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I’m thinking we may need to investigate the MPAA’s claims about piracy and copyright…
:)
Oh and we get redefine terms as well:
Being intimidated by the religious thugs threatening violence seems to be a growing fad. This needs to stop. I mirror this video that was taken down by youtube for a terms of use violation – (being offensive to the deluded). Here it is again on the blog.
You and your dogma can go away, the sooner, the better.
Watch, gentle readers, what happens when elite interests are not given priority. The outcry, the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the injustice of it all. The MPAA CEO Chris Dodd called out the irresponsible websites – Wikipedia, Reddit etc on their egregious behaviour:
“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.”
Ah, so the authors and money men who sponsored and rammed through the DMCA legislation are back for more, and of course it is all just to protect American Jobs, Apple Pie and All that is What is Right in the World (aka profit). The MPAA and friends screwed up this time because they over estimated their purchase of the American Congress and grossly underestimated the will of the American people. I’m not a huge fan of the American body politic, but this time, for once, the good guys won. The corporate lobby and its billions just got rolled by a ground swell of people calling/emailing/tweeting etc their elected representatives and telling them in no uncertain terms that if this passed, so too would their comfy digs in congress. Huzzah!
It would be me remiss of me not to point out that similar elite interests have been much more successful in herding the American populace in other areas. Perhaps the MPAA and related corporate lobby should have declared a “War on Piracy”, as that seems (going to war on common nouns to be specific) to have a much better track record in press-ganging convincing the people of America to support their government when it does horrible things in their name.
The smiling face of your corporate sponsored disenfranchisement.
One of the instruments of douche that has been doing his very best to whip American into a blind frenzy just happens to be a representative of the Global Intellectual Property Center affiliated with, of course, the US Chamber of Commerce. Enter Steve Tepp. Steve Tepp, along with the US Chamber of Commerce is only interested in saving US jobs and making the world a better, safer place for Business Americans.
Steve was recently interviewed on CBC’s The Current by Mike Finnerty. It is a 20 minute interview, but I highly recommend you listen to the whole thing as Steve gets his ass handed to him by Rob Beschizza the managing editor from Boing Boing.net. I’ve transcribed and will reproduce some of the highlights from the interview. Watch closely how our boy Steve attempts to frame this issue:
“This issue is fundamentally about American Jobs and protecting consumers.”
Wow, the MPAA CEO and Steve are all about JOBS. Like holy-frack they are right there beside the rest of the 99% fighting just to make ends meet. They just want to protect the little guy! They certainly would not want to scaremonger or obfuscate what SOPA is really about.
“Criminals are abusing the internet to steal the most creative and innovative products that are out in the marketplace.”
I’m wondering if Steve said this with a straight face considering the creative output from Hollywood that enhances and enriches our cultural life.
” […] New twists, children’s toys, automobile parts, medicine its all fake, its all made in unsupervised facilities, it can be shoddy, people have died. This stuff can be extremely dangerous.”
This from the same people who regularly decry the EPA, food safety and consumer protection and worker health/safety legislation in general as ‘dirty socialism’ suddenly finds is voice and moral outrage at the very notion of Americans buying shoddy unsafe products. Profits Lives are on the line!
Steve tries very hard to be the good corporate PR flack but ultimately fails when confronted with the facts of the situation. SOPA like the DMCA act before it, exists only for business entities to consolidate and defend their ‘intellectual property’ in perpetuity. In essence they want a bigger stick to punish people who dare to mess with their profits.
Not this time Steve. The democratic spirit of America awoke for a little while and slapped you down. Hard. A small victory for internet freedom and expression, but the repressive forces of the corporatocracy have already fired back, taking down MegaUploads and charging people with copyright infringement and piracy. Anonymous fired back, taking down several government web sites as well as the MPAA’s own website.
This issue is not going away. The siren call of avarice is much to strong to let little things like freedom of speech and freedom from censorship to get in the way. Stay tuned for round 2.
*update* – Need Background on the issue? Check out the TED Talk.
I did not know that their was a ordered hierarchy of things to distract me, this sort of thing makes me wary of social media and being ‘connected’.
The Internet has growing pains right now. The whinging from the corporations is effecting recent government policy decisions about what and how things are downloaded on the net.
“Hollywood studios, recording labels, artists and internet service providers have created a program to alert internet subscribers when their accounts are used to access movies, songs and other content that entertainment companies consider unauthorized.
The new “copyright alerts” system is intended to educate consumers about online piracy by sending up to six electronic messages notifying subscribers when their accounts are used to download or share such content. Internet service providers in the U.S. would send the alerts to a subscriber after receiving a notice from a copyright holder.”
You see friends, money is being made on the Net, but not enough…never will it be enough. Presently commercial greed is in the drivers seat, so hang on tight for awhile, it is going to get bumpy.
“Consumers who ignore the notices could face “mitigation measures,” such as slower Internet connections or redirection to a special website that provides information about copyright protections. Internet service providers would not be required to terminate any subscriber accounts or hand over subscriber names to copyright holders.”
You feel that? That was your activity online being monitored to even a greater extent than what it is now. Let’s take a peek at who is organizing this little shindig.
“Among the groups and companies participating in the new program: the Motion Picture Association of America and member companies including Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.; the Recording Industry Association of America and member companies including Universal Music Group Recordings and Warner Music Group; Independent Film & Television Alliance; and internet services providers including AT&T Inc., Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc.”
Yep. The usual suspects, righteously protecting their products the world wide. One commenter on the article describes my attitude toward these new measures perfectly…
“This seems like a good incentive to develop some hardcore personal encryption software.
I’m paying them to transmit my bits and bytes, not to look at them. This is a principle I do not plan to simply roll over and abandon.”
The American public is starved for actual news. The conservative propaganda mill that masquerades as fox news is the premier example of a society that is becoming insular and uncritical of its policy and place in the world. For a country that purports to value the idea of freedom of speech and the marketplace of ideas, the US certainly seems to define Al-Jazzera outside the acceptable limits of discourse for the public.
“The network has been targeted by the US government since 2003, when former vice president Dick Cheney and former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld described it as tantamount to an arm of al-Qaeda.
Two of its reporters were later killed in Baghdad when US missiles hit its office. Al Jazeera and others voiced suspicions that the channel’s reporters had been deliberately targeted.
And, to this day, Al Jazeera, which, together with BBC News, has become one of the premier global outlets for serious television news, is virtually impossible to find on televisions in the US.
The country’s major cable and satellite companies refuse to carry it – leaving it with US viewers only in Washington, DC and parts of Ohio and Vermont – despite huge public demand.”
Ah, that must be the market making the correct decision about the needs and wants of its consumers. Or perhaps it is the politics that actually drive the market as a opposed to the cherished notion of supply demand.
“The station’s US push could hardly be more necessary – to Americans. By being denied the right to watch Al Jazeera, Americans are being kept in a bubble, sealed off from the images and narratives that inform the rest of the world. Consider the recent scandal surrounding atrocity photos taken by US soldiers in Afghanistan, which are now available on news outlets, including Al Jazeera, around the globe.
In America, there have been brief summaries of the fact that Der Spiegel has run the story. But the images themselves – even redacted to shield the identities of the victims – have not penetrated the US media stream. And the images are so extraordinarily shocking that failing to show them – along with graphic images of the bombardment of children in Gaza, say, or exit interviews with survivors of Guantanamo – keeps Americans from understanding events that may be as traumatic to others as the trauma of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”
Not surprising, as the forces of the status-quo do not need inflammatory images stirring up the population. Seeing the actual face of American foreign policy and what it is responsible for might waken the good altruism in the American people and have them demand a stop to the atrocities committed in their name.
“For example, the leading US media outlets, including the New York Times, have not seen fit to mention that one of the photos shows a US soldier holding the head of a dead Afghan civilian as though it were a hunting trophy.
So, for America’s sake, I hope that Al Jazeera penetrates the US media market. Unless Americans see the images and narratives that shape how others see us, the US will not be able to overcome its reputation as the world’s half-blind bully.
Indeed, Egyptians are in some ways now better informed than Americans (and, as Thomas Jefferson often repeated, liberty is not possible without an informed citizenry). Egypt has 30 newspapers and more than 200 television channels.
America’s newspapers are dying, foreign news coverage has been cut to three or four minutes, at most, at the end of one or two evening newscasts, and most of its TV channels are taken up with reality shows.”
The people of America are good decent people, but are purposefully being kept in the dark about what their role in the world is and how their corporations and government are acting internationally.
“Americans have a hunger for international news; it is a myth that we can’t be bothered with the outside world. Maybe Americans will rise up and threaten to boycott their cable and satellite providers unless we get our Al Jazeera – and other carriers of international news.
We would then come one step closer to being part of the larger world – a world that, otherwise, will eventually simply leave us behind.”
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