The Behind-the-Scenes Campaign To Bring SOPA To Canada 171
An anonymous reader writes "SOPA may be dead (for now) in the U.S., but lobby groups are likely to intensify their efforts to export SOPA-like rules to other countries. With the Canadian DMCA back on the legislative agenda at the end of the month, Canada will be a prime target for SOPA style rules. In fact, Michael Geist reports that the recording industry wants language to similar to that found in SOPA on blocking access to websites, new termination policies for subscribers, and an expanded SOPA-style liability for sites that could include YouTube and cloud-based services."
Another reader points out that similar mischief is afoot in Ireland: "The Irish government's new 'statutory instrument' threatens to do some of the same things as SOPA, mainly introducing the power to force ISPs to block websites suspected of having copyrighted material on them."
The reasons are obvious (Score:2, Informative)
Positions of power must exist in order for humans to organize themselves. Civilization is logically dependent upon such positions.
People who desire positions of power tend to put effort into attaining them, whereas people who have no such desires tend not to expend such effort (or even to put effort into avoiding the responsibility).
Most motivations for desiring positions of power are either the maximization of personal profit, or the purely corrupt desire to control others. Not all, just most.
So, since power is mostly attained by people who desire it, and most people who desire it do so for harmful self-serving reasons, over time *all* positions of power wind up saturated with corruption.
The only attempts that have been made to prevent this boil down to:
1) divide the government out into multiple branches to avoid concentration of corruption
a) this fails because the branches can simply find ways to align their corrupt interests, and cooperate in their evil.
2) empower the people to hold their government accountable for their corruption (through voting and legal actions)
a) this fails because most people are both too stupid and too busy (working for a living + raising a family takes a LOT of time) to actually do this.
b) also fails because, over time, the powerful use their power to introduce ever more ways to keep their actions secret or otherwise avoid accountability.
3) regularly rotate non-power-hungry civilians into positions of power
a) this fails because said civilians do a piss-poor job of living up to the unwanted responsibility, resulting in chaos. e.g. athens.
So, to summarize:
those who remember history are doomed to watch it be repeated.
Re:How much is a political bribe in Canadian dolla (Score:2, Informative)
In the US, you can campaign directly to an individual. In Canada, you can not.
Re:Canadian Campaign Financing (Score:3, Informative)
Donations and campaign finance rules do nothing to prevent MPs from using their time creating laws (or just general behind the scenes work) benefiting an industry/company/etc., then receiving compensation after leaving Parliament. I think this is an exceptionally malignant form of corruption that currently exists in Canadian politics.
Perhaps I'm just not thinking of it the right way, but I can't picture our government supporting such ideas as SOPA as being anything other than from some form of corruption. Perhaps I'm giving our MPs too much credit in their ability to sit back and think of the consequences and, well, just the philosophical basis of the laws.