White House will not support SOPA, PIPA

The industries that oppose SOPA are the ones that tend to make money on traffic and advertising. They stand to lose revenue because they have made so much money on traffic for illegal content. Companies like Google and Yahoo stand nothing to gain from the crack down on illegal downloads and copyright infringement. What should they care if other people are getting ripped off? They make a ton of money from it.

The fact is that no one has been able to provide a concrete argument against it other than the DNS issues, which could be removed or addressed, and absolutely NO ONE has ever presented a better alternative.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. There's no such thing as a law that can protect people from being ripped off that someone cannot pretend will be an infringement of free speech. On the internet, free speech includes stealing from others. To ease their conscience they pretend that they are just ripping off big evil corporations who are out to rip them off. Yet the reality is that those who suffer from the stealing are the little people who just want to put food on the table but have to take pay cuts and lost jobs as the income shrinks. And the income isn't shrinking because it's being replaced by something better (though there is more competition with other forms of entertainment).

They also try to ease their conscience by claiming the problem is the business model being used by music companies and movie companies. As if there is an alternative to free. One could become the richest person on earth if they were to simply implement this supposed better business model. Yet no one claiming this can be done has done so.
 
One of the rare things I'll credit the administration for doing. Let's see how it ultimately plays out now.
 
mortimer said:
Jonnyclueless said:
Right now you have 95% of music downloads being illegal.
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Evidence?
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Can't say if it's exactly 95% but that number isn't far off. It's a serious problem for any digital media. Genie of digital piracy is out of the bottle and it's not going back in. We have to find a way to deal with it, properly.
 
It's not far off of 95%? This sounds like RIAA math which sounds almost exactly like police math when they do a drug bust and give a monetary value for what they seized. I don't believe either one and to be quite honest it makes the rest of their claims weaker by using those types of numbers without hard data to back it up.

iTunes alone has sold how many songs so far? Over 16 billion songs back in August of 2011. Even if iTunes were the only possible way on earth to get music (no CDs, no other online stores) that means that well over 300 billion songs have been stolen using your RIAA-ish math.

That's about 45 stolen songs for every person on the face of the earth. EVERY person on earth. From infants to the very old. From the tech savvy in Silicon Valley to someone who doesn't even have electricity much less internet access in the middle of a rain forest.

That doesn't even account for the legitimately free music that you can find out there or any of the other legitimate online music retailers.

Do you still want to stick with that 95%?
 
Jonnyclueless said:
The industries that oppose SOPA are the ones that tend to make money on traffic and advertising. They stand to lose revenue because they have made so much money on traffic for illegal content. Companies like Google and Yahoo stand nothing to gain from the crack down on illegal downloads and copyright infringement. What should they care if other people are getting ripped off? They make a ton of money from it.
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What a load of bull. Hell, here's a relevant article from just yesterday. And the idea that all the internet companies that oppose it are ad generating ones is absurd. A decent percentage of the software industry is against it and they've been hurt hard by piracy.

ETA: Cause I finally had a bit of time this morning. Read through this list, are they all advertising based industries? Or are we painting with such a wide brush that we can discount all legitimate complaints as that they make so "much money on traffic for illegal content" no matter the reality?

The fact is that no one has been able to provide a concrete argument against it other than the DNS issues, which could be removed or addressed, and absolutely NO ONE has ever presented a better alternative.
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Simple against: It won't work. I've seen nothing in this bill to demonstrate it will do jack to stop piracy. It might stop random, one time piracy - especially by people who don't know their doing it - but that's not "the problem" is it?

Know what it will work against? Random, unfounded, copyright infringement allegations. You don't like what that person said about you? Claim IP infringement and try to have their site turned off. It's already a problem on Youtube.

The most obvious alternative, and the one we're going to have to face eventually, is that our copyright/IP laws are antiquated and aren't adapting well to the internet age. Obviously the MPAA and RIAA are against it, but they're pretty firmly against anything productive. Fighting harder and harder against the piracy hurts the legitimate consumers more than it does the pirates (a fact the gaming industry is slowly coming to realize - and DRM free games can be remarkably successful, such as GoG and the Humble Bundle).
 
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Sam.I.Am said:
It's not far off of 95%? This sounds like RIAA math which sounds almost exactly like police math when they do a drug bust and give a monetary value for what they seized. I don't believe either one and to be quite honest it makes the rest of their claims weaker by using those types of numbers without hard data to back it up.
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It was from three years ago and it acknowledged that digital music sales were increasing - especially single track sales. I imagine with the prevalence of Iphones/Ipads and the internet music radio stations (Pandora and such) that provide direct links to purchase tracks that it is likely that digital sales are still increasing.

I'm a little interested in the how broad a net the original report used (i.e. do "ringtone" downloads count?), but I don't have the time, right now, to look it up and read through it.

ETA: OK, the IPFI is basically the international version of the RIAA (in that they cover all countries except the US). Knowing the RIAA I'm inclined to take their reports with a grain of salt, but for the benefit of the doubt here's their report for 2011 [pdf] (covering 2010).

Random related ETA: There is some evidence, though possibly only anecdotal, that piracy correlates to age. Young people without jobs are more likely to pirate and when they start working they tend to be far more inclined to pay for products they want. There's a reason the RIAA's legal battle against school children hasn't exactly won them any friends.
 
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Jonnyclueless

the thing is, about challenging a SOPA takedown, you would be outlawyered, as the RIAA, or other corporations who put out a notice, would have top of the range legal firms working for them. Whereas you would only have almost literally the first solicitor to talk in the room.
 
Jonnyclueless said:
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Right now you have 95% of music downloads being illegal. It's out of hand and we need laws that help fight this problem.
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If my friend listens to a CD I bought, would you consider that theft?

:boxedin:
 
Jonnyclueless said:
The fact is that no one has been able to provide a concrete argument against it other than the DNS issues, which could be removed or addressed, and absolutely NO ONE has ever presented a better alternative.
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Let me outline some hypotheticals which make SOPA ridiculous.

1. Suppose that I go to a wedding and video tape the wedding couple dancing to a copyrighted song. I then go to youtube and upload it. 1,001 people view that video over a 180-day period. I have committed a criminal offense and so has youtube.

2. Suppose I'm at a bar with some of my friends and the Dusty 45's are playing. I record the hijinx of my friends on my camera phone. I then go to youtube and upload it. 1,001 people view that video over a 180-day period. I have committed a criminal offense and so has youtube.

3. Suppose the website of the Dusty 45's in the above paragraph contains a copyrighted work that they are not allowed to distribute. The JREF would have committed a copyright violation for allowing a link on their website to a website that has copyright violations and could be punished.

The law as it stands will require all websites to verify that user-generated content is not in violation of a copyright. This could cause sites like JREF, Youtube, Wordpress, etc, all to be shut down. That's what this was really about. The big content generators, such as the RIAA and the MPAA are terrified about small studios using sites like Youtube to market competing products. The press is similarly concerned about bloggers taking away readers from their newspapers and broadcast news.
 
Jonnyclueless said:
TThey can monitor the downloads from legitimate sites and the downloads from file sharing torrents.
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Not all torrent files contain copyright infringing material. Some small game companies, for example, will use torrent files to help distribute game patches since it lessens the load on the company's servers.
 
Corsair 115 said:
Not all torrent files contain copyright infringing material. Some small game companies, for example, will use torrent files to help distribute game patches since it lessens the load on the company's servers.
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Not just "small game companies," either. Blizzard distributes World of Warcraft patches via bittorrent.
 
I know Linux distros can sometimes make heavy use of bittorrent. There's also a nice website that has torrents of old public domain movies.
 
NWO Sentryman said:
Jonnyclueless

the thing is, about challenging a SOPA takedown, you would be outlawyered, as the RIAA, or other corporations who put out a notice, would have top of the range legal firms working for them. Whereas you would only have almost literally the first solicitor to talk in the room.
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100% correct. This is why the very idea is just stupid from the perspective of the average human.

Forget about all the DNS issues, forget about whether it will actually help reclaim any of the revenue "lost" to piracy or prevent IP related job loss, forget about all the actual facts.

Lets just hypothesize about what will happen if these laws go through like Jonny wants.

First, to protect your IP, you need to get a court order. That means 1) paying for a lawyer or 2) doing it yourself. If the courts are fine with 2), then I imagine there is going to be a flurry of frivolous court orders that will result in more and more constraints placed on just who and when can apply for such an order. Result -- people will need to pay lawyers to protect their IP.

Second, if you are accused of infringing, and you are guilty, once you fix the mistake you need to 1) get a lawyer to fill out the paperwork to get your domain name unblocked or 2 ) learn to do it yourself. Not to mention -- will submitting such paperwork require government processing fees? How long will it take for the authorities to verify? Who gets to verify? Result -- people will need to pay lawyers to get their sites accessible again.

Third, if you are wrongly accused of infringing, you not only need to go through the above steps but ALSO if you want to sue for wrongful <whatever> you will obviously need a lawyer to do so, or else learn the law profession yourself.

Thus it is obvious that in order for SOPA to protect any IP, the IP owners are going to need deep pockets for lawyers. Meaning, the only IP that is gonna get "protected" is that of the big companies. Not a surprise that this is exactly who is pushing the law. This won't do **** for the small companies that can't afford all the legal fees.
 
Jonnyclueless said:
The industries that oppose SOPA are the ones that tend to make money on traffic and advertising. They stand to lose revenue because they have made so much money on traffic for illegal content. Companies like Google and Yahoo stand nothing to gain from the crack down on illegal downloads and copyright infringement. What should they care if other people are getting ripped off? They make a ton of money from it.
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Completely and utterly untrue. Virtually every educated internet user opposes it, because the idea is just stupid.

The only proponents are content industry *executives*. I don't know that the hollywood workers or the recording label employees are also in favor of such legislation, just because their bosses are. Isn't that a kind of bad assumption?

Likewise, who cares if the MPAA is in favor of it -- who voted? Did the entire film industry take a vote? No, it is just the fat cats that make the decisions who are in favor.

So to say that the only people who oppose SOPA are the ones that benefit from piracy is just untrue.

Case in point, I develop video games and every single person at my studio is opposed to SOPA. Yet video game piracy causes us to lose money like crazy all the time.

We oppose SOPA because we are smart, and SOPA is utterly stupid. It has nothing to do with wanting to protect IP or support piracy. It is just a stupid idea.

Jonnyclueless said:
The fact is that no one has been able to provide a concrete argument against it other than the DNS issues, which could be removed or addressed, and absolutely NO ONE has ever presented a better alternative.
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More lies.

The biggest arguments against SOPA have nothing to do with the DNS issues. They are:

1) It isn't going to do what proponents want it to do in the first place, just like the war on drugs hasn't done anything. The fact that it only affects people in the U.S. is your first clue there.

2) It is going to create a legal nightmare for anyone that cant afford the millions to keep lawyers at their beck and call.

3) It is going to make the U.S. look like idiots in front of the rest of the world.

Furthermore, the current legislation is working pretty good if you ask anyone who isn't a fool or a money grubbing fat cat. The way an average person searches for copyrighted content is by name -- so it isn't hard for the lawyers at the current corporations to do the same thing, and then just alert the authorities when sites infringe. And every site I know of will rapidly pull copyrighted content from their servers as fast as they can.

And you can already get a court order to remove content.

If sites are distributing stuff faster than the lawyers can catch them now, how does SOPA change that? It doesn't -- at all. That's why it is such a stupid law.

Jonnyclueless said:
You can't have your cake and eat it too. There's no such thing as a law that can protect people from being ripped off that someone cannot pretend will be an infringement of free speech. On the internet, free speech includes stealing from others. To ease their conscience they pretend that they are just ripping off big evil corporations who are out to rip them off. Yet the reality is that those who suffer from the stealing are the little people who just want to put food on the table but have to take pay cuts and lost jobs as the income shrinks. And the income isn't shrinking because it's being replaced by something better (though there is more competition with other forms of entertainment).
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The question is whether there is more money made from an open, free internet or lost on IP copyright infringement that SOPA will actually stop.

Have you done the research? How much money and jobs will be lost to SOPA? How much will SOPA actually fix?

How many employees will lose their jobs because now every company with a website may have to pay unreasonable amounts in legal fees, and/or lose business because their URL is blocked until < the yet unnamed entity that will speedily verify when copyrighted content has been removed > unblocks it?

Right off the bat, the fact that SOPA doesn't mean diddly squat to any other country in the world should clue you in that perhaps it isn't going to be the magic bullet you think it is.

Jonnyclueless said:
They also try to ease their conscience by claiming the problem is the business model being used by music companies and movie companies. As if there is an alternative to free. One could become the richest person on earth if they were to simply implement this supposed better business model. Yet no one claiming this can be done has done so.
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More lies. Here is a clue, Johnny -- look at Hulu and all the embedded media players the major broadcasting companies offer now. If you want to see an episode of any popular show, you simply go to the company's site and .... watch it.

Nobody bothers to try to find hacked streams or look on torrrents anymore because it is soooo easy to just put up with the few commercials in the middle of the stream on the abc or nbc website.

Wow, that must have been hard for them to provide that service... that generates money for them via advertising ... and is so much easier than pirating, nobody bothers to pirate tv shows anymore ....

The business model exists, and people are doing it, and succeeding.
 
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Good news, but why are we hearing about this for the first time? Why couldn't Obama make his intentions clear before any such legislation were even proposed? Shouldn't it have been obvious where he stood on this issue? Only two days ago, it was basically a coin-flip.
 
Richard Masters said:
Good news, but why are we hearing about this for the first time? Why couldn't Obama make his intentions clear before any such legislation were even proposed? Shouldn't it have been obvious where he stood on this issue? Only two days ago, it was basically a coin-flip.
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I assume it's because he's a politician, it's an election year, and he can see which way public opinion is blowing.
 
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