Not to harp on a horrible metaphor, however I would say Google is more like a metro or subway than a getaway car driver (or car manufacturer).
Yes, you took it to the bank robbery -- however it also took lots of people to other places, and didn't know nor care where you were going or why. Nobody would accuse a bus or train of being an accessory.
You just made me realize how self-driving cars can be (ab)used by police or higher organisations to track citizens, and stop a crime.
Knowing what they are currently trying to do with the Internet, them wanting to have some control over the self-driving cars wouldn't surprise me.
To some people it may seem clear how much of a benefit this would be. "Wow, the police are actually able to lock down a getaway car and arrest people who have just committed a bank robbery?".
But, there's a reason I wrote "(ab)used" up there, you probably understand the implications already.
Going back to the subway metaphor: if you by your NYC metrocard with a credit card, the police can (and do) track you. There have been incidents with people being charged with---and exonerated from---crimes on the basis of their travel logs.
they probably used Google to find the website of the bank they're going to rob so they could get a location and hours. So really the Google and the bank both assisted in robbing that bank.
The MPAA goons have long passed the line of "we give a frak what anyone says about us" and will happily stay there as long as politicians take their money and vote as desired. And look who said this: Chris Dodd, a former senator.
Wow, I'm surprised that more hasn't been made of the fact that the "MPAA boss" was the Chris Dodd. Pretty amazing that he could go around saying things like this.
I was driving and listening to NPR the other day. Some story was on about the MPAA and the new SOPA bill. I hadn't yet heard that Dodd was the new MPAA chairman (chief lobbyist).
I was almost physically sick when that came across the air. I'm a long-time Democrat but I'll be damned if that didn't make me want to never vote for anyone ever again. Our two political parties are really two sides of the same coin and they are all working for corporations.
Our two political parties are really two sides of the same coin and they are all working for corporations.
They're not, right? Google is a corporation and SOPA goes against Google's wishes. The political parties work for whomever they think will get them re-elected, and apparently the media companies are who they consider most valuable.
Not to mention piracy is rampant in China, so I don't know what he's talking about when he says "it works" there. It makes me think that the main backers of SOPA want something more than just to fight copyright infringement, and this is why they are asking for "China-level" control, even though piracy is just as bad or worse there.
How nice. Instead of USA spreading American values to the Chinese people, China is spreading its "values" to USA. Also MPAA's "analogies" to theft are becoming increasingly more ridiculous.
I generally don't like the use of a metaphor as an argument since it often misses the point. Watching a movie without paying is not the same as stealing. I cannot give it to someone else what I have watched, I can't sell it, etc. But even if we accept that comparison, adding a second level of comparison by saying that a search engine is an accessory to stealing/robbery is just plain ridiculous.
For some reason, I don't really worry too much about all of these regulations. They will create speedbumps along the way, but the world will move on and come up with more innovative ways to get what they want. If they don't change with times, they will be uprooted eventually.
What Steve Jobs did was bring great technology and experience to masses faster than most other people. All of this would have been created/invented anyway, but it just would have taken a bit longer. All of these people only slow down the progress (which is still pretty bad), but they won't be able to stop it.
"""I generally don't like the use of a metaphor as an argument since it often misses the point. Watching a movie without paying is not the same as stealing. I cannot give it to someone else what I have watched, I can't sell it, etc."""
That same holds for stealing a pie and eating it. You cannot give it to someone else or sell it.
You just decided on a specific, narrow, interpretation of "stealing".
You are right in that example, but saying that downloading a file illegaly is stealing is still wrong. It is an broad and overreaching definition of "stealing".
Stealing is the substraction of an object. If I steal something from you, you don't have it anymore. You lose it. If I pirate Avatar, you can still sell it to someone else. If steal your car, its gone unless you get it back from me.
I hear that argument a lot, but it's not consistent with how we actually use "stealing". I think it's just a feel-good argument to justify that "no harm was done" with downloading a file illegally.
For example, we say that "he stole the answers to the exam" --in this case, too, the answers are still there, nobody lost them.
Here's what dictionary.com gives for steal:
1. to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, especially secretly or by force: A pickpocket stole his watch.
2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
3. to take, get, or win insidiously, surreptitiously, subtly, or by chance: He stole my girlfriend.
Let me check if I got this, just because they're ripping money off the film industry and they must come up with results to justify the money they get into their pockets, the country is supposed to give up on all freedoms and throw the constitution to the trash?
I generally don't like violence or encourage it, but people who back things like SOPA and PIPA really deserve a good beating.
We all saw how good the "great wall of China" proved to be. Protesters vanish without a trace, people who dare to say anything online sometimes go to jail or just vanish.
"When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn't do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites."
And then they decided it was such a bad idea that they were going to leave the country. Carrying this to the logical extension, if implemented, Google would pack up and leave us for Canada.
Canada is already on the MPAA's naughty list, so....
The US seems to be taking the expressway already to becoming more like China in terms of how the government relates to and deals with its citizens. This is just the tip of the iceberg considering a lot of whats gone on in the last decade in this country.
I really hate how companies like the MPAA and RIAA exist. They care about nothing but precious profit. Yeah, let's forget constitutional rights and free speech, and censor the Internet to protect our product that can survive without us. China's doing it! We have the technology!
They exist so that their member companies can say unpopular things that aren't directly attributed to them. It's like money laundering, but for speech.
Exactly, I think the media should recognize that the MPAA/RIAA consists of companies, and actually attribute things said to the companies that participate in the MPAA/RIAA. That way the people can see what these companies really think about the world.
"We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content. Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product."
I think it's great that he is making comments like this. It is such bad P.R. that it only makes it easier to do away with SOPA. I hope he continues to make these statements.
Carefully what you wish for. Get the right rep with the right amount of pull in congress and they'll get a ton of support from the rest of our reps no matter how asinine their statements are.
The GP is right though. Get the right rep with the right amount of pull in Congress, and it will happen regardless of what is said. However I think the statements being asinine make it easier to fight back and more costly for reps to go along with it.
This is so far into WTF that I can't help being deeply suspicious that it's a deliberate ploy of some sort. I just can't figure out what it would be expected to accomplish.
Does anyone have a good explanation of the mentality of these media organisations? There are good examples of how relaxing DRM and making it easy to purchase content makes you shed loads of money. E.g iTunes Music Store.
Why aren't they just concentrating on how to make more money? Are these actions really more productive than acquiring more customers?
The problem is that we have ten thousand year old representatives. They probably still do accounting using an abacus (or demand that their account use one).
All joking aside, we're talking about people who can barely use a computer debating laws governing the use of the very technology they haven't slightest clue about. As long as our representatives continue thinking that the Internet is a series of tubes we'll continue to hear this sort of thing from them.
Your government is a government just like the one in China. There are cultural differences, of course, but both governments are run by human beings.
It's not that the US government couldn't behave like China's - so far they've just chosen not to go quite that far. They seem to be on their way though.
This whole discussion of the US in general has got me thinking but your comment specifically really stood out to me. I know that these measures suck and all but is the US government really becoming as evil as people say?
If you at things historically you'll find people worrying that the US government is/was becoming tyrannical since the year our constitution was adopted. While I agree that the current Internet censorship debate should be taken seriously and I don't want any of these proposed laws to pass, if you take the long view you'll find that the history of the US is all about a series of battles for freedom. Some we win, some we lose but overall we've been heading in the right direction for a long time. It sounds silly but this can be likened to the posts that pop up on HN from time to time about how it's getting diluted and becoming lame. Some days trolls and idiots rule the day, others the smart folks take control and in general the community and their contributions have remained high quality since its inception.
So let's fight the good fight but maybe not go down the whole "this country is becoming the next [insert unpopular regime here]" road. Yesterday always seems like it was better than today, hindsight is 20/20, the grass is always greener, and all that.
I don't know - the nullification of the 4th Amendment thanks to the Patriot Act, and the recently voted 93-7 NDAA law that allows US military to arrest American citizens indefinitely without due process, is a pretty good start for totalitarianism don't you think?
And please don't use the argument "but if you didn't do anything wrong, then you have nothing to fear" because that completely misses the point.
No, I would never use the "if you didn't do anything wrong" argument. I'm not defending these messed up laws at all. I think they're awful like everyone else. All I'm saying is that if you take the long view you kind of see a pattern. People always feel like the past was better despite evidence to the contrary if you look at it. What I'm against is hyperbole. The country always seems to be going to hell but is it really? Things have gotten better overall. Women's rights, abolishment of slavery, civil rights movement. There are always these restrictive laws that come about and awful circumstances but in the end things get better. We had a terrible financial collapse and out of that was born Occupy Wall St. Maybe that movement will be the one that helps us move forward on the economic front just as those of us who are against internet censorship may, in the end, save freedom online. I just don't believe things are as bad as many would have us believe.
Well, actually, I think it has slowly become more tyrannical since about day 1. Maybe that's just a natural consequence of having a bunch of people whose whole job is to invent new laws.
I don't want to go all ad populum, but if people have been saying something for a long time, isn't it possible they've been right for a long time?
> I know that these measures suck and all but is the US government really becoming as evil as people say?
Your government (just like any other) is full of people who only care about their own personal gain. It's a slippery slope.
The Western world is full of politicians taking campaign donations (=bribes) in exchange for weaseling through whatever legislation their benefactors benefit from (at the expense of ordinary people), and that presents no problem for their consciences. Further along on the same road, there are places like Egypt, where the government tortures citizens to make an example of what happens when they have the audacity oppose their masters.
They want personal gain, and they want to maintain whatever machinery provides it to them. They're all just people though, the same human race all over. If an Egyptian homo sapiens is capable of abhorrent tyranny, so is an American one.
It's two opposing camps: the government against the governed. Just like in a war, the enemy is not really personified. It's just them vs us.
If hindsight is 20/20, then surely we should be realizing the the past sucked and not realizing why things suck today, giving the perpetual impression that we are improving.
I propose that hindsight is 20/20, and the fact that we don't think we are improving as a result says a great deal...
One doesn't have to search long to find plenty of examples of how the US government has made a mockery of the 1st Ammendment as well as many other Ammendments in the Constitution. Its nice to think that we have fundamental rights but in practice I really don't find that to be all that true unfortunately.
Yes, you took it to the bank robbery -- however it also took lots of people to other places, and didn't know nor care where you were going or why. Nobody would accuse a bus or train of being an accessory.