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Piracy Government United States Your Rights Online

White House Responds To SOPA, PIPA, and OPEN 517

eefsee writes "The White House today responded to two petitions with a statement titled 'Combating Online Piracy while Protecting an Open and Innovative Internet.' They note that 'We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet.' In particular, they cite manipulation of DNS as problematic. But overall the statement is clearly supportive of anti-piracy efforts and lays down this challenge: 'So, rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don't limit your opinion to what's the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what's right.' So, what's right?"
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White House Responds To SOPA, PIPA, and OPEN

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  • What's Right. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14, 2012 @03:56PM (#38699866)

    What is right, is the community itself, polices the piracy traffic. Before the government steps in. The purpose of the government is to do the big jobs the little guy can't. So in suggestion to stopping online piracy.

    -Sites that offer illegal software, movies, videos, photos, should be reported to the hosting company.
    You can usually find out which company is hosting the site, by simply running the ip through WHOIS website.
    Than checking the location, and services in that location, and than calling up the providers and reporting.

    BETTER YOU MAKE THE EFFORT, than Big Brother

    -Making a repository of sites that are considered malicious, and contain malware, wyrms, trojans, keyloggers.
    Allowing users to manually add sites to the fire wall for extra security.

    It comes down to simple common sense. If we can not police ourselves, someone else will do it for us.

  • What's Right (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14, 2012 @03:58PM (#38699878)

    What's right is to stop passing legislation to bandage up the entertainment industry's ancient, bloated, rotting business model. Make it easy for people to buy music/movies/tv shows inexpensively-- and without DRM-- and the problem will solve itself. As long as pirating a movie is 100x easier than buying a Bluray and sitting through hours of previews and FBI warnings, piracy will continue despite legislation. Give us real digital copies of movies for sale, not DRM-infested WMV files that we can only play on one Windows machine with Internet access. Give the people what they want and they will empty their wallets in your direction.

  • Re:Protecting rights (Score:5, Interesting)

    by trout007 ( 975317 ) on Saturday January 14, 2012 @04:16PM (#38700022)

    The problem is that "intellectual property" is not property and should not be afforded any property rights protections. It seems this government is much more interesting in protecting IP rights than real property rights. They don't have a problem going all over the world punishing people for violating drug patent rights but at the same time violating the real property rights of the people in New London to steal their real property and transfer it to Pfizer.

    The basic reason there are property rights is because property is scarce. If you take my car I don't have a car. Simple. The concept of IP is so confusing for so many people is because IP is not scarce. I can have an idea and share it and yet I don't lose the idea. Also the enforcement of IP rights always violates people's real property rights. The laws punishes me for using my computer (real property) for copying someones IP. So to enforce this it means the person with the IP owns some part of me and my computer to prevent me from using it.

    The IP laws have to go the way of slavery. Companies and people have to compete in the marketplace with real products not imaginary ones.

  • Re:Abolish IP (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fusselwurm ( 1033286 ) on Saturday January 14, 2012 @04:23PM (#38700100) Homepage

    And in one fell swoop you abolish the entertainment industry.

    So what. Industries that weren't profitable anymore have been lost in the past, yet somehow the world continued without them. And actually, it wouldnt even been lost; only the part of it that does the content copying (ie distribution) would be lost. Artists would still make music, give concerts, paint pictures and do movies. Budgets will be reduced, but heck... the whole point of the entertainment industry is, well, entertainment, and I for one probably would feel quite entertained on lolcats and self-produced music alone ^^

  • Re:Abolish IP (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bky1701 ( 979071 ) on Saturday January 14, 2012 @04:24PM (#38700110) Homepage
    There is an old saying. If there is a will, there is a way. Maybe the current entertainment industry needs to die before the next can be born. Certainly, we've already seen what can happen in software with open source, a model which has slowly made some progress into other areas.

    In any case, I do not value entrainment more than free speech and the right to communicate and share ideas. Maybe you should reconsider your stance if you do.
  • Re:Protecting rights (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FlyingGuy ( 989135 ) <flyingguy@gmai l . c om> on Saturday January 14, 2012 @04:40PM (#38700272)

    Your missing the point and failing to understand why "punishment" exists int he first place. First of all lets all take the mindset the piracy of copyrighted work is "bad" so:

    If I pirate on single copy of some work then would should be the consequence?

    • Being made to pay the face value of the work?
    • Being made to pay the face value of the work and some additional fine?

    If I place a "pirated" copy of a copyrighted work on a publicly reachable server and then seed a torent site with pointers to said work then what should be the consequence?

    • Being made to pay the face value of the work?
    • Being made to pay the face value of the work and some additional fine?
    • Since the work can be obtained by anyone and I don;t keep records of just how many time the work was downloaded should I be made to pay the face value of n copies of the work? Just how would you go about estimating n?
    • Should the "punishment" be formulated to attempt to convince me from doing it again?

    In the GPL world in which I am a contributor, I say you may freely use and distribute my work providing that:

    • You do not remove my attribution ( my copyright notice under the general terms of GPL).
    • You do not sell my work without my expressed written permission.
    • You MUST return to me, the copyright holder, all code that changes my code so that I may decide to whether or not to include it in my original code.

    If someone violates those conditions what should the consequences be?

    Throughout time we have made agreements that dictate the norms of social behavior and we as a society have enforced those agreements with forms of, punishment, retribution, etc. Everything from the scarlet "A" to getting you right hand "removed" to killing the person. I think that for the most part in our modernity we have strove to use the threat of punishment as a deterrent to keep people from breaking those social contracts.

    So the question is how do we as a society deter these sorts of violations and what kind of threat is sufficient enough to prevent anyone from doing it? Simply saying he "pirating" of copyrighted works is not against social norms will be rejected out of hand because in point of fact it is because someone worked hard to produce that work or funded its creating as an investment ad deserves the opportunity to realize a return for their investment and labor, if they so choose, without that opportunity being taken from them before the term of the protection from such taking has expired.

  • Re:Protecting rights (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14, 2012 @05:00PM (#38700430)

    People deserve to get paid for their work.

    See, it's this kind of unqualified stupidity that poses as reason that is responsible for a lot of the silliness in the debate. I am typing this response, and a handful of people are going to read it, so I deserve to get paid for my work. In a moment, I am going to sit on the toilet, and squeeze my bowels to produce a turd, so I deserve to get paid for my work. And on, and on, and on. You need to be clear and precise in your language ... otherwise, you come off sounding like a child yourself.

  • by Lando ( 9348 ) <lando2+slash@gma ... m minus language> on Saturday January 14, 2012 @06:09PM (#38701004) Homepage Journal

    As it stands, to me the copyright terms are so far out of proportion that I just chose to ignore the law altogether. If I get caught, I'll tell them to shove it up their ass and deal with it. Since the law offers me nothing in return, I chose to ignore it. If copyright law was sane, then I might actually accept the law as valid and proceed from there, but currently all the law does is take from the public domain and offers nothing in return.

  • by bieber ( 998013 ) on Saturday January 14, 2012 @06:18PM (#38701064)
    Copyright as an imposition on private communications is untenable in the digital era. There's no reason we can't have a limited copyright that applies only to commercial entities, as copyright effectively did when it was originally instated.
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday January 14, 2012 @07:36PM (#38701704)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Alsee ( 515537 ) on Saturday January 14, 2012 @08:37PM (#38702154) Homepage

    I doubt that 20+ year-old works make up a significant chunk of online piracy.

    I'd lay you 10-to-1 odds that the the percentage of 20+ year old works would go up sharply, and the percentage of under 20 year old works would go down sharply, if we were to drop the copyright term to 20 years.

    That would include countless albums such as Nirvana's Nevermind and countless movies such as Batman Returns. Click to view a small fraction of other music [wikipedia.org] and movies [wikipedia.org] that people would fileshare massively, legally, and safely.

    And not only could all of that be fileshared legally and safely, but all of it would be open for massive commercial revitalization of re-releases and compilations and derivative works. Virtually every Disney movie ever made was based upon an some public domain story. Just imagine all of the new music and movies and books and TV shows and more would flourish based upon unlocking the treasure chest of 20 year old culture.

    -

Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. - Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian

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