Stupidite 250

 

SOPA and PIPA Are Only a Skirmish

• by Joel Boyce
• January 19, 2012
• 1:51 am

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/sopa-and-pipa-are-only-a-skirmish.html#ixzz1ju4QCXN9

On Wednesday, January 18, 2012, Wikipedia initiated a 24-hour blackout of its own site, in order to protest and raise awareness about the SOPA and PIPA bills being debated in the US Congress and Senate, respectively. Though they’ve been leading the charge, the Wikipedians haven’t been alone. I visited many of my favourite sites throughout the day only to discover they, too were symbolically self-censoring. Not that I needed the reminder. I’ve lived behind the Great Firewall of China — I know how frustrating it is.

Victory in an ongoing battle

I agree these bills are bad news. But according to my most trusted source on copyright issues, this is only the beginning, not the end. While many of us were enjoying our Christmas holidays, Cory Doctorow was at the 28th Annual Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin, warning of things to come.

For those who don’t know him, Cory is an activist, journalist, and socially-conscious science fiction writer. He has spent years working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, reporting on copyright, free speech, and digital rights issues, and writing excellent novels. And in a little less than an hour, he convincingly made the case that SOPA is just the opening skirmish in a much larger war.

If you don’t have an hour to spare, you can pretty much get his whole argument in an analogy he makes about halfway through:

If I turned up and said “well, everyone knows that wheels are good and right, but have you noticed that every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from the bank robbery? Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would of course be “no”. Because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys. . . .

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/sopa-and-pipa-are-only-a-skirmish.html#ixzz1ju462WIW

 

If you have an hour, I highly recommend watching Cory. He's excellent. Here's another bit:

"In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo citing research that SOPA would probably work because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argue that these measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in America, too.

Don't applaud me! Applaud the MPAA!

Now, it may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over copywrite and the internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn't about copywrite. Because the copywrite wars are just the 0.9 Beta version of the long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in this coming century long conflict. We tend to think of them as particularly successful; after all, here's SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, and breaking the internet on this fundamental level in the name of preserving top forty music, reality TV shows and Ashton Kutcher movies.

But the reality is that copywrite legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it is not taken seriously. Which is why, on the one hand, Canada has had parliament after parliament introduce one stupid copywrite law after another, but on the other hand, parliament after parliament has failed to actually vote on the bill.

It's why we got SOPA, a bill composed of pure, stupid, pieced-together, molecule by molecule, into a kind of stupidite-250 that is normally only found in the heart of a newborn star, and it's why this rushed through SOPA hearings had to be adjourned midway through the Christmas break so that law makers could get into a real, viscous nationally infamous debate over an important issue, unemployment insurance, it's why the World Intellectual Property Organization is goaded, time and again into enacting crazed, pig-ignorant copywrite proposals -- because when the nations of the world send their UN missions to Geneva, they send water experts, not copywrite experts, they send health experts, not copywrite experts, they send agriculture experts, not copywrite experts.

Because copywrite is just not important to pretty much everyone."

I want to write up the whole thing because it's just excellent. Go Watch.