STOP "PROTECT IP (S. 968)/SOPA (HR. 3261)" - Page 60

On December 18 2011 02:29 pPingu wrote:
Is there no way for the population to do a referendum against this law in the us?

On November 16 2011 01:45 FaiL_SaFe wrote:


I actually think the problems lie in a somewhat different direction.

Problem one is the fact that, the entertainment industry is on this insane quest to control utterly all access to any sort of media content that they had anything to do with. This is of course, absurd. In their perfect world, most of the entertainment industry would still force you to buy CD's for all of your music which, of course, cannot be burned onto a computer or used in an MP3 player to avoid the risks, god forbid, of someone sharing their music with someone else, and if the MPAA had their way, you could only purchase movies on DVD for the same reason. It's also worth noting that the entertainment industry has funneled quite a large sum of money into political campaigns. Money may not buy their votes, but it sure as hell buys access. This leads to the second problem...

That is the fact that most of the government officials, elected or appointed who are responsible for writing and passing this sort of legislation or making FCC rules in this area have absolutely no fucking clue what they're talking about. Somebody pointed out earlier in the thread that most of these people are 50-somethings many of whom are barely computer literate. There is a certain simple logic to the entertainment industries argument, it's quite simply piracy=bad, therefore, we must do everything in our power to stop piracy. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, however, this has and does often lead to overreach in legislative attempts to come to grips with internet piracy. This never really gets noticed by the senators and members of congress who are responsible for introducing and passing the legislation because they don't know what they're talking about.

I would argue that many people in positions of power, and, to a certain extent among older people in general, they seem to have a fundamental misconception about the way that the internet works. They seem to see it as a controlled environment in which the "good" people and the "bad" people operate in highly differentiated "parts" of the internet. Obviously, this is rather ridiculous to anyone who has, well, really any familiarity with the internet. Unfortunately, this idea seems to be beyond the conception of our elected officials which leads to bills that ultimately, have good intentions (let's be honest, the elimination of true internet privacy is probably a good thing), but in their haste the entertainment industry and the government have overreached horribly.

Fortunately, if the Supreme Court decides to treat the internet as an area where we free speech is protected, then we're fine. But that could take a while unfortunately.

On December 18 2011 03:26 stormtemplar wrote:


Sadly, as california shows, direct democracy sucks too because most people have no idea what the heck their talking about.

On December 18 2011 04:26 Aic wrote:
After some 300 veiws the counter stops uppdateing for a couple of hours. It's a frequently well know "feture" of Youtube, seen on all videos going vrial from launch

On December 18 2011 03:50 Roggay wrote:

Switzerland works very well, stop making stuff up.

On December 18 2011 04:32 OVERTsc2 wrote:
What's wrong with the government just doing what it wants whenever it wants? I mean, as long as it's giving us all lots of money and providing essential services and keeping those greedy capitalists in line what would the problem be with a totalitarian state?