I thought this was a good summary of some of what is wrong with the mindset behind SOPA. Of course, none of this even mentions other problems with SOPA, such as a lack of due process, but I think it well explains the illogical attack on “pirating”.
But first, a VERY IMPORTANT NOTE. I am not advocating illegal behavior. I am not advocating pirating. I am not advocating illegal downloading of videos.
However, I do believe that copyrights on digital media are a little silly and ineffective and that something will change in the industry. Ask me about that in real life for a somewhat rough and unformed spiel on what I think could be the future of media industries.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in arguments for a change in copyrights, go read just about anything Seth Godin’s written on copyrights and any of Cory Doctorow’s essays on copyright, particularly this one.
And, finally, here is the Pirate Bay’s SOPA Press Release:
INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.
PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.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.
The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them).
It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition. We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.
And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.
The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe – but we’ve stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the
rest of us obedient consumers.
The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.
SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.
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.
In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he’s complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world – because he’s jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you’d get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.
Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can’t access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We’re sorry for that.
THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012
The full text of the law reads…
20.003. Weather Modification and Control Grant Program
The department shall develop and administer a program awarding matching grants to political subdivisions of this state for weather modification and control.Added by Acts 2001, 77th Leg., ch. 376, 2.01, eff. Sept. 1, 2001.
via dumb laws
Now suppose that we set up manned outposts on other planets (or, for that matter, satellites) in the solar system. How would people there count time?
Obviously, the simplest way would be for them to keep some Earth time, say Greenwich time, and let go at that. Surely this would make relationships with Earth easier.
[...]
So what do the Martian settlers do?
If they just use an ordinary watch synchronous with Earth movements, it will hopelessly lag behind the Sun. If one day it reads noon in the middle of the day, then two weeks later it will read noon at dawn. Now a solution of sorts would be to move the watch back 37 minutes each day, say at noon, but would YOU like it? I know I wouldn’t, and settlers wouldn’t either. They would keep forgetting it, so the watches would have to be built to adapt themselves automatically. But does this really solve the problem? With that trick, each time between 12:00 and 12:37 PM happens twice in succession. So you plan to catch the 12:24 from Syrtis? Which one, the 12:24 ‘before’, or the 12:24 ‘after’? And how easy is it to boil eggs between 12:36 and 12:02?
Read the whole essay, The Fortieth of July by Pierre Hallet. It’s a light, well-written, enjoyable read, about something you probably haven’t considered before. Also, you’ll have to read it to see why it’s called the The Fortieth of July.
You see this marshmallow? You don’t have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how.
read the whole article on the marshmallow study on new yorker
In 2008, Americans owned an average of 92 items of clothing, not counting underwear, bras and pajamas, according to Cotton Inc.’s Lifestyle Monitor survey, which includes consumers, age 13 to 70. The typical wardrobe contained, among other garments, 16 T-shirts, 12 casual shirts, seven dress shirts, seven pairs of jeans, five pairs of casual slacks, four pairs of dress pants, and two suits—a clothing cornucopia.
Virginia Postrel, The Wall Street Journal via You don’t need more. You need better. (Thanks, Steve) on Put This On
AS of March 2010, one days worth of youtube videos were uploaded every minute.
via onlineschools.org
if you throw a penny off a skyscraper and it hits someone, can they die?
The Mythbusters tested this myth and proved that a penny will not go fast enough to kill somebody.
According to Warwick Cairns (author of How to Live Dangerously)
You’d have to fly every day for the next 26,000 years to die in a crash (during which time you’d have died 20 times over driving to the airport).
According to Warwick Cairns (author of How to Live Dangerously), if you wanted to guarantee that your child would be snatched off the street, he or she would have to stand outside alone for 750,000 hours.
That’s more than 85 years.
From the article Keeping Kids Safe From the Wrong Dangers on The NYTimes
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