White House Holding Piracy Summit 268
DesScorp writes in to let us know about a White House piracy summit, which is going on this afternoon. Judging by the press accounts, the sort of intellectual property criminals they are interested in are large-scale DVD bootleggers, not individual downloaders. "Hollywood once again demonstrates its close ties to Washington DC, regardless of who is in power, with a White House summit on piracy to be attended by the top executives in Hollywood, as well as the music industry. Vice President Joe Biden will be leading the summit to discuss organized cooperation between the federal government and the entertainment industry on all matters of piracy. Also at the summit will be the Obama Administration's new Copyright Czar, Victoria Espinal. The summit comes after Congress has earmarked $30 million dollars of taxpayer funds for anti-piracy efforts." According to one attendee's tweet, the press was kicked out of the meeting around 20:45 GMT.
!change nor the first time... (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't surprising in the least. Less than two weeks ago they had a workshop for Federal employees on openness in government and it was closed to the public. [yahoo.com]
Don't forget that Obama promised to have debates on healthcare on C-Span. [74.125.155.132] (google cache)
I’m going to have all the negotiations around a big table,” Obama said. “We’ll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies — they’ll get a seat at the table, they just won’t be able to buy every chair. But what we’ll do is we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who are making arguments on behalf of drug companies or the insurance companies.
Then he goes on to have closed door meetings with drug companies and insurance companies. Not to mention that he promised to not support any health care bill that forced people to get healthcare.
You'll find very few people here who ever worshiped the Obamassiah. It's no secret that the Dems are just as much in the pocket of the media companies as the Republicans.
As a person who was continually modded down for saying there was (and will be) no difference between Obama and McCain before and during the election I find your statement very funny.
Re:!change (Score:3, Informative)
I can't wait to hear all of the partisans who rightfully complained about Dick Cheney's energy task force come out of the woodwork to tell us why this is "different".
Reasons why this is different:
1. Dick Cheney never put out a press release announcing there was a meeting
2. Dick Cheney never released any of the names of the people he or his Task Force met with
3. Most of the activities of the Task Force have never been/will never be disclosed by the government
Here's most of what we know [washingtonpost.com] about the Energy Task Force [washingtonpost.com] (two articles)
I find it distasteful that the press is getting kicked out, but none of this is happening in Cheney-esqe secrecy.
I'm going to save my outrage for something more substantial like the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Treaty negotiations.
Re:!change (Score:2, Informative)
Bullshit. There's a lot of shades of gray to libertarians.
Do you completely oppose regulation or do you just oppose the Federal Government stepping outside of the bounds of the Constitution?
Are you pro-life or pro-choice?
Are you opposed to the social safety net entirely or just the fact that the Federal Government is involved?
Are you in favor of a non-interventionist foreign policy or just opposed to the fact that Congress has ceded it's authority to declare war?
Are you in favor of blanket drug legislation or do you think it should be up to the states to decide the issue?
Those are just the issues off the top of my head that Libertarians have good-faith disagreements on. Not all Libertarians are anarco-capitalists.
Re:!change (Score:2, Informative)
!Piracy (Score:5, Informative)
For the 88th Time:
Piracy is ship to ship armed robbery. Calling copyright infringement piracy makes light of murderous thugs, and makes infringement sound worse than it is. It doesn't even work as a metaphor. When we use their misnomer, they win. Then one of two things will happen. Either infringers will be demonized people sharing 1s and 0s or the word piracy will lose its gravity.
Cue the "langwijiz morf, get/it" crowd.
And yeah, get off my lawn, or whatever other dismissiveness you want to conjure. Disagree all you want, but try to do it without dismissing me as pedantic or a grammar nazi. Try some substance.
Language matters; word choice matters. All actions start as thoughts, thoughts happen in words. By calling a government a regime, we can make overthrowing it more palatable. By calling a person a kike, nigger, rag head, witch etc, we can make them not human, so killing them won't be murder. Hacker was a positive term. The "man" (media, law, etc) has corrupted the word hacker to refer to criminals. It's like calling Nazis German over and over until the word German means Nazi. When we blur the distinction between words we lose expressiveness and have to invent awkward ways to regain specificity that we threw away out of laziness and ignorance. Yeah languages change over time, but there is evolution and there is devolution and corruption. Change is not inherently good.
And stand up for yourselves.
Last time you guys modded this "redundant", let's see if you do better this time!
Re:!Piracy (Score:1, Informative)
Yeah! I hate sloppy use of our language, trying to mainstream terms that have only been in use since 1703!
When we say pirates, we mean the REAL 1600s definition!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
Read it. Get over yourself.
Re:Republican? (Score:3, Informative)
Now hang on. I know you have dozens on replies to this already, but... how come you can safely divide up the Republican party into different factions, and then give examples you like and presumably approve of (eg. Ron Paul) but the Democrats can get lumped together into one bucket of crap?
The Democratic Party is even more divided than the Republican. They range from the practically Republican Joe Lieberman, the very left-wing Dennis Kucinich, and everyone in between.
It's one of many reasons the Dems can't get stuff done. They aren't the party of the rubber-stamp follow-the-party-line.
Re:Republican? (Score:2, Informative)
The deep South were Democrats because Lincoln was Republican. That's it. Look up Dixiecrat in Wikipedia. It was only when the Democrat President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights act that they started bolting for the Republican Party and changed the course of American politics. Look up Southern Strategy in Wikipedia.
The South has long been a political force that is basically outside the typical American mainstream of politics. They are cohesive, but they aren't so much a politically organized group as they are a sociologically organized force. Look up Authoritarianism and Right-wing Authoritarianism in Wikipedia. Proto-fascist.