Like I said, to protect against mistakes there must be defense mechanisms built in. The death-penalty example you use is completely different since death is irreversible.
This bill is specifically designed to target wholesale distributors of copyrighted material, NOT individual users.
The industry targets users that download content, and people complain that they should be targeting websites that upload the material.
The industry targets websites, and people complain that they should be going after the users who post the links.
Who is unwilling to compromise here?
It is the cost of the material itself, not the overall number of downloads, since that is impossible to know. That is what “retail value” means. A link doesn’t have retail value because it is not a product that is sold.
As for the criticism of these “multi-billion dollar industries”, keep in mind that
Having money doesn’t make you a bad person, especially when you are an employer of so many people.
The opposition to SOPA and PIPA (Google and Facebook) are filthy rich too, both in money and followers. These bills could say anything and people would oppose them if Google told them to.
ps: Read about Megaupload’s creator: Kim Dotcom - Wikipedia
He doesn’t seem like much of a freedom fighter
It is more than just about about targeting websites and i believe people said that companies should hunt the people that are behind the uploads. Usually websites aren’t behind it in the majority of cases. The biggest part of the real problem is not that people download or upload illegally (this is only part of the problem). A large group of people quit buying this stuff and went for alternative and indie-talent and there is enough good stuff to get for a bargain or for nothing. So this Sopa and Pipa, doesn’t solve these companies problems, even if these bills would have made it, the problem wouldn’t turn less, yet power would have come into action that can and most likely will be abused. If something is not effective against what it was designed for, it will be abused for something it wasn’t designed for. (It has been done in the past, why should that be any different in the future?)
I’m not really shedding any tears for folks hosting sites like megaupload (I’m surprised rapidshare hasn’t been sued yet). But i’ll tell you why i don’t give a shit about multi national corporations in the media industry:Not because they have money, but because they have a monopoly and asked too much for stuff that wasn’t worth the pricetag. They let it happen and when it got clear, instead of hooking in and appeal to the new demand, they started shouting, threatening and convicting up to the most rediculous nonsense cases that can be found → A young English teenager being prosecuted for large sums of money simply for using Disney images on his website. These companies also try to block, take out or buy out indi- and non-profit initiatives simply because that kind of cheap competition coming with mainstream quality isn’t appreciated by those mainstream commercial corporations. Well, competition is tough and talent is everywhere (not just behind big contract licensees), i simply think these companies should feel the pain a lot longer and a bit harder until they understand they have to change their attitude.
Protection is fine, but targeting abuse should be done with reason, laser precision and not with a sledgehammer or even a nuclear bomb (that’s what Sopa and Pipa frankly are).
It seems odd that you claim this bill is both extremely powerful (a nuclear bomb, as you say), and also highly ineffective at stopping piracy.
You can’t have it both ways.
Conjecturing about how these bills will be abused is really silly. You can apply that type of loose paranoia to anything.
You are weighing a real, serious problem (people getting their shit stolen in mass amounts), versus an unsubstantiated hypothetical problem (that they will be abused and human knowledge will end forever).
Yes, you can. It will be very powerful in terms of censorship in open internet while it will fail in fighting piracy which will develop more distributed networks.
Ineffective as that there isn’t a “mass” stealing stuff, it is a small core that do the actual illegal uploading and downloading, ohw, and the core will always figure out ways to circumvent it, but that already has been said many times. If you ever tried to get something through bittorrent, you probably noticed there aren’t millions of potential seeds around and that is because there aren’t millions of people having the speed to be downloading that, or simply don’t want to go through the trouble for that.
Another fact that lots of stuff online that you can download illegally also comes with a lot of risks like backdoor virusses and other shit and the fact that illegal offered downloads even may not contain that what is offered already discourages people enough to try it. There is this kind of hassle you have to go through to get that stuff and well, stuff has to be seriously expensive (like Microsoft software) for people having to go through that.
If people don’t want to buy it, they won’t do it either if all illegal options are taken away.
That is also hypothetical guessing.
The fact that revenue lowers is not 100% correlatable to illegal downloads. Like i said before, there are more lucrative markets around and people simply don’t always prefer mainstream products.
The latter (indie artists, creative commons stuff etc.) is rising and i think this may be the bigger part of the iceberg than the illegal downloads that top them off above the waterline.
But perhaps such kind of laws like Pipa or SOPA should be granted the daylight for an experimental time and let those who support these laws discover if this was all worth the trouble.
I’m personally convinced otherwise, but you are nevertheless right that we can’t be 100% sure if all this remains hypothetical.
Some facts are measurable and we don’t need Pipa or SOPA for that: How many official stuff is being downloaded illegally vs what is downloaded legally vs what is downloaded legally from alternative sources / artists.
But these statistics should be gathered by independant organisations.
It is mass theft. Get real, everyone who uses the internet knows how much piracy is going on.
The number of seeds doesn’t correlate to the number of downloads. Most people don’t upload shit after they download it (myself included).
Eh, I’ve heard this one many times. I can’t tell you how many albums I would have bought, but downloaded them for free instead.
This is just an excuse for stealing, plain and simple. Even if this were the case, which it obviously isn’t, it certainly doesn’t justify stealing.
No it isn’t. Look at how much money the industry has spent on lobbying. You think they would be spending millions on this if it weren’t a real problem?
Another contradiction from the SOPA opposition.
Criticize the industry for spending millions on SOPA/PIPA.
Criticize the industry for claiming piracy affects them.
It is extremely difficult to get good data on piracy and the economic impacts of it. The US Government Accountability Office came to this conclusion: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10423.pdf
The media industry indeed overstates their losses from piracy using poor studies. Do we really need accurate data before we can prevent theft? I mean, even if it was the case that piracy helped the media industry (which is definitely not the case), shouldn’t they be the ones to decide the distribution model for the content that they create?
If Google actually cared about legality, then they would have no problems taking down links to foreign sites that are primarily dedicated to copyright infringement (the point of SOPA). This isn’t the case. Google benefits immensely from copyright infringement and counterfeiting. They get to place ads on those sites and profit.
Although this thread is sort of dead in the water (like SOPA/PIPA, unfortunately), here is an interesting case of the current copyright laws being abused on a mass scale:
The DMCA safe harbor provisions are abused every single day, and musicians are the victim, not the pirates who profit off their works. Imagine having to send 20 take down notices a day to get your music from being pirated. Does that sound reasonable?
What is worse, an occasional website getting taken down temporarily for copyright infringement accusations (like dajaz1, which is apparently the worst example people can think of), or thousands of artists getting all of their music put on Grooveshark against their will and not seeing a penny for it, while Grooveshark profits.
Seriously people, why favor internet companies over music companies?