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?"
The Swiss have already answered this question (Score:5, Interesting)
What's Right. (Score:1, Interesting)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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?
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?
In the GPL world in which I am a contributor, I say you may freely use and distribute my work providing that:
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)
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.
Re:It isn't that complicated (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It isn't that complicated (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It isn't that complicated (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll give an even better example...Steam. Steam DRM is trivial to bypass for anyone but the simplest Billy Joe Bob (which is what the original DRM like CD checks was for, to get rid of casual piracy) and hacked Steam games are all over P2P yet Gabe from Valve is singing "Merry Xmas to me" while swimming in a giant pool full of money like Scrooge McDuck, why? Because he learned the way to turn pirates into customers isn't pile on the DRM and hoop jumps but to make it easy, simple, and cheap. We humans are lazy creatures by nature and if you make something simple enough and cheap enough it becomes more of a PITA to pirate than it does to simply buy it and Valve seems to get that.
Take my own case for example, I probably spent a good $200 this Steam Xmas sale between me and my two boys. Now was there a SINGLE game, even one, that I couldn't have pirated trivially? Nope in fact I could have simply used the listings on Steam and went and downloaded every single one if i desired, so why didn't I? Because Valve has made it as simple as "whip out CC, push button, get game" and their download speeds are insanely fast compared to most P2P, most of the games i bought were bundle packs where I got a pile of games in a series for one low price (such as FEAR 1 & 2 & the DLC extras for $5)or a game with ALL the DLC (which the pirated version never has, such as Just Cause II with all the DLC included for $7) and unlike the pirated version I can enjoy full MP support, I get the game automatically updated to current, I get Valve's excellent long tail game support (Such as their throwing in HL:DM when I bought the complete HL2 series which is STILL highly populated after all these years) and it even keeps my graphics drivers updated without me having to bother.
The way you kill piracy isn't with a stick but with a cookie, and by finding the sweet spot on price that gives you maximum sales. look at how just as an experiment the sold L4D for $2 and ended up making over 1700% PROFIT on the title simply by having everyone buy the thing while not having to pay for advertising or making copies. Even at that ultra low price because of the massive economies of scale they got they not only made such huge profits but now everyone of those people will see the DLC for sale as well as the news of the latest L4D games thus making it easier to sell even more content.
So if companies would just accept the mantra of keep it simple, easy, and cheap, put in the most simple of DRM, just to keep Billy Joe Bob from passing around copies to all his buddies, they could be making mad piles o' cash instead or trying to assrape the entire Internet with SOPA and the like. For an example of a company that didn't "get it" look at MSFT, for about 7 months I saw NOTHING but legit versions of Windows and in a small shop that's unheard of, so why did it happen? At $50 a copy the win 7 HP upgrade made it cheaper and less hassle to buy Windows than it was to pirate and $50 appears to be the sweet spot for Windows Home. Sure enough Ballmer kills the program and not 30 days later I start seeing Win 7 Ultimate everywhere because folks simply weren't willing to pay $100 for home and if they are gonna pirate why not get the biggest SKU? Make it simple, easy, and cheap, find the sweet spot on price and people WILL buy simply because its the easiest route. Throw in a couple of bonuses that pirates don't get like DLC and MP and it becomes a no brainer. I mean when I get both Max Paynes for $2.75, Butcher Bay remade in HD AND Dark Athena for $5, and JC II with over a pages worth of DLC for $7 why would I bother to pirate?
Re:It isn't that complicated (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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