What the US government and many other non computer-savvy people in power need to realize is that linking is speech!
One of my first employers was at a public television station. In his mind, he had to ask the other party permission to link to them. That is thinking of a link as a physical thing, as if it was a copper wire or a metal house key. It's not. It's just information. Needing permission to link to something is exactly like needing permission to talk about something. That shouldn't be. If we live in a society that believes in free speech, we should all be free to link to anything we want to!
Free speech has many exceptions. So no, you shouldn't be able to link to anything you want to. Just like free speech, there are many exceptions about what you can link to which are already illegal.
That's like saying I can't walk out of a public art gallery and go tell a friend there's a cool landscape portrait by a famous artist hanging on the 3rd floor. That's linking.
By definition, if it's on the internet, it's public facing and therefore publicly available knowledge. Linking is simply telling others, hey, look over here for publicly available information.
Now, if you link to something illegal or perverse, depending on content, that could result in interest from the authorities but that's because you, the user, made a personal decision to directly affiliate yourself with that content via a link. The mere act of linking to publicly available information, should not in and of itself, be illegal or prohibited.
Really? That's the best analogy you could come up with? It's more like a newspaper printing advertisements that there will be stolen radios for sale or prostitutes behind the Walmart on Saturday.
Poor analogy. Unless there are other mechanisms in place, a link doesn't serve an advertising purpose any more or less than a purely informational one. I would like for a newspaper engage in activities like exposing fences or street prostitution. I believe that's called "reporting."
This is a shakedown by Members of Congress, plain and simple. Internet companies have made billions of dollars in an unregulated market but have not paid off Congressmen/Senators through campaign contributions, lobbyists, creation of significant PACs, 527 committees -- things which all appeal to a politician's self-interest. Hollywood has outspent internet companies, paid hundreds of millions of dollars through direct and indirect campaign financing and actually gives a demonic benefit to the greedy politicians by essentially paying them off.
If internet companies want to do anything, I think they should get off their butts and outspend the heck out the idiotic music/movie industry so politicians can see there is a monetary return from internet companies. To be naive and think that SOPA will go away because of its inherent stupidity is wrong. You have to fight.
You have to take action and battle for protection of the internet. You need to pay Congress the "protection money" in this sickening game of soft-extortion. Understand that Congress has power, and can exercise it either way, as long as you appeal to the politicians' self-interest.
Wow. I hadn't thought of it in these terms, but you're absolutely right: we're one of the few industries that doesn't contribute much in the way of lobbying or other contributions, so we lose out unless we fall in line. It's shocking - our government is a protection scam.
It strikes me that this is a great opportunity for technologists to get into politics. It's been done before, of course, with semi-lighthearted endeavors like the Pirate Party. But there's certainly room for a new kind of democratic party that works like the web and espouses the combination of social libertarianism and progressive business that so many of us are behind. Human society is a complex system, made up of graphs and dependencies; there are so many political approaches we can apply to that idea.
> Internet companies have made billions of dollars in an unregulated market but have not paid off Congressmen/Senators through campaign contributions, lobbyists, creation of significant PACs, 527 committees -- things which all appeal to a politician's self-interest.
This is completely false; Internet companies are regulated by the DMCA, which provides them safe harbor from private lawsuits related to copyright infringement. If the DMCA did not exist, they would have been sued into oblivion by the content companies long ago.
There are a lot of reasons to oppose SOPA but let's not pretend that the Internet is unregulated.
> This is completely false; Internet companies are regulated by the DMCA, which provides them safe harbor from private lawsuits related to copyright infringement
Look, I don't want to get in an argument but the DMCA is a joke. You know it and I know it. If it really worked, do you really think these idiot music/film companies would try to pass SOPA? The DMCA is supposed to protect IP and it doesn't work.
The internet is one of the least-regulated industries in the United States. Pardon me for saying "unregulated" - but ti basically is. Also, sales taxes are the exception to the rule right now. Last time I checked -- that's a whole lot of freedom.
I pride myself on seeing things the way they are and I know -- Congress is like a legal protection racket. If you actually want to do something, the big players need to pay the protection money. Hollywood execs paid $91M in lobbying for SOPA. How much more was paid in other methods of political support as well?
Our (consumer internet) industry needs to step to the plate. We make a lot of money but want to pretend we're somehow immune from the idiocy of Washington -- we're not. Reid Hoffman, Jack Dorsey and Sergey Brin need to wake up and realize that writing a letter to Congress isn't going to change anything...
Money is the only form of communication that matters in politics.
Media companies dislike the DMCA not because it is a joke, but because it hasn't eradicated piracy. Unfortunately it would be practically impossible to stop piracy.
I'm not sure how much blame can be placed on Congress for this. What they receive as protection money is a pittance compared to the effect their laws can have, and this is why lobbying is such lucrative investment now - you can't beat the returns. Moreover, it isn't outright bribes most of the time although it might seem like it; actually transferring money from campaign coffers to personal accounts is of course illegal and difficult to get away with. Most don't bother. (That is not to say that Congressmen don't take advantage of their position for financial gain in other ways.)
Big corporations want it this way. They have money, and the more they can conflate money and speech in the business of government, the better off they'll be. Don't confuse members of Congress with people who have considerable power over what the American government does. But I don't know if the right course of action is for tech companies to compete with more entrenched interests in the lobbying game. Not for any particular reason, but it seems to me that while lobbying is the lever the ruling class currently uses to control government, if tech companies - who for the most part are young upstarts and not part of the establishment - try to subvert that, then the groups actually in charge will just switch to something else and they'll have wasted resources. Perhaps in the short term for particular things it might be a good idea, but only to bide time. The problem isn't going to be truly solved until the existing order is defeated completely and overthrown - until then expect further and more well-funded assaults on all personal liberties technically and otherwise.
From Silicon Valley, instead of more focus on lobbying and influence in Washington, I'd prefer to see emerge a robust alternative to the centralized internet, one that is inherently unregulatable, for technical reasons, rather than just granted some measure of indulgence for the time being.
Thinking of government as a protection racket is an interesting angle, by the way. Not in the sense of Congress extorting money for campaign finance, but in the sense of the government demanding taxes in exchange for a justice system and a military, and coming down hard on you if you don't pay. This is not to say that it's such a bad thing.
This kind of weak-minded opposition actually makes me think that I'd rather see SOPA proceed as-is. If SOPA were amended with some provisions for cargo-cult "due process", most of the corporate opposition would disappear but we'd still be left with the same broken internet.
> It’s hard to make a coherent case that you should be able to download a full movie or album completely for free
Actually, it's hard to make a coherent case that it's even possible to police such downloading when universal computing devices and networks exist. The internet community needs to wake up and realize that the copyright cartels (and political groupthink, in general) are their mortal enemies, stop kowtowing to them, and write code to defend themselves (and push these realizations to the masses).
Exactly. We need to put up some opposition to this in court, but eventually just decentralize all levels of the internet. The real fight is when using that code (Namecoin, TOR, etc) is becoming illegal. Then we have a final legal battle to fight.
This is bad. I would have thought the overwhelming stupidity of this bill would have, if not killed it, then at least signaled its demise by now. The so-called "nuclear option" of everyone who is opposed to SOPA blacking out their sites is looking like it might be a necessity.
One of my first employers was at a public television station. In his mind, he had to ask the other party permission to link to them. That is thinking of a link as a physical thing, as if it was a copper wire or a metal house key. It's not. It's just information. Needing permission to link to something is exactly like needing permission to talk about something. That shouldn't be. If we live in a society that believes in free speech, we should all be free to link to anything we want to!