SOPA/PIPA Bill The first step to making Government Bigger while Politicans claim they want it smaller.

 

Above is a video explaination of this bill, this video is the work and product of http://www.kahnacademy.org I posted this video because I love his website, and the service it provides.

The Stop Piracy Prevention Act as well as the Protect Ip Act also known as SOPA and PIPA . These acts which will pretty much destroy all of the so-called piracy sites will also destroy sites like megaupload.com and fileshare.com (which is my personal way of distributing my freeware software. These sites also pay me x amount of usd cents per file downloaded.) Some users misuse these services and distribute copy write protected material though these sites as well. Other sites like thepiratebay.org  will be inaccessible to US users. I have gotten a lot of freely distributed independent movies (one being called Zenith which was a fun little sci-fi flick that featured cowboys from this site. This movie was released prior to the Cowboys and Aliens movie)  There have been a few other legitimate products such as certain game demos only released through  other torrent search engines. Not only do these bills stop Americans from using these websites but others as well. I would like to note I do not condone Piracy, but I also do not think Congress should put their big noses into the Internet in this fashion. I believe if an ISP wants to restrict user’s access to certain websites they should do so without Big Government telling them to.

As I said before there are other websites that may also come under these bills that are not “pirating” sites. One of those is the streaming of broadcast channels in other cities. For instance I am not a football fan, the only sport I really follow is the NHL. I live in Florida, a state that is not really hockey oriented as far as options to follow certain teams. There are websites such as freeredwings.tv, craigslist.com, ebay.com and a few others that will get the axe. Also seeing The Huffington Post is now owned by AOL, political type blogs like ADKOB may suddenly not be available to US Citizens.   I am a Detroit Red Wings Fan and I would rather watch my team play other teams than just the Lightning or the other Florida team. Also justin.tv and other sites like it that streams not only sporting events but events that happen in big MMO’s like the new Star Wars: Old Republic mmo, EVE Online, WoW(which I have no interest in but Blizzard boasts 12 million still are.)  This would also affect Facebook, YouTube,  and other sites as well. With Big Brother cutting governments jobs, and then at the same time it seems this bill will create at least one new position within the government. (Probably not an elected one either.) Or another Homeland Security type Department.  (which does the job of the Department of Justice and the FBI. It is a redundant  Department in my eyes.) Congress for the past four years have claimed of wanting a “smaller government” and to keep us “Democratic” yet they are actually considering bills that will give us a China type of Internet where the government limits what sites an American will use. I think this is the wrong way to do things, and it should show us as much as Congress and the Senate talk about Obama bringing about a more “Socialist America”. Yet bills like these have been thought up by Republican Representatives. The same Political Union that claims they are trying to stop America in becoming a socialist or communist nation.

This bill is not even out the gate yet, and there is already abuse. This bill shouldn’t be redrafted, this bill should disappear. To be honest if I wanted a government controlled Internet, I would move to China. This is, in my eyes, proof that it is not the Obama Administration that wants this government to become a socialist/communist country. It is always the loudest group that says they are against such things. Actions to me speak louder than words.

These are not the only bills, and I would like everyone to read these bills and browse the many others the 112^th Congress has put out. We as Americans have a duty to see things that could one day impact us in a way that would damage our freedoms on the internet. Which has become a big part of our lives, I do not want to one day see the only way we can view websites it by clicking app like buttons in a web browser.

Read the bills come up to your own decision, tell me if I am overreacting or not. These bills like many others are not very confusing to read. They are written so anyone can understand. The first ¼ of any bills come with definitions of certain words in the bills. We need to stay on top of our government. You must remember it doesn’t matter what ethnic background  our President is, what matters is that the citizens are  making sure the representatives that work FOR the citizens , are actually representing the citizens and not their own interests. These people are PUBLIC SERVANTS, we are a part of a democratic republic where the citizen through petitioning, voting, protesting, etc.  We the people run this country not the financial elite, not lawyers, not politicians. Politicians are supposed to do things that the citizens want, not what the politicians want. Look where our country is, look at what happens when a majority of the citizens say let them decide because they are smarter than us. If you still think that way wake the frack up, they are not smarter than a majority of the citizens, they don’t care about the majority obviously. The minority (those that are in the top 25% of the economic tax brackets) are getting tax cuts. Who has to take up the slack? The ones below that. Because their money comes from those that don’t have several houses, or cannot even afford more than one vehicle and still work. Those are the people financially supporting the government. So our say should have more  weight than someone not affected by unemployment, or whose job cannot be taken away from them because Congress talks about a smaller government, yet makes decisions that make the governments reach bigger. On January 18^th 2012 we will be joining sites and companies like Reddit,  American Express, AOL, Creative Commons, Demand Progress, Discover, eBay, Etsy, Facebook, FourInaSquare, Google, LinkedIn, MoveOn, Mozilla, OpenDNS, PayPal, Twitter, Visa, Wikimedia Foundation, Yahoo! and Zynga. We will be protesting by  making ADKOB  unavailable  for as long as those sites  and companies are also protesting. Protesting is not just about walking around the streets and camping making ourselves a public and health hazard and bringing about rodents. We know live in an age where digital protesting can be equally effective.

These bills have been found using the Library of Congress Website.

Direct links here:

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112s968is/pdf/BILLS-112s968is.pdf

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr3261ih/pdf/BILLS-112hr3261ih.pdf

You can browse all sorts of other bills here:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bssQuery/?Opt=t&Db=112

The site above lists all the bills currently up for vote in their short titles Alphabetically. Congress is also doing things like a College Football act (how does this help the US Citizens in any way?)  This is how I get my information by look and reading from the source, not from the media or media controlled sites like the Huffington Post.

If you want a particular site to join in the protest, even browser-based online games (this affects how they advertise. If they advertise on what congress blacklists, they may not be available to US users as well) you can do that here : http://act.fightforthefuture.org/page/m/2e1f2084/1d11336d/71de7597/f863ee6/1642143196/VEsH/

Update:

It is now the day after the big protest. Not only did several websites block out their sites as promised, but this also caused quite a stir over the internet. I would like to go over some of the things that happened yesterday during the internet strike. I would also like to not that the extended blackout that ADKOB did was intentional. ADKOB came back up, January 19th at noonish eastern standard time.

http://www.kahnacademy.org posted a video that explains this bill. Kahn Academy is a website that does many video tutorials on math, computer science, political science, and other topics. If you really want to re-learn, or you don’t understand a subject he actually explains things to make it a little clearer. (I had to post it above the post because for some reason the blog wouldn’t show the video down here.)

The website thepiratebay.org (mentioned above) is a site that actually gives people access to pirated content. (surprise there! It’s not like the name of the site is misleading or anything) they released this statement:

http://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/sopa.txt

For those two lazy to read that press release here is somethings from it that I feel make valid points.

“Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture. “Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them – like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.” “So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations – it’s all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules.”

Then they stated something about the source of the piracy problem, which I will add my own two cents to.

“To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.”

Here’s my two cents adding on to that, because I think it is a very valid point.

When Napster first came out, one of the first ways people could share things like music over the internet using a “peer-to-peer” system. The music industry instead of conforming to this revolutionary idea and provide a similar service charging less than they charged for a cd, and be able to distribute the music more effeciently. Instead they tried and failed to squash it. Rather than to learn why it would have been more profitable to take away the physical product (cd’s in this instance.) and provide a service like iTunes that charged per song or a flat rate charge that would ultimately be less than buying individual songs and still be profitible. They decided to spend the countless amount of money to squash the movement, instead of becoming apart of it. They started to do a DRM system (Digital Rights Management.) which later proved easy to circumvent. So they wasted all that money, and all that profit to stop the movement instead of perfecting ways to distribute their products in a more affordable way, digitally they wasted countless millions and time to stop something that could not be stopped with brute force. One can say the same for the Video Game industry, which despite piracy makes more money than a lot of blockbuster movies. Instead of lowering the price of their PC titles, and digitally distribute the product. They followed the bad example of the music industry. Before anyone says well there’s steam, I am going to rebuttle that. While steam is a highly effective and good ways to distribute a game there are some flaws. The major one is that in order to play a game you need to open steam first, and a game you buy on steam is usually more watered down than a physical copy. You buy a game on steam and you can’t just play a game, you have to wait for steam to open, log-in, then wait for steam to verify that you own the said game. It is a good and effective system, and is great if you like playing games like Call of Duty or Battlefield 3. For multiplayer games I myself prefer to play MMO’s. I do like playing single player games, and I see no point in retarding a games performance. I have a very decent computer, in most new games I meet the recommended requirements. However, if I buy the game on steam the performance is greatly decreased. There is a way to circumvent this, none exactly legal. My suggestion to the Video Game Industry, distribute your product through your website using “peer-to-peer” technology. There is in fact, a way to ensure a person has actually bought the game before they download. This technique is actually employed by some indie game companies, where you buy the game and they e-mail you a .torrent file. Peer-to-Peer distributing is actually cheaper in the long run to do, the reasons is you don’t have to actually dedicate a server, or even bandwidth past distribution day. All of your paying customers will do your distributing for you. It is not a perfect system I would agree, but I think from a technical stand-point it is a much more cost-effective way to distribute a software product. This would also lower your overhead, so would telecommuting. If you hire employees that work from home there are many advantages. For one you do not have to pay for offices, taxes for those offices, electricity, or new computers for your employees. Your employees more than likely have their own equipment that is on par with the stuff you use in a physical office. Especially for the gaming industry, real-time communication can happen using technologies such as Teamspeak, or Skype if you want to physically see a person face-to-face. There are problems with that, but you will also find that these employees would be willing to work at a lower pay rate, because you take away the actual need for relocation or even the gas expenses to get back and forth to work. With technologies like Cloud Computing you can also monitor your employees activites and make it so any work they do it has to be done in the Cloud to get paid. I actually think these strategies would be more effective in combating piracy, than giving the government more control over the Internet.   I would like to note to those that are offended by the word retard, and all of its incarnations, the real meaning of the word has nothing to do with mental disease. In this word’s case because it is a verb, the word’s meaning is to cause to move or proceed slowly; delay or impede. If you never knew that this word is something more than a very nasty slur, now you know and knowing is half the battle. Besides if I wanted to call someone stupid, I have a rich vocabulary and I can find a more eloquent way to do so.

Rupert Murdoch has tweeted these things.

“So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.”

“Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.”

“Film making risky as hell. This has to lead to less, hurting writers, actors, all concerned.”

“Understand more than all allege! Google great company doing many exciting things. Only one complaint, and it’s important.”

“Just been to google search for mission impossible. Wow, several sites offering free links. I rest my case.”

I invite Rupert Murdoch to either write an article giving reasons why SOPA/PIPA is the answer to piracy as far as the film making industry is concerned. But be prepared to be grilled by myself and many others, since this is an open-ended town hall debate style blog. I honestly would like his personal opinion, not one an employee of his writes while he dictates it. On the one condition that he promises not to sue me, because I make him look foolish. While debating points of the bill that could lead to a more Chinese Internet or one run by big corporations. (which would be worse in my opinion.) With that said here is a general statement to enlighten him and everyone else about how search engines really work. All a search engine really does is find matches to words given in a boolean format. A question or sentence is usually formatted automatically, they only look for WORDS that match not actual content. To demand a search engine to stop access to such things would be redundant. A better approach to this is to distribute in the same fashion these criminals and terrorists do. I would rather download something than buy a DVD or Blue-Ray Disc. I personally do not buy DVD’s or Blue-Ray discs for the movie or tv show. I buy these products for the extras. The commentary, the behind-the-scenes stuff. If you want to combat piracy, you are doing it wrong. Legislation and making the government less about the people and more about the corporations WILL NEVER WORK. The first lines in the Constitution is not WE THE CORPORATIONS, but WE THE PEOPLE. Using iTunes, The Sony Network, Netflix, Zune, and other services like it is a good step. But if you want to combat piracy make it irrelevant.

I would honestly rather pay .99 cents USD for a tv show, that I can download to my computer a limited amount of times. You want more people to do this take out the middle man, what I said about ways the Video Game Industry could improve its distribution could be said for tv and movies as well. While the above ways are good, broaden it. I personally don’t want to pay a middle-man for something that I can buy directly from the source.

There are ways to make sure that only one computer or network can view a certain file or software. As for movies, I understand many new digital projectors use DVD’s or Blue-Rays instead of the old reels. You could also limit the ways someone views these products, Windows Media Player has something that allows it to ask a server for a license rights on many movies. (A lot of these movies I have seen that use this technique is pornography movies, but it is effective.) The cool thing about this is if a media player does not get this license the video will not play. If the license is expired the video will not play. This is part of existing technologies, and this could also cut down on illegal recording in movie theatres.

Because you can use this technology to distribute movies that were in the movie theater, but not yet on DVD and just sell the movie to be able to be viewed for a limited time. (I personally would suggest a week, this way someone can watch a new release in their home for about the price of a movie ticket. But they could view it on their own time.) Also with this technology a certain file could be given a one time view license. Requiring a customer to buy another license or pay a little more for a multiple viewing license. The movie and tv industry would get their money on something that hasn’t even come out on DVD yet.

Assuming people are willing to wait for a DVD rip you could employ the same way to distribute DVD ISO’s. You could also only allow the iso to be burned once with unlimited playback. The reason this would be more profitable than selling DVD’s in a store is that you could sell it cheaper than it could be found in Wal-Mart, and you would make more of a profit. This way you reach more customers, and still provide the fancy packaging in stores as well. Only half of what you sell would be sold back on sites like Ebay, or Craigslist. Digital distribution is more “green” than physical distribution. So instead of being the evil ones, you suddenly become the good corporations. These things I believe would make piracy irrelevant.

Also if you distributed legitimate copies the same way, it would really reduce the need for piracy. My challenge try it or something like it for a year or two, see how it works. If I am right then you could tell me thank you. If I am wrong you are free to call me whatever you want. But I don’t think I would be proved wrong.

I could go on and on about this topic, and over the next seven days I will.

I would like to remind everyone who reads this blog, everything written is up for a debate. I want a good clean debate with intelligent points for or against this topic.

Send your representative this link invite them to join in. The purpose of this site is to show that the processes of government should and with our current technologies has the potential to make it a more active one, where exchanges with the citizens and politicians can be more direct than ever before.

Plus I really would like to debate with some politicians on this subject if they dare. They probably won’t because they don’t even allow non democratic and non republican parties to participate in their debates.

All that being said let the debate begin!

E_E