Online piracy is a great thing as it creates innovation. The only proven way to beat it is to offer a better service for a reasonable price which is a win/win situation. Just think about some major examples:
Napster lead to iTunes
Movie torrents/streaming lead to Netflix
Sports streaming has lead to most major sports leagues offering online packages
Those are huge wins and improvements for the consumers and all those legal replacements are extremely profitable. To top it off whenever they try to use the government to shut something down others just spawn up and replace it. Napster got killed then Limewire took over. They got in legal trouble, went downhill and now there's torrents. In a way their blocking attempts only improve the means of obtaining things for those that want to.
That being said this probably doesn't have much to do with copyrights at all. People have been downloading songs in masses for over 10 years and movies for over 7 and all the government has ever done is shut down the odd site or program here and there. Real reasons imo are things like Wikileaks/Bradley Manning, Anonymous hacks, loss of media's control of what content people absorb, and the biggest would be Arab Spring where we learned that the internet could enable people to take down their government.
More proof it doesn't really matter who you vote for these days. Bush in the same spot would've done it for some anti-terrorist cause and now Obama is doing it to protect copyrights...
CMR
quote:
Originally posted by GGM
More proof it doesn't really matter who you vote for these days. Bush in the same spot would've done it for some anti-terrorist cause and now Obama is doing it to protect copyrights...
Just an FYI, Obama has said he will veto the bill if it passes. This isn't a bill created by the "big, bad government", its one that what was quite clearly a case of good 'ol fashioned corporate lobbying, mainly by the film & record industries and the politicians on their payroll.
This isn't the first time that Hollywood has gone to congress to attempt to put a stop to new (more innovative) technology cutting into their profits. They did it with VCRs, they did it with cable, satellite, and now they're doing it with the internet.
Originally posted by Orko
Swamper how does this effect TA, considering the site is hosting in Texas? And, I'm sure you get a tonne of take down notices from copyright holders.
Even if it was hosted in Toronto it wouldn't matter since they could cut off routing at the source (via ARIN) so it would be as if the site fell into a black hole. TA and any other site similar that has messageboard content would be ed since it would just take 1 person posting a link to some illegal to create chaos.
I posted about this on Dec 23 in this thread in the c0r. GoDaddy's original support for SOPA (and their built-in 'immunity' from being affected) was the reason I moved about 20+ domains away from them on Dec. 27th.
Cutting/pasting what I wrote there:
This is legislation that WILL be abused -- many are moving their domains off of GoDaddy because GoDaddy supports SOPA but the truth is if this passes all US registrars will have to abide by its terms. For a site to be somewhat protected you need to have your domain registrar, dns, and web host not be US based. This is bad news any way you cut it.... so typical of the US to be passing important things (NDAA) so close to Christmas when attention (from the educated) public is abysmal at best.
Open Letter from Internet Engineers to Congress -- LINK
It's not that hard to miss the connections and what's really going on.
"Chris Dodd, the head of MPAA and strongest supporter of SOPA/IPA bills, is a retired 30 year Senator. Salary @ MPAA? $1.2M.. He's the same guy who said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were 'financially strong' during the sub prime mortgage crisis, all while his campaign was heavily funded from the financial services industry-(his job then? head of Senate Banking Committee-how coincidental)... NOW he says the internet blackouts, that tech companies are proposing as a response to his legislation is an "abuse of power."
It's not that hard to miss the connections and what's really going on.
"Chris Dodd, the head of MPAA and strongest supporter of SOPA/IPA bills, is a retired 30 year Senator. Salary @ MPAA? $1.2M.. He's the same guy who said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were 'financially strong' during the sub prime mortgage crisis, all while his campaign was heavily funded from the financial services industry-(his job then? head of Senate Banking Committee-how coincidental)... NOW he says the internet blackouts, that tech companies are proposing as a response to his legislation is an "abuse of power."
Dodd a piece of . I would love to see Google and others move their HQ and everything to Canada or even Sweden, be a nice you to the US government.
lamar smith's views on this (the guy who came up with all this )
GGM
quote:
Could SOPA Be Coming to Canada?
After widespread online protests that saw several sites including Wikipedia go dark, the U.S. House of Representatives effectively killed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) last week.
But the spirit of SOPA lives on in a bill before the Canadian Parliament, according to at least one law professor.
Michael Geist, who specializes in Internet and ecommerce law at the University of Ottawa, says that Bill C-11, currently under review in Canada’s House of Commons, could bring SOPA-like copyright law to the country.
Bill C-11, titled the Copyright Modernization Act, aims to replace the country’s current copyright law with something more compatible with the days of broadband.
Geist says it goes further than that. Citing a document that appears to be a set of proposed amendments to the legislation from a music-industry representative, Geist makes the case that the same lobbying groups that backed SOPA are laying the groundwork for SOPA-like rules in Bill C-11.
“While SOPA may be dead (for now) in the U.S.,” Geist writes, “Lobby groups are likely to intensify their efforts to export SOPA-like rules to other countries. With Bill C-11 back on the legislative agenda at the end of the month, Canada will be a prime target for SOPA style rules.”
In particular, Geist says the idea of blocking sites from the Internet — or at least the Internet in Canada — is on the list of proposals. The note, dated March 1, 2011, suggests that the bill should “permit a court to make an order blocking a pirate site such as The Pirate Bay to protect the Canadian marketplace from foreign pirate sites.”
Besides that, the proposals would incentivize Internet service providers to terminate users who infringe copyrights more than once. Geist points out that there’s no mention of due process or what sort of proof would be required. Also under consideration is an “enabler” provision, which would target sites that aren’t necessarily pirate havens, but are primarily used for piracy.
Empire Avenue, a virtual-currency and gaming site based in Canada, came out against SOPA, and its CEO says he expected such legislation to come to his country and elsewhere after SOPA failed.
“One of the points I made when the SOPA debate was happening was that if SOPA failed, which it did, at least this time around, what would end up happening is that similar bills would be [proposed] in Canada and the U.K.,” says Duleepa Wijayawardhana, CEO of Empire Avenue. “The idea is to get these kinds of bills passed in other places and the say, ‘Hey, U.S., shouldn’t you be on board?’”
Wijayawardhana is optimistic that just getting the word out will be enough to ensure that any copyright legislation that passes will be fair.
“There’s a chance lobbyists will succeed. Our job as startups, innovators and entrepreneurs is to make sure people understand what about these laws will prevent stuff from happening. And I think as we explain to people why they’re bad, people get it.”
