This Just In
Posted on 18 January 2012
Just now (8.00) read online that SOPA (the reason why Wikipedia went black today) is dead:
Two bills intended to help combat the online theft of intellectual property have stalled in Congress after Internet giants Google and Wikipedia protested and legislative sponsors reconsidered their support. Some Republicans, including Rep. Paul Ryan, had opposed the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act, and Rep. Eric Cantor saw to it that the bill was tabled. Conservative favorite Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida withdrew his support from the Senate’s companion legislation, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, and other sponsors subsequently withdrew. … But the bills are nonetheless defective pieces of legislation, and conservatives are right to oppose them.
Mmm. So far, so good. However, don’t relax your vigilance. (‘You’ meaning those reading this who are American citizens.
) Firstly, while the bills may or may not be dead as complete pieces of legislation, individual provisions may be snuck into future bills as riders. (And short of actually getting to a vote and being voted down, it’s really hard to say that a bill is completely dead in the American system, anyway. On Friday SOPA was reported dead because it had been shelved until February.)
Second, the idiots who thought this thing could possibly be a good idea are still in office, and still, presumably, taking bribes to promote narrow interests at the expense of the public welfare; or alternatively, still so ignorant of technical matters, and unaware of their own ignorance, as to be actively dangerous in charge of their TiVos, much less the national communciations infrastructure. They are only turning because they got caught; honour to the catchers, not to the ones who thought they could get away with it. Don’t let them keep their seats. Anyone who supported, or absent gods help us all sponsored, either SOPA or PIPA, at any time, is either corrupt or dangerously, arrogantly ignorant. Don’t forget that. Throw the rascals out at your earliest opportunity.
or alternatively, still so ignorant of technical matters, and unaware of their own ignorance, as to be actively dangerous in charge of their TiVos, much less the national communciations infrastructure.
The technological idiocy of American politicians is legendary. It’s often been said that once you go into U.S. politics full time, you stop learning about anything else in the world. I have read that Bill Clinton was astonished, upon becoming President, to find that the White House telephones were still routed through a manual switchboard in the basement, which had not been altered since the Nixon Administration. Nobody upstairs knew or cared enough about communications technology to order it replaced.
I can vouch for the same foolishness in Canada, not quite to the same extent, but afflicting both the politicians and the civil service. When I worked in an MP’s constituency office back in 2000, I was astounded to find that the only approved software for doing up constituents’ newsletters and other print publications was Microsoft Publisher. InDesign, Quark, even PageMaker — not allowed. If it wasn’t done up in MS Publisher, it would not be accepted by the Queen’s Printer.
Are you telling me the web isn’t a series of tubes?
Not only that, but (this will make you gasp in astonishment) an IP router is not Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine going, ‘One ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingy. Is this the party to whom I am speaking?’
From Wikipedia’s blackout page: ‘Imagine a world without free knowledge.’
Which should be subtitled, ‘Do something we don’t like, and you won’t have to imagine.’
Or, more traditionally, ‘Nice encyclopedia. Shame if something were to happen to it.’
The articles may be neutral, but the hand on the switch isn’t.
(Jimmy Wales’ complaint that SOPA wouldn’t let them link to The Pirate Bay was…less than stellar.)
The articles are not neutral.
Agreed with…both the commentors, really.
Didn’t much like the wording or implications behind the bills. I thought they were heavyhanded and wrong-headed. The protests struck me as…heavy-handed and wrong-headed. And annoying, to boot.
“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right…”
Note I have heard (unreliable) talk that this is part of a higher strategy, and that they plan on attaching the bills to another bill that is highly likely to pass, an anti-child pornography bill.
I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the claim, but it is possibly that this was the strategy all along. Get all the energy of the Internet expended and then sneak it in? Note I do NOT consider my source reliable.
Good, although I too have my doubts as to whether these bills are completely dead and buried. Let’s face it, there is big money involved, so the companies interested are going to have another go.
I think, personally, it’s not so much about the pirates (because let’s face it, how were these bills going to stop the rip-off artists in China from producing dodgy DVDs of the latest movies either stolen or recorded-in-cinema-and-burned-to-DVD? They weren’t) and more about what the record companies did with Napster. It’s not about the guys selling pirated DVDs or even online file sharing, it’s about the home consumer and how they use film and TV. Things like Netflix and being able to purchase TV shows and movies from iTunes for watching on your PC or newer, flashier piece of technology, and making people pay for the copy on the PC, the separate copy on their smartphone, etc. etc.
As it stood, technically all of us have been involved in pirating material. All those photos of Space Princesses Mr. Wright used to illustrate his posts? Did he have permission of the copyright holders? Did he pay a licence fee? No? Then close down this den of iniquity!
I tend to use paintings as examples when I’m doing posts on aspects of Catholic tradition (both small t and big T tradition) and belief. Do I have the permission of the museums, art galleries and photographers? No, I lift the URL from Google images. Well, any complainant could get the blog that publishes my post and uses those images shut down as a distributor of pirated material. Never mind that we’re not printing out posters and postcards and selling them in Sunday morning car boot sales or making a penny profit, we’re technically breaking the law.
I was unimpressed about the “home taping is robbery” kerfuffle (remember? Making cassette tape copies of an LP or CD you bought yourself so you could play it on your Walkman or in your car tape player or give it to a friend or family member was the height of illegality and badness?) because the reason people were doing it was not for money (most people who gave copies to friends or family members didn’t charge them) but because a record or CD might cost £14 where a cassette tape cost £2. In these days of mp3 players and downloading, it seems quaint to have had to buy two or even three different media of the same album (say an LP for your record player, a cassette tape for your Walkman, and a CD when those came out) and pay three times over for the content you bought. Same way, when technology marches on, for visual media. The movie studios and big entertainment conglomerates will have to get used to the fact that people will not pay three times over to watch the product they bought on different devices in their homes and that using images from stills or screen captures to illustrate fan sites, blogs and what-not (making icons, for example, out of comic book heroes for use as signature images when posting on Livejournal) is the way the world works now.
Saying that John or Jane Fan is going to have to get formal permission from the copyright holder and/or pay a charge for use is not going to fly, and trying to sneak that in under the aegis of fighting piracy is just going to cheese everyone off.
And just saw by the news that Kodak (sorry, Eastman Kodak, to give them their right name) is filing for bankruptcy.
That’s sad. It’s also indicative of the way modern technology has gone. So SOPA and other bills like it are going to have to deal with the way accessing media has changed so dramatically.
Still, it’s sad news. My parents’ first camera was a Kodak, and it lasted for years and years and albums worth of family photos.
Hollywood moguls and record companies can look out for themselves. It’s the poor free-enterprise author who has the most to lose from piracy. Mark Twain once complained that someone with a press had collected some essays of his, altered them to taste, added some writings of his own, and sold a book entitled “Mark Twain on [whatever the subject was].” “He’s dead now,” Twain told Kipling. “I didn’t kill him.”
So this sort of thing is not new to the Internet, no matter what the neophiliacs like to think, and is in fact the reason why we have copy right laws in the first place. A complete copy of my novel EIFELHEIM was up on the web for months on ScribD, despite repeated requests by myself and my agent to take it down. They kept throwing obstacles in our path. We had to prove to them that we had the authority to have it taken down. (They did not have to prove they had secured the right to copy it in the first place.) The arrogance was overwhelming. Author estates suffered even more. And the whole purpose was to lure eyeballs to their portal in order to see the advertisements.
+ + +
The Day Wikipedia Went Dark, aka The Day the Internet Contained a Little Less Disinformation.
signed,
Ye Aulde Curmudgeon