

Internet Community Shut Out of Stop Online Piracy Act Hearing - Again - srl
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/11/public-shut-out-stop-online-piracy-act-hearings-again

======
dfc
I have a enormous amount of respect for the EFF and I am very concerned about
SOPA, however I am a little troubled by the tone of the article:

    
    
        "Many of the online watchers took to Twitter 
        to voice their concerns about being shut out 
        of the hearing by the poor quality webcast. 
        But the Internet community was shut out 
        of the hearing in a more fundamental way"
    

I think that the lack of representation in the hearing is appalling. I can
certainly imagine that the lack of representation is attributable to malice.
But the poor video streaming? I really doubt that the video quality is part of
a two pronged plan to shut out the opposition. Given the subject matter I bet
that this video stream has attracted more attention than any in the past.

~~~
hartror
I agree, EFF should have applied Hanlon's razor[1], but it wouldn't have made
for as good link bait. :/

[1] "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
stupidity."

~~~
burgerbrain
How about Grey's Law^? It doesn't really matter why it's wrong, it matters
_that_ it's wrong.

^ "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

~~~
glimcat
Munroe's Law: It only matters that it's wrong - on the internet.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Source: <http://xkcd.com/386/>.

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pingswept
It's almost as if the government doesn't understand how the internet works.

~~~
coreyrecvlohe
The fact that they can't even stream the video from the hearings properly
would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.

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sanderson1
This is just another illustration of how a group of people are trying to
change the internet at its core while obviously knowing nothing about it. SOPA
is ridiculous.

------
msmith
FWIW, I caught the tail end of the stream and the quality was fine.

I'm looking forward to being able to watch the entire recorded session when
it's available. If you're at all interested in the issue, I recommend that you
watch this and make up your own mind on it.

Edit:

The recorded video is at [http://infodocket.com/2011/11/16/live-video-stream-
sopa-stop...](http://infodocket.com/2011/11/16/live-video-stream-sopa-stop-
online-privacy-house-judiciary-committee-hearing-additional-resources/) I used
VLC to view it.

~~~
dfc
The recorded stream is also up on the house.gov[1] page. I am listening to it
now but its slow. Any serious analysis is going to come from reading the
transcripts.

[1]
[http://judiciary.edgeboss.net/wmedia/judiciary/full/full1116...](http://judiciary.edgeboss.net/wmedia/judiciary/full/full11162011.wvx)

------
101001011
mplayer -nocache -dumpstream -dumpfile file
mms://a1869.v657641.c65764.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1869/65764/v0001/sos1473-1.streamos.download.akamai.com/65768/full/full11162011.wmv

ffmpeg -i file file.someformat

Surely there are some mplayer/ffmpeg experts here. I'm not one of them. There
are no doubt more precise and efficient ways to do this but something like the
above might work if the streaming is slow going.

