with a housing bubble in part caused by crazy loans? He was Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee which oversees that sector and received a special loan as a "friend" of Countrywide Financial, which was one of the biggest problem lenders. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countrywide_financial_political...

JumpCrisscross• 15 years ago

There's a curious parallel in the social malignancy between the banks he used to regulate and the MPAA he now commands.

Both had (and have) a legitimate purpose, both delivered value to society, and both used the proceeds of their enterprise to secure rents at the cost of society.

I cannot empathise with the OP on the whole; the music and publishing industries, though kicking and screaming plenty, are reforming. The film industry has yet to figure out heads and tails of their predicament, but neither did Kodak and we rarely call their incompetence evil.

Where I converge is on the malignancy of the industries actions; SOPA/PIPA is an attack on civil and productive society. In that act of selfishness and rather-burn-Berlin-than-let-her-fall rhetoric is, in my mind, morally UN-forgivable.

funkshanker• 15 years ago

"Dodd for President 2016"...

guelo• 15 years ago

It's so disgusting that Chris Dodd just retired from being a senator for 30 years and now is the CEO of a corporate lobbying firm pushing legislation in congress. He represents everything that is wrong with politics in the country. Fuck him.

alexqgb2• 15 years ago

If you run media companies that own nominally-independent news operations, it is not an abuse of power to 'discourage' their coverage of your legislative agenda. If a media company that opposes this agenda successfully spotlights your non-abuse of power, it is a clear abuse of power.

Likewise, it's not a class-war until they hit back. In both cases the logic is entirely consistent.

snissn• 15 years ago

I wish they'd just stop making movies

alexqgb2• 15 years ago

Credit Chris Dodd with this: the man knows how to troll.

notJim2• 15 years ago

It seems like everyone in this thread is falling for a false dichotomy. I would argue that both the MPAA and many internet sites are abusing power. In an ideal system, neither one of them would be able to do what both parties are doing. Now, we don't have an ideal system, so I'm still in support of the blackouts, but I'm going to call a spade a spade and say this is an abuse of power.

sage_joch2• 15 years ago

I think you're drawing a false equivalence. On one side, the MPAA/RIAA are bribing our elected officials to turn online communities into major business liabilities. On the other, existing online communities have rallied the companies that host them to take a stand. Remember, Reddit was the first major company to announce a blackout. And they wouldn't have done that without a lot of prodding from the community.

wwweston2• 15 years ago

"It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts"

You know what I've noticed about this? When it comes to this topic, the people on the PIPA/SOPA side of things who are saying the facts are getting skewed NEVER get around to actually discussing the substance of the facts and trying to set the record straight.

Go ahead, Mr. Dodd. Educate us -- if you can. You and the clients you've sold yourself to have a pretty big media platform for speaking yourself. Surely it wouldn't be too big of a challenge to address specific misconceptions, rather than just using weasel words to imply that there's a problem that you can't seem to actually explain.

feralchimp• 15 years ago

The great-great-grandpappy of whoever authored this press release, in late August of 1831, in a dispatch from Southampton County, VA:

"It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on [Negroe slaves] for [labor] and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the [sunshine and fresh air] these [Negroes] enjoy in the [cotton fields] today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the [Negroes] that serve as gateways to [cheap cotton] intentionally skew the [shovels and pitchforks] to incite their [fellow human witnesses] in order to further their [basic human] interests."

fsethi• 15 years ago

Apparently the MPAA is made up of a small group of individuals nobody really knows. They are generally shrouded in secrecy and have very odd subjective systems. They tried it with Howard Hughes 90 years ago, ultimately they must adapt.

bitwize• 15 years ago

Chris Dodd was my senator, and I can tell you this: he ain't in a position to be talking about abuses of power.

_nist• 15 years ago

One of the major problems is copyright. The copyright laws have gotten so out of hand in this country that things still retain copyright long after the creator is dead. Back when it was first issued, it use to be only 28 years in 1710, but it has just increased and increased... I mean, what good is money if your dead? Does the media industry really need to make more than billions and billions of each year? And its not like they're that original, they release old films and books countless times and you're telling me its impossible to turn a profit in 28 years? It's ridiculous www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4

Peaker• 15 years ago

They're routinely publicly accusing Google of supporting piracy.

Why isn't Google, in turn, publicly accusing them of corruption and bribery?

lvh• 15 years ago

One's a crime, and the other ain't. You can't accuse people of crimes without being able to back it up.

Kevin_Marks• 15 years ago

Chris Dodd's sanctimonious bluster translated back into English: http://j.mp/MPAAbluster

sterling312• 15 years ago

I think rather than saying that this is an abuse of power, MPAA with its massive lobbying power should really reconsider its position. Lobbying was particularly helpful way to reduce information inefficiencies to the government prior to the existence of the internet. The opinion of the smaller, individual voters would only be reflected on a voting day, hence every 2 or 4 years depending on if we are talking about a congressmen or a senator. However, with the progression of free flowing information, aka the internet, the opinion of the public became more readily available, to a point where it is in direct competition with an older form that is the lobbying system. Of course, I'm not saying that lobbyists are completely obsolete. But what I am saying is that the new form of information and opinion expression using the internet will take a bigger and bigger share of the way the constituents actually express themselves to the politicians. Hence, instead of complaining about it, they really just got to embrase it, and learn that what if they are indeed plotting to hurt the consumers, that even if they go around the consumers and directly to Washington, they will not be able to get away with it without consequences.

ec429• 15 years ago

I think the /real/ abuse of power here isn't the RIAA/MPAA at all... it's the US (or rather, govt and certain corporations thereof) thinking that because key Internet infrastructure is located on their territory, they have a right to screw with it.

If the US were to start messing with, say, DNS, it seems fairly obvious that they couldn't restrict the effects to their own country (especially since the Internet is canonically /not/ organised around national boundaries). So, they'd be breaking not only their own internet but everyone else's too - and they simply do not have that right, morally speaking.

If bills like SOPA/PIPA pass, I intend to write to my MP about the importance of establishing a separate infrastructure that co-operates with, but is not dominated by, the existing system. The US has too much control over things like name authorities and SSL root CAs. ICANN is a US corporation. If the US wanted to break the BGP routing table, they wield enough power to do it (heck, AS7007 did it by /accident/).

It is becoming increasingly clear that the US cannot be trusted with stewardship of the global Internet; a still more decentralised approach is needed.

(Maybe, if they break it entirely, we can build a new one with all the lessons we've learned over the past few decades about how to build peer-to-peer decentralised internetworking. Plus, y'know, we could use IPv6 from the start)

pinaceae• 15 years ago

someone should go on Foxnews and explain to those viewers that this is:

1., Big government grabbing the freedom of its people

2., After freedom of speech, your guns are next. They will raid your homes without warrants on the pure premise that someone has maybe placed a gun there.

Turn the Foxnews/Tea Party monster against Murdoch.

NoSalt• 15 years ago

LOL ... I love it, "an abuse of power".

shareme• 15 years ago

Wait, having the LAW work for only lobbied interest isn't an abuse of pOWER?!

SOPA lives—and MPAA calls protests an "abuse of power"

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