

SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet  - sathishmanohar
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally-gets-chance-break-internet

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FuzzyDunlop
Why not target markets and car boot sales for also enabling piracy?

Piracy seems to just be a convenient term/scapegoat that enables businesses
that can't (or won't) consider adapting to a changing environment while
dealing with the prolific infringers through the proper legal channels.

That's not to dismiss piracy in its entirety. More to say that a very
complicated issue is being considered a black and white one on both sides. One
that is so new that no one's really got a good idea of how best to tackle it
yet.

This is evident rather clearly in approaches taken to battle piracy and defend
it, such as DRM measures actually punishing the legit consumer for having the
audacity to buy their product; and such as the ridiculous sense of entitlement
some consumers have: that they have the god-given right to consume media for
free.

Hence arguments arise, for example, about the ratio of downloads to lost sales
(neither 1:1 or 1:0 as both sides would have you believe), how piracy is a
victimless crime, how the internet is an insurmountable threat to big
business' bottom line and other such bullshit.

Piracy as a concept will never truly stopped and pirates will never get all
their content legitimately for free (without any sort of compromise). Hence
the solution is good, old-fashioned innovation, and the willingness of
businesses to constantly adapt to new opportunities and threats in their
environment while considering their own strengths and weaknesses. The economy
as businesses would like it to remain (free of regulation) is too harsh and
remorseless for the old mammoths to survive.

And the legal system as it is is there to allow them to face the real piss-
takers in court, and also to allow those individuals or businesses to defend
themselves.

Sounds almost too sensible to be true.

~~~
mukyu
I had never heard of a car boot sale, but I had heard of a car boot (a device
that fit around a car's wheel to prevent it from turning).

Wikipedia says it is basically a flea market except people selling out of
their car's trunks.

~~~
chc
"Boot" = "trunk", depending on your dialect of English.

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zipdog
This law sounds so bad I don't see how it really even benefits the big media
companies. It seems it could be abused in the other direction too... The
summary suggets that Visa,etc _have_ to comply with all requests in five days.
And all you need is to be a rights-holder, which is pretty much anyone (you
only need to suspect infringement).

So every webcoder with even teh smallest IP could just issue takedowns to
every major company site, claiming that the company website is holding IP-
protected code. [A good portion of the time large company websites are in
breach anyway]. And anyone with any publicity-related IP could issue takedowns
to everyone with any connection to them.

Then no-one at all will be able to process any transactions online.

------
joejohnson
Half of me hopes things like this happen. Imagine what this would mean for
sites like Google and Twitter? It's a ridiculous proposal, and it will not
work.

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earbitscom
> _In essence, Hollywood is tired of those pesky laws that help protect
> innovation, economic growth, and creativity rather than outmoded business
> models. So they are trying to rewrite the rules, regulate the Internet, and
> damn the consequences for the rest of us._

"Hollywood" has been innovating, creating economic growth and, most of all,
been the center of creativity for the most creative industries there are for
some time. They are not tired of the pesky laws that protect those things.
They are tired of the opposite. They are tired of existing laws designed to
protect innovation, economic growth and creativity in the form of copyrighted
IP going unenforced, and sites abusing the DMCA (Grooveshark is a great
example).

I am not saying that I support this bill, and I'm not saying it shouldn't be
stopped dead in its tracks. But it's so tiring to hear about big, bad
Hollywood. You can't expect someone to lobby for a half measure, and
especially when the opposing side wants nothing that gets passed to be
enforceable. Either you shut down sites that are clearly infringing, or you
insist on information about individual users so that it can be enforced on
that level instead. As long as people keep infringing on peoples' property
rights, one or the other solution will be proposed. The easiest way to stymie
this debate is for people to stop taking things that don't belong to them and
people who truly care about privacy and the rights of technology companies to
speak intelligently about both sides of the issue instead of making stupid
statements like the one above.

~~~
nextparadigms
The way they are proposing is clearly not the way to do it. Just because
Hollywood is contributing to the economy, doesn't mean they are the only ones,
and you should throw the Internet away just to save Hollywood. Because
apparently that's how they think, when they try to push for laws like these.
They really don't care about the consequences. They just want something to
stop piracy.

And worst of all, just like DRM and any other anti-piracy measure in history,
it will still probably not stop piracy. There will be made other encrypted and
anonymous tools to deliver piracy files to the people who want them, and so
on. In the meantime, it _will_ break the Internet for the rest of us.

Plus, who's to say the Internet isn't disrupting the big content industry,
just like it has disrupted pretty much everything else? So far it has turned
out a net positive results. Why should the Government save an industry from
disruption? It's not their job to do that, and it will have a negative effect
in the long term. This is almost like the bailouts all over again.

If you ask me, I think we'll need an #OccupyHollywood soon.

~~~
earbitscom
What I'm saying is that they are going to propose whatever is easiest for them
to use to achieve their goal. They're not going to put in their own
limitations. If people who care about this want reasonable laws, they need to
propose some of their own. Theirs are usually equally in the opposite
direction. And, most on the other side need to change their attitude about
copyright because it's not likely to change and you lose credibility fighting
for privacy and reasonable laws in the same breath as you say that information
wants to be free when referring to copyrighted material.

