SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act)

Sir Matt

Mostly because the media refuse to cover it. Fox, NBC, Turner, etc all have a vested interest in the bill being passed. None of them will discuss it on television.

jveezy

And what about the collateral damage to non-violators?

Team Brian GB

I am saying that, in this situation, the United States is far more pragmatic than many young people who spend their lives on the internet believe, and the same applies to the United Kingdom.

If you gave the populations of both countries a list of things that are going on that they care about, governments clamping down on copyright violation would not feature in the top fifty.

AVARiCE

You've not replied to my post, which was a lot more direct than these two. I, for one, would appreciate you coming up with a reasoned reply as opposed to trying to snipe at points when it suits.

Again, I'm not trying to be personal or even offensive here but you're coming across as someone who has little to no idea on how the internet works, let alone how it should work. It's easy to focus on the rights of people who own intellectual property but that's half the debate here, at best. For me, you're letting yourself down in this thread.

Team Brian GB

Do it the old fashioned way, get you wallet out and buy whatever it is that you are after.

Lance Uppercut

Young people like you?

Stop making shit up to support your "argument."

Hectic

You are skirting around this question now, Brian, this is not Question Time.

Team Brian GB

How much polling data do you look at?

Burrow

If they knew what would happened when the government 'clamped down', then surely it would be a burning hot topic amongst a major part of the population?

Lance Uppercut

77 percent of it. See, I can make shit up, too.

AVARiCE

Good strawman you've built there. If you did a survey of world football, Luis Suarez wouldn't be in the top 50 things people care about. Racism would be.

This isn't about copyright violation in any more than name.

jveezy

Read what I said again. NON-violators. As in people not pirating stuff. People who actually do want to get the wallet out and pay for things.

Sir Matt

How Copyright Industries Con Congress | Cato @ Liberty

Cato Institute Digs Into MPAA's Own Research To Show That SOPA Wouldn't Save A Single Net Job | Techdirt

Team Brian GB

I didn't see your post before now.

It is certainly very potent though that is what is required, the law can only go so far on the internet. The only way for regulation to work online is if it is self regulated by internet service providers and websites themselves, and as this bill aims to push responsibility onto them it would drive them to come down hard on such violation.

That is the only way it could ever be effectively stamped out.

Team Brian GB

Then buy things, I do all my television/film/music downloading on iTunes - I have never had a problem.

Team Brian GB

Amongst a struggling economy, austerity measures downsizing the public sector, the Eurozone on the verge of collapse, very concerning trends coming out of China, an uncertain transition in North Korea, sabre rattling in Iran, and Syria imploding people are not particularly concerned by government attempts to bring regulation to the internet.

Sir Matt

What are you talking about? If a website has a youtube video linked on it, with fair use of a clip of music, and the copyright holder has the site taken down, then the owner of the site has to go to court to get it returned, if the hosts didn't delete everything. Guess who has to pay for that even though it's a frivolous lawsuit? If I had a small website discussing something and made money off it, I could lose that because someone linked a legal youtube video on my site. Not because they or I did anything wrong, but because the copyright holders are idiots.

If I write a bad review on a movie or album on my hypothetical site, they could make a baseless complaint and have it taken down requiring me to spend money to get it back up. Why? Because they want to control the coverage of their crap.

Burrow

Yes, obviously there are more pressing matters out there, but how big a part of the population do you think would get involved in the internet-debate rather then one of those you mentioned? Surely tons more would be directly affected and have an opinion about a major change to the internet as we know it, rather then the situation in North Korea?

Lance Uppercut

Yes, Brian, all of those things are burning issues in the minds of "normal" young people.

jveezy

It's never going to be stamped out. There's already ways around SOPA.

You can hurt copyright violators on a short-term basis, but ultimately the only people ever hurt on a long-term basis are people who are trying to do legitimate business.

Like people who bought DRM'ed video games and discover that they can't play the game they purchased on multiple devices and find that customer service is nonresponsive. People who pirated the game didn't have to deal with that crap.

Like people who bought a DVD legitimately and had to sit through all kinds of piracy warnings and other nonsense that treats them like criminals. People who pirated the movie got a completely clean experience.

Like people who will want to visit Youtube after SOPA passes but can't get there because youtube.com is blocked on DNS servers. Pirates and everyone who managed to educate themselves about the bill will have Youtube's IP address on file somewhere or a browser extension in place so they'll still be able to continue mostly unimpeded.

Pirates can adapt better than anyone else. They'll be the ones least hurt by this legislation. SOPA attacks the wrong people.

Team Brian GB

The government isn't answerable to 'young' people, it is answerable to all people.

Though lets take this back to young people, how many young people do you think care about this relative to the youth unemployment rate?

Lance Uppercut

It is blatantly obvious that Brian has no idea what he is talking about. The evidence is in this thread. Yet, he maintains that he "supports" it. You can't help but laugh.

AVARiCE

I completely disagree with the notion that this is what is required and that it's the only way copyright violation could ever be effectively stamped out. For starters, you could always let copyright holders manage their rights and open civil cases where they feel they have been infringed upon.

ISPs particularly should have no involvement in this. If someone else throws nails onto the road and I get a puncture, why the hell should the people who own the road be held responsible? It's completely illogical and simply stands so that the old media can hold someone financially responsible for damages. Damages they'll undoubtedly calculate as highly as possible -- look at their 'one download, one lost sale' policy.

There are no internet police. The job here lies with the owners of the rights, just like it does in any other form of life. Apple's IP has allegedly been used by HTC, they didn't go to the retailers and tell them to shut their shops down until they removed all their HTC stock. To the contrary, they went to the courts and got an injunction. Simple.

I actually reckon this will backfire on America badly anyway. People like the Pirate Bay founders have been looking into a way to move the internet away from their clutches via decentralised systems. If an American kid can't access Youtube, he'll look for those instead. America can't ban every proxy and they certainly can't steal the internet from the rest of us. Companies like Google and Microsoft will find only initial difficulty in relocating and I'm damn sure many countries globally would more than welcome such large companies.

My main issue here, TBGB, is that you're too intelligent to be as naive as you're claiming here. I refuse to believe that you've looked that this objectively and honestly thought that ISPs are the ones who should be policing the internet.

---

Lance, your reputation precedes you. When you posted my name up earlier I assumed you were unleashing a cutting one-liner. I felt oddly happy that you weren't.

Team Brian GB

With regard to things like Digital Rights Management, people should read the terms and conditions instead of ticking without reading.

Youtube is going to have to find a way of working with this legislation if it indeed becomes so, they have done far too little over the years to prevent copyright infringement which is why this legislation is required in the first place. If they have to review every video that is posted before they go online then that is what they will have to do.

jveezy

They've already given producers direct access to their internal UI and that's resulted in them taking down videos that should never have been taken down.

Lance Uppercut

What has that got to do with anything? You said this wouldn't register in the FIFTY topics young people care about. You made that figure up, obviously, because you have no idea what you are talking about, but anyway, list them, please. You can insert "youth unemployment rate" anywhere in the fifty.

Team Brian GB

I never said young people.

Lance Uppercut

I beg to differ.

x42bn6

And that's why it's even more scary that the US will have a firewall that is almost as draconian as North Korea's.

Don't you think the content industry will try to abuse SOPA? They're already abusing their powers.

The year 2000 is ancient history when it comes to the Internet. None of those laws are able to deal with millions of legal, freemium downloads. None of those laws can cope with the explosion of fair dealing (UK)/fair use (US) performances of parody and criticism, fueled by HD-capable broadband connections. Heck, in the UK, you still can't rip a CD legally - what makes you think the balance of power in 2000 would be good today?

Let me be clear - piracy does not equate to lost sales, and quite often, pirates buy more music (many independent studies have concluded this). Piracy doesn't equate to lost sales because it does not mean that a pirate would have purchased the content legally had piracy not existed.

You can also take a look at the fact that the digital singles market has gone through the roof, while hard-copy album sales have slumped. This is because the music industry has got into the habit of selling us albums with 1-2 good songs on them, and the rest are filler. Yet album prices have barely fallen since the 1990s.

If you want to bring the "balance of power" back to the year 2000, you can kiss all the social networks goodbye (except perhaps Facebook and Twitter, and be prepared to see no innovation and increased censorship on these), kiss Spotify, Last.fm and iTunes goodbye, kiss YouTube goodbye in its current form, and kiss Wikipedia goodbye. That is a very, very grim world to be in, all for the sake of a few media companies. That's a rubbish "balance of power", quite frankly.

The Internet, free of government interference, has brought us thousands of successful, excellent Internet companies. Don't you think that this trend deserves to continue?

I don't think we should go back to the year 2000 where big companies were everything. The Internet is moving at a frightening pace and almost self-regulates itself, culling companies that don't innovate - and innovation is money. Don't believe me? Napster, Altavista, Friendster, Bebo, MySpace - gone. Yahoo! might follow - who would have thought 5 years ago that Yahoo! might be where it is now? Google itself may feel the heat from Apple in the future - who'd've thought 5 years ago that the world's best search engine would be fending off competition from a company that made overpriced hardware? Apple will struggle in the next decade or so, too. Facebook is arguably struggling now as it attempts to clone itself into a bad copy of Twitter. Microsoft has never really got into this Internet thing and is arguably now stuck where it is, and I bet it wishes it could have had things like iTunes.

The media companies, bless their poor souls, would like to go back to the days when you could only buy £15.99 albums and nobody could download music/videos. They want to take over the likes of YouTube and Spotify (these companies having set out all the investment and infrastructure in the first place).

You are pro-business, no? Well, the UK's digital economy accounted for 7.2% of the UK's GDP in 2010 (BBC News - UK internet economy 'worth billions'), and the world's internet economy in 2011 is estimated to be $8 trillion (The $8 trillion internet economy: By the numbers - The Week). And these figures are only going to increase: The Internet Is 20% Of Economic Growth I would argue this is miles more important than the content creators, and crippling the Internet is not in the interests of any economy whatsoever.

I don't think the Internet needs any more regulation, except perhaps against real problematic crimes such as the spread of child pornography.

The Internet today is very different to the Internet tomorrow, and it is all a very exciting thing to watch. In the next few years, you are going to see App usage explode, consumer hardware vanish, the next stage of RDBMSes in the form of NoSQL databases (frighteningly fast - Google, Digg and Facebook use these) to satisfy millions - if not billions - of users, advancements in HTML and JavaScript (although HTML itself may become sidelined soon enough if it doesn't speed up). With low-cost countries like India and China slowly getting on the bandwagon, connectivity is more important than ever and crippling DNS/deep-packet inspection is not going to help things at all. The likes of Second Life and Bitcoin suggest that wholly-online economies can be realised into real-world profits, and more of these will pop up in the future. Online platforms such as GOG and Steam have arguably saved the video-gaming industry, and these platforms are not the end-result at all.

And what has Big Content produced? The same generic bubblegum pop artists. Oh, I suppose it has created the X-Factor generation as well. And excuses for rap and hip-hop. I'll give them a few well-acclaimed movies of course but most movies are no good nowadays, and are not online-friendly.

If anything, Big Content has failed to innovate at the same rate as the Internet. At the rate the Internet has grown, I would always favour the Internet over content.

Music will be perfectly fine without Big Content. We might have fewer Justin Biebers to go round but hey, that would be replaced by indie content makers who don't have expensive deals and actually have to work for our wallets.

AVARiCE

I'm 20. A significant amount. Both the ill-educated who will only care because they can't listen to music on YouTube and the well-educated who will be disturbed by the removal of their freedom. If anything, when you combine the lack of job prospects with an infringment on civil rights, you're going to end up with a hell of a lot more unhappy young people than you would with either alone. From there, it's a different thread and a different topic.

By your own logic here, the government is answerable to everyone. Why, then, are they only listening to the ones lining their pockets to listen?

As much respect as I have for him, and will continue to have for him in other threads, I'm more than tempted to agree.

With regards to DRM, I should be able to do whatever I want within the realms of the law. To hell with EULAs and the like. Apple, in particular, have a lot to answer for.

YouTube's answer will be quite simple in my eyes, they'll relocate. The USA doesn't own the internet and if they want to censor a part of it (that's why they were compared to North Korea and China earlier) then they'll move outside that zone. The internet is a global thing -- my website is the same in Cyprus as it is here. In terms of law, it's probably similarly easy to run. As someone else mentioned earlier in the thread, China or Russia would be wise to offer a home to these corporations. China could just wire them up outside the firewall.

x42bn6

YouTube might just shut down, to be honest... YouTube has never been profitable (How Google Will Finally Make YouTube Profitable | InvestorPlace). There's doubtless some cross-promotion between its Google brands but quite honestly the costs involved for things like pre-moderation and legal costs might just force YouTube to close down.

And I'd like to see what would happen to music and video sales without the world's most popular video portal essentially offering free promotion.

jveezy

China wouldn't be the destination for YouTube or any other Google service considering the problems the two have had in the past, but your point stands that this bill is going to put handcuffs on one of the few industries in the US that is thriving during this economic recession. One of the other ones happens to be the entertainment industry that seems to be thriving despite the recession and despite piracy.

Team Brian GB

Though as you wish, in no particular order:

1. Anaemic economic growth
2. A growing unemployment rate
3. Record youth unemployment that has been getting worse for years
4. The minimum wage and workers rights
5. Inflation outpacing GDP growth and salary rises
6. The strength and influence of financial services
7. Rising taxes in recent years
8. A severe lack of affordable housing
9. A lack of credit lending despite the World Bank believing the UK to be the best in the world on that front
10. An apparent lack of secondary industries
11. The North/South divide in wealth and opportunity
12. The strength and influence of London
13. Utility prices and fuel poverty
14. The cost of petrol and diesel
15. Transport cost increases far exceeding inflation
16. Overcrowded roads, rails and airports
17. violent crime
18. Strong growth in identity theft and fraud against individuals
19. Net migration hovering around 200,000 a year for a decade
20. Trust in Parliament
21. Britain's projection of hard power
22. Britain's relationship with the European Union
23. Our closeness to the United States
24. The consequences of an aging population
25. Pension provision plummeting
26. Managing UK household, corporate and national debt
27. The United Kingdom's balance of trade
28. Overseas investment into the United Kingdom
29. The relative fall in the value of Sterling
30. The decline of town and city centres, and the high street
31. Years of austerity
32. The severe curbing of social welfare in a time of difficulty
33. The reorganisation of the National Health Service
34. Growing rates of ilness and disease linked to poor diets
35. Education not being spared austerity alike the NHS
36. University fees rising to a maximum of £9,000 a year
37. The spectre of an imploding Eurozone
38. Peace and stability in Northern Ireland
39. The future of Scotland within the United Kingdom
40. Domestic and international terrorism striking our shores
41. The urbanisation of rural parts of the British Isles
42. Climate change
43. Scarity of basic resources such as food stuffs and water in the future
44. Vulnerability to new pandemics
45. Reliability of tabloid newspapers
46. The authority of Judges in a common-law legal system
47. Declining British agriculture in recent decades
48. Need for investment in national communications and infrastructure
49. The rise of China and the consequences for the world order
50. The future of the British Nation

Team Brian GB

I didn't say that in relation to fifty things people care about, considering you quoted from the same post you ought to have noticed.

Lance Uppercut

So, you actually made up 50 things.

And it is still based on nothing but your imagination. Nice. Now, perhaps you could pull yourself away from inventing things, and actually address some of the posts in this thread.

Lance Uppercut

Are you fucking serious with this shit??

Team Brian GB

Firstly, you need to calm down, why you are angry I do not know.

Secondly, if you kindly refer to the post where I speak of 'fifty' things, you'll find that I refer to the population of 'both countries' - referring to the United States and the United Kingdom.

jveezy

Yep.

Team Brian GB

You're losing your marbles - people have called me many things, I was even called a communist recently which was somewhat bizarre to say the least, but nobody has claimed I have made up that we are in economic difficulty before - that is most certainly a new one.

Team Brian GB

It is more difficult to find political issues that are not somehow related to any other issues.