The Petulant Left of my generation thought that they were being profound in saying, “What if they held a war and nobody came?” What if the Petulant Lefties of this generation hold a blackout and nobody cares?
I’ve never had much respect for the Wikipedia or the clowns running it, and behavior like this just reinforces that belief.
It also shows the danger of too much of the Internet being concentrated into too few sites. There is a problem with a small group of sanctimonious, self-righteous narcissistic can just turn off sites that people depend on. Tomorrow gov’ts should declare an emergency and nationalize Wikipedia’s servers “for the common good.”
Lamar Smith may be a [walking rectum], but he’s right, this is a stunt. What will be the next cause that’s so important they they’ve got to shut down?
” Tomorrow gov’ts should declare an emergency and nationalize Wikipedia’s servers “for the common good.””
Wow, sounds like something a communist would do. Are you sure you really want such a thing to occur?
These are private entities who can do as they please with their private property. No one has a right to their services any more than any other business or charity.
Isn’t that the whole point of limited government and free markets?
Don’t like google, use Bing. Don’t like wikipedia, use a different service or start your own wikipedia service. Their software is free to download and run. I’ve done it myself on my own server.
None of these services has made any specific contract with you guaranteeing service availability. Anyone “relying” on these services has made specific business decisions and have to live with the “risks”.
Maybe it’s a dumb decision, maybe not, but it is theirs to make.
The internet is actually the closest thing we have to limited government and free markets that exists at the moment. SOPA and friends threaten that. That is why anyone who is for those ideals should be against these bills.
There are problems with piracy that should be dealt with, but not at the cost of the internet itself, through DNS blacklisting or weakening of due process in favor of one particular industry.
Actually, I am serious, in a sarcastic way. What these people are demonstrating is that there is too much of the Internet concentrated into too few sites. And that too few people can shut down services for arbitrary and capricious reasons. So all they are showing is that they can’t be trusted any more than the gov’t they claim to be protesting against.
And we all know that once the Left decides private parties aren’t to be trusted, then the only solution is gov’t intervention. They’re the ones giving the Lamar Smiths ideas they’d never come up with on their own.
(They are also demonstrating that they think that they are immune to the Law of Unintended Consequences, which most of them will have to wait to look up after they turn the lights back on.)
So, because they are protesting a bill that is threatening the internet, taking an action they have never taken before, and only now because the issues are so serious, they are untrustworthy. OK……. This bill is the exact opposite of a capricious issue.
“They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites.”
Basically, it means Rand Simberg’s entire site could be shut down if Raoul Ortega links to a copyright-infringing youtube video, because Rand would be responsible for policing everything every user posts in the comments.
There’s nothing really “Left” or “Right” about this.
(And, they haven’t really disabled their site completely. You can just disable javascript, which they describe further down on the link I gave.)
I don’t think the Founders got it wrong, but they got it incomplete. They never defined “for a limited time” in the Constitution.
If you are clever, you can take this to say that “limited” means “anything less than infinite”. In the beginning, copyright started out as 14 years, plus a 14 year extension. Now it is automatic life of the author + 70 years.
Mathematically, that is “limited”, in that it is “less than infinity”, but common sense tells me that it is de facto unlimited considering the real world with finite human life spans.
Another problem is the term itself, “intellectual property”. It is thinking copyright is a form of “property”, instead of a “government-granted monopoly on a particular work for a limited time”.
It’s why I don’t like throwing around the word “theft” or “stealing” when talking about copyrights. Stealing implies I took someone’s property. Copying a CD doesn’t deprive the original owner of any property, since they still have their original CD, so I didn’t really steal anything.
What it does do is “infringe” the government-granted monopoly. And the distinction is important, even if it sounds like I am splitting hairs.
It’s why 10,000 downloads does not really equal billions of dollars of losses. It assumes everyone would have purchased the product instead (yeah right), and that the owner of the copyright of the song is now deprived of his property, which he is not. He still has his song. He possibly has some monetary losses based on the government-granted monopoly of a non-physical work, but there was no loss of any property.
(Just to be clear, I am not condoning infringement of copyrights.)
What did the Founders know about IP, anyway? It hadn’t been invented. The earliest reference by an American president was by Lincoln, in his historic IP Address…
FFS. Finally we have something that leftists, rightists, and people in the middle can agree on (no, we don’t need to “protect” the overindulged, decedent, swollen with cash entertainment industry from “piracy” by censoring the internet), and you’re still bitching. Do you realize that what you’re doing is the equivalent of a snippy teenage girl ruining the ball game for everyone when she says “I’m not going to play on the same team as her!“?
SOPA will ruin the internet for everyone. It will be like living in China, only the Chinese can probably still get to most of their websites.
You have to engage it every page, and there’s probably some browser plugin (GreaseMonkey, maybe?) that allows you to execute arbitrary code on page load, but as is you’ll manage.
While I can understand the ire drawn against Wikipedia and other sites participating in a “blackout”, it’s worth remembering that the bills that are being opposed here are worth opposing.
My view here is that while Obama may have picked up Biden for his “foreign policy experience”, he also picked up Biden for his deep-pocketed pimps. This sort of legislative activity is the diabolical price for that choice.
That’s OK – I downloaded the internet, just for such an occasion.
The Petulant Left of my generation thought that they were being profound in saying, “What if they held a war and nobody came?” What if the Petulant Lefties of this generation hold a blackout and nobody cares?
Petulant Lefties are against terrible legislation written by the entertainment industry? I thought that Big Media were buddy-buddy with the Democrats?
I’ve never had much respect for the Wikipedia or the clowns running it, and behavior like this just reinforces that belief.
It also shows the danger of too much of the Internet being concentrated into too few sites. There is a problem with a small group of sanctimonious, self-righteous narcissistic can just turn off sites that people depend on. Tomorrow gov’ts should declare an emergency and nationalize Wikipedia’s servers “for the common good.”
Lamar Smith may be a [walking rectum], but he’s right, this is a stunt. What will be the next cause that’s so important they they’ve got to shut down?
” Tomorrow gov’ts should declare an emergency and nationalize Wikipedia’s servers “for the common good.””
Wow, sounds like something a communist would do. Are you sure you really want such a thing to occur?
These are private entities who can do as they please with their private property. No one has a right to their services any more than any other business or charity.
Isn’t that the whole point of limited government and free markets?
Don’t like google, use Bing. Don’t like wikipedia, use a different service or start your own wikipedia service. Their software is free to download and run. I’ve done it myself on my own server.
None of these services has made any specific contract with you guaranteeing service availability. Anyone “relying” on these services has made specific business decisions and have to live with the “risks”.
Maybe it’s a dumb decision, maybe not, but it is theirs to make.
The internet is actually the closest thing we have to limited government and free markets that exists at the moment. SOPA and friends threaten that. That is why anyone who is for those ideals should be against these bills.
There are problems with piracy that should be dealt with, but not at the cost of the internet itself, through DNS blacklisting or weakening of due process in favor of one particular industry.
Actually, I am serious, in a sarcastic way. What these people are demonstrating is that there is too much of the Internet concentrated into too few sites. And that too few people can shut down services for arbitrary and capricious reasons. So all they are showing is that they can’t be trusted any more than the gov’t they claim to be protesting against.
And we all know that once the Left decides private parties aren’t to be trusted, then the only solution is gov’t intervention. They’re the ones giving the Lamar Smiths ideas they’d never come up with on their own.
(They are also demonstrating that they think that they are immune to the Law of Unintended Consequences, which most of them will have to wait to look up after they turn the lights back on.)
So, because they are protesting a bill that is threatening the internet, taking an action they have never taken before, and only now because the issues are so serious, they are untrustworthy. OK……. This bill is the exact opposite of a capricious issue.
What they are trying to show is what can happen under this legislation. They say so here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more
“They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites.”
Basically, it means Rand Simberg’s entire site could be shut down if Raoul Ortega links to a copyright-infringing youtube video, because Rand would be responsible for policing everything every user posts in the comments.
There’s nothing really “Left” or “Right” about this.
(And, they haven’t really disabled their site completely. You can just disable javascript, which they describe further down on the link I gave.)
I’m down with this. Now if Facebook and Twitter would follow suit, Congress would be brought to its knees.
IP is a flawed concept. Our founders got this one wrong. It’s more paving material for hell.
I don’t think the Founders got it wrong, but they got it incomplete. They never defined “for a limited time” in the Constitution.
If you are clever, you can take this to say that “limited” means “anything less than infinite”. In the beginning, copyright started out as 14 years, plus a 14 year extension. Now it is automatic life of the author + 70 years.
Mathematically, that is “limited”, in that it is “less than infinity”, but common sense tells me that it is de facto unlimited considering the real world with finite human life spans.
Another problem is the term itself, “intellectual property”. It is thinking copyright is a form of “property”, instead of a “government-granted monopoly on a particular work for a limited time”.
It’s why I don’t like throwing around the word “theft” or “stealing” when talking about copyrights. Stealing implies I took someone’s property. Copying a CD doesn’t deprive the original owner of any property, since they still have their original CD, so I didn’t really steal anything.
What it does do is “infringe” the government-granted monopoly. And the distinction is important, even if it sounds like I am splitting hairs.
It’s why 10,000 downloads does not really equal billions of dollars of losses. It assumes everyone would have purchased the product instead (yeah right), and that the owner of the copyright of the song is now deprived of his property, which he is not. He still has his song. He possibly has some monetary losses based on the government-granted monopoly of a non-physical work, but there was no loss of any property.
(Just to be clear, I am not condoning infringement of copyrights.)
What did the Founders know about IP, anyway? It hadn’t been invented. The earliest reference by an American president was by Lincoln, in his historic IP Address…
FFS. Finally we have something that leftists, rightists, and people in the middle can agree on (no, we don’t need to “protect” the overindulged, decedent, swollen with cash entertainment industry from “piracy” by censoring the internet), and you’re still bitching. Do you realize that what you’re doing is the equivalent of a snippy teenage girl ruining the ball game for everyone when she says “I’m not going to play on the same team as her!“?
SOPA will ruin the internet for everyone. It will be like living in China, only the Chinese can probably still get to most of their websites.
Here’s a better way. Create a new bookmark with the Javascript snippet here as the URL.
You have to engage it every page, and there’s probably some browser plugin (GreaseMonkey, maybe?) that allows you to execute arbitrary code on page load, but as is you’ll manage.
While I can understand the ire drawn against Wikipedia and other sites participating in a “blackout”, it’s worth remembering that the bills that are being opposed here are worth opposing.
My view here is that while Obama may have picked up Biden for his “foreign policy experience”, he also picked up Biden for his deep-pocketed pimps. This sort of legislative activity is the diabolical price for that choice.
Well at least Bob won’t bother us today.