
Reddit successfully pressures Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to back off support of SOPA - chaosmachine
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/o9gq7/reddit_successfully_pressures_rep_paul_ryan_rwi/
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jerfelix
This headline is pretty misleading.

Ryan never supported SOPA. He came out against it. And this event came after
Reddit guys said they should pressure him. And then clueless Reddit guys take
credit for successfully pressuring him.

I would hope this HN crowd knows about correlation and causation.

~~~
mwsherman
Seconded – I don’t see any evidence that Ryan’s stance has anything to do with
Reddit, before or after.

Such strange behavior for programmers – accepting an idea with no evidence,
and allowing flattery to drown out reason.

~~~
PakG1
This won't be a popular statement, but I think programmers and engineers in
general pat themselves on the back more than they deserve in terms of how
logical they are in real life situations.

~~~
hessenwolf
As compared to whom?

~~~
PakG1
My point is that many engineers I meet seem to have this attitude that since
they're an engineer, it's evidence that they're logical and rational in all
aspects of life. A recent case in point is an old friend who told me that he
liked the chances of his startup because they were all engineers and so made
rational decisions about their business. I threw back at him that there are
also tons of engineers I've met who fall in love with their technology and
make blind stupid decisions because of it.

More cases in point. Many an engineer crashes and burns if ever promoted to
management because he doesn't know how to communicate with people. Any quality
manager would be able to resolve conflicts easily, and the required people
skills can be justified quite logically. This isn't to say that all engineers
are idiotic non-people people. This is saying that there's a selection bias
that just because someone was good at something, they must be good at other
things.

I see many more cases in situations of crisis, deadlines looming, etc. Bet if
you up it to a situation of war, no engineer's brain would be able to survive
and continue to think logically; only those who are properly trained for
thinking will getting continuously mortared would be able to continue
functioning. Still more examples out there in areas like marriage
relationships, anything that involves dogma (whether political, religious, or
scientific), etc.

My point is not that other people are smarter or more logical about the rest
of life than engineers. My point is that engineers are not automatically
smarter or more logical about the rest of life than other people.

------
rbanffy
Online piracy is _not_ a legitimate problem. It's an unavoidable side-effect
of having easy and cheap duplication and transport of digital goods.
Industries have to innovate to adapt to new technologies and circumstances.

~~~
jamesbritt
_It's an unavoidable side-effect of having easy and cheap duplication ..._

I've been trying to accumulate a list of practices or behaviors where there
has never been any (or much) barrier to copying, and where for someone to
complain would sound a little bizarre.

For example, hair styles. If you dream up a wicked hair style and go out in
public, anyone who sees you can likely copy it for themselves.

Same with how you dress yourself. (See also
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=878401>)

Can anyone suggest others?

~~~
tlb
Hollywood invests as much as $100M in a single movie, probably no hair style
has involved such effort. Perhaps if someone did invest $100M developing one
hairstyle, they would try hard to protect it.

~~~
davidw
Voting down this point of view is pretty sad. While the content guys have
certainly behaved badly, and sure don't seem to be creative in searching for
solutions, you can't deny that there is a _huge_ problem for them if we went
to the other extreme of having everything free everywhere for everyone. Huge
investments in films like that would completely cease to exist. No amount of
hand waving will paper over that fact, and he's just stating it, not
advocating SOPA or anything like that.

~~~
jamesbritt
*...if we went to the other extreme of having everything free everywhere for everyone."

My interest in this is wondering about areas where people innovate but rarely
expect any sort of copy protection.

Few people are going to invest the budget of a Hollywood movie into a hair
style. Is this because they know there is no practical way to stop people from
copying hair styles?

Suppose the was never any way to copy protect [films|recordings|whatever]. How
would this change things? Is (or was) the difficulty of copying things an
aberration, a quirk of a relatively brief period of technology? Should we tell
the MPAA and RIAA, hey, you guys just happen to have lucked out for a few
decades?

If someone invested several million dollars in a hair style, and then tried to
get laws to prevent people from copying it because copying breaks their
business model they'd be mocked for basing a business model on an untenable
condition. At what point do we do the same for people creating digital goods?

~~~
davidw
You write "you guys" as if the public has not benefited from the music and
film industries over the years.

~~~
davidw
If you've ever seen a movie or listened to music, it stands to reason that
you've benefited in some way from those industries, no? Come on people, engage
your brains, this isn't reddit. IP is a complex, multi-faceted issue without
any easy answers.

~~~
rbanffy
Most of the reasoning about piracy is based on the idea of content
consumption. Content is not consumed in the sense that consuming it doesn't
make it vanish. If I listen to a recording, you can listen to it, either at
the same time, or later, when convenient.

The economics of content production and distribution changed. It's no longer
difficult to move, replicate or make content from it. When refrigerators
threatened ice factories we didn't outlaw them. How much does long-distance
telephony cost to airlines? How much more business would they have if, in
order to talk to your factory manager in Shenzhen, you had to be there? How
much business have hotels lost thanks to it?

Luckily for us, they didn't have the power to outlaw long distance telephony.

This is exactly what's happening with MPAA, RIAA and others - they are afraid
they will have to change their businesses and will fight to prevent it.

~~~
davidw
You're conflating things that are useful with things that have some kind of
inherent enjoyment value for people.

For instance, if someone spends a year writing a book, and gets paid nothing
for it, I guess we could just shrug our shoulders, but I think the world would
be worse off for it.

> This is exactly what's happening with MPAA, RIAA and others - they are
> afraid they will have to change their businesses and will fight to prevent
> it.

I'm not in favor of what _they_ are proposing by any means, but do think
there's a balance to be struck somewhere. What Amazon is doing with the Kindle
isn't bad: it's very quick and easy to get eBooks across a whole range of
devices. It's not perfect, but things like that and iTunes seem to be a good
direction.

~~~
rbanffy
> if someone spends a year writing a book, and gets paid nothing for it

Cory Doctorow manages that very well. There are models that make writing books
and creating other works of art economically viable. Also, most writers never
get well paid for the books they write. Actually, most artists are really
poor.

~~~
davidw
Anecdotes are not data. Perhaps Cory Doctorow is leaving a lot of money on the
table. That may work in his case, but for someone 'at the margin', it may mean
they are forced to do something else, rather than write.

------
OstiaAntica
Rep. Ryan's statement is significant and helps the cause in both the House and
the Senate. Ryan is a widely respected policy leader for Congressional
Republicans. It is also a strong stance for him to publicly oppose another
Republican's legislation, while the bill is still being considered in
committee.

------
iso8859-1
I think sad how much of a popularity contest politics are. He doesn't really
respond to the arguments, just uses the boilerplate "freedom" stuff. You can
turn that statement right around, and it'd still make sense. I wish
politicians would actually have the time and commitment to know what they were
legislating. This system is broken.

Turned around:

> The internet is one of the most magnificent expressions of freedom and free
> enterprise in history. It should stay that way. In order to do that, we must
> close those evil sites so that we can have better conditions for the
> corporations and they will continue to provide jobs and security to our
> economy.

~~~
ajross
Having politicians who understand the issues you care about is no guarantee
that they will work for them. Yes, most of us yearn for a utopia where we're
ruled by super-intelligent benevolent overlords. But in the real world, I'll
settle for politicians that take popular positions because it's what the
voters want. Ryan did the right thing here, regardless of what you think about
his understanding of the issue (or about his other politics), and should be
commended. We won this little battle. It's a good thing.

~~~
jjoe
"""But in the real world, I'll settle for politicians that take popular
positions because it's what the voters want."""

It doesn't always work out best. It becomes a tyranny of the majority.
Especially when what's at stake impacts a small group of people (e.g.
religious differences, minorities, etc). I'd rather settle for politicians
that can think on their own.

~~~
polyfractal
I don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. He makes a valid
argument against the tyranny of the (uninformed) majority.

A significant number of Americans thought defaulting on our debt was a good
idea and ignored every expert and economist shouting this would be
catastrophic. Their argument was simply "we don't believe you" without
supporting evidence, and without any desire to listen to counter-arguments.
There is plenty of legitimate controversy over monetary policy, but basically
everyone agreed defaulting on the debt was not a good idea.

I'm not arguing for elitism or benevolent dictatorship, but there are
definitely times when "average Joe" has no idea what the fuck he is talking
about.

~~~
ajross
In which case shouldn't the correct solution be to _educate_ Joe about the
issue and get him to make informed choices at the voting booth and town hall
meeting?

Which, it seems, is exactly what happened here. Democracy is working (if not
working well). That's a good thing.

 _Edit: three responses now are picking on my use of the term "educate" and
referring to the willful ignorance of the public. That's missing the point.
People certainly can be "educated" about issues they care about, as
demonstrated here. It's not an issue of "book learning" or making Joe watch
the news. It's an issue of Joe knowing what matters to him already and getting
access to information that impacts those interests._

~~~
yummyfajitas
Joe has no incentive to become educated. His odds of affecting the outcome are
essentially nil [1], so it's all the same if he votes based on his tribal
affiliations or self image (e.g. "look at me, I'm so very not racist!" or
"look at me, I'm so religious").

[1] Math can be found here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750757>

~~~
ajross
Except that's clearly wrong, as evidenced by this very story. Joe reads reddit
and hears about SOPA. Joe tells his rep he doesn't like SOPA. And his rep
flips. QED.

The bug in your logic is that "tribal affiliation" is, in fact, an "issue" Joe
cares about. You don't think it's an important issue, and probably don't like
his affiliation anyway, but it is and he's going to vote on it. But it isn't
the only issue.

Basically: you can't expect to "educate" Joe to think like you do. Education
can't cure Christiantity, etc... But you _can_ tell him about stuff he cares
about. Real people care about SOPA, they just don't know the details. That is
something that can be fixed.

------
danso
It's not clear that he ever supported SOPA, just that his form letter wasn't
explicitly against SOPA when Reddit decided to work against him:
[http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/12/reddit-
force...](http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/12/reddit-forces-paul-
ryan-play-defense-sopa/46782/)

~~~
DennisP
Targeting an influential rep who's ambivalent is arguably a better strategy
than targeting reps who strongly oppose you and probably won't be swayed.

~~~
mayneack
This is why bills are almost never voted down. One thing that politicians hate
doing is switching positions because they can then get attacked on both sides
of an issue and as a flip-flopper. In fact, bills rarely get voted down once
they are proposed. Congressional leaders rarely force a vote unless they know
the bill will pass. The most common way for a bill to die is to just never
vote on it. This allows them to not support or oppose something controversial.

------
ward
Must we have politics on Hacker News...

Edit: It always ends up in bickering about viewpoints anyway.

~~~
bh42222
Unlike generic politics posts, this is very narrowly focused, and shows how
we, using our tools, can make real and immediate difference in how we are
governed.

This isn't just "politics", it's practical self-determination.

