Ethics and Legality of Copyright and Online Distribution

The Stop Online Piracy Act (formerly known as E-PARASITES) and Protect IP Act are designed to destroy the Internet as we know it! But I shouldn't worry, because the bills are too stupid and too flawed to be passed anyway. Story

edited 17th Jan '12 10:44:58 AM by Angeldeb82

We need to kill the bill, and then amend the copyright clause to align better with the first amendment.

First of all, who the fuck came up with that name? I mean, how many hours they spend jsut to get it spell E-PARASITES? Wouldn't all that time be better spend making it more acceptable?

I wonder, if this went through would Google threaten to relocate? And would that change their minds?

Or they could just leave "infringing" alone? This is just a bunch of really big companies feeling pissed about their already substantial bottom line not being substantial enough.

Yet another totalitarian aggression from the copyright mafia. We need to kill copyrights dead: It's the only way to get the industry to shut the fuck up permanently.

edited 26th Oct '11 11:48:54 PM by SavageHeathen

^It would prevent a lot of anti-piracy bullshit.

It would also permanently kill off modern media, though, so that's not good.

It wouldn't kill it off, because a lot of creative works that are at risk due to copyright issues are themselves modern media.

Art existed before copyrights and would survive after it. The content industry, on the other hand (the executives, the suits, the copyright lawyers) would starve, which they completely deserve.

edited 26th Oct '11 11:53:40 PM by SavageHeathen

Copyright law is not the topic of this thread. Go make a copyright law thread, would you?

Why? It's a thread about a copyright law.

The RIAA and MPAA have for long tried to kill our freedoms to protect their copyrights. It's only fair that we kill their copyrights to protect our freedoms.

My point is that you can't make a TV show, or movie, or game if nobody's going to watch it because everyone will just get it for free from someone else. Not unless you just want to throw a few hundred thousand dollars away.

And yes, art existed before copyright law. But you know what didn't? Means of copying it without going through the entire process of creating it.

Irrelevant: Once copyright holders try to restrict the people's freedoms, their livelihoods should be destroyed in return.

edited 27th Oct '11 12:52:34 AM by SavageHeathen

I think general discussion of copyright law is off-topic for this thread, SH. I'm calling a stop to it.

Would this just be a big censorship firewall like what China uses? If so, it looks like America will have to start learning more about censorship evading software.

Eh, another too-broad-to-enforce-in-the-real-world IP bill. I'm not particularly worried. I am somewhat amused that they thought to include streaming content too. But, as harsh and wide-sweeping as they're trying to be... I don't think they can cram that genie back in the bottle. It's too late, and serious tries at it will only cause more backlash in a time when people have reason enough to be pissed off at corporations as it is. You can't go BACKWARDS in features for a product and not upset people.

I'd be a lot more worried if it was targeted narrowly with the intent of taking down the infrastructure of specific kinds of uploaders and the most important of the host sites.

edited 27th Oct '11 7:35:12 AM by Karkadinn

Deleted post since this thread isn't about copyrights apparently.

edited 27th Oct '11 10:45:01 AM by SpookyMask

Sociology/economics failure.

Eh... I find myself mostly unconcerned by this law. I don't know why.

~shrug~

Only in the bastion of freedom and democracy! God bless America!

Well, protect copyright as it stands and you perpetuate the industry itself (which is contemptible), but few people seem to actually want to reform it, just get rid of it, which is just as bad.

Ah, PROTECT IP.

Hmm...I have a link to DemandProgress.org regarding this, would it be out-of-line to share it?

edited 27th Oct '11 5:15:39 PM by RocketDude

As I think about this, I realize that the law is actually a rather subtle and clever Ayn Rand reference.

That's incredibly depressing...

edited 27th Oct '11 5:20:28 PM by USAF713

There's another possibility.. abolishing it with the express intent to create a new, more functional institution (called some other name suited to it's purpose). Copyright has been around 300+ years now, it's about time it got kicked out and replaced with something suiting modern situations (Reform will not achieve anywhere near as much, AFAICS.. as long as we call it by the old name, people will try to use it in the old ways, and any fixes proposed are liable to be superficial rather than addressing that the whole concept is a misfit for modern situations.)

Ideally you could develop it before time (Consider the example of civil unions — Eventually all significant marriage rights could move into these and "marriage" could be abolished as a legal entity, becoming a purely religious entity). I haven't heard of any such initiative yet, though.

TL;DR version: Another possibility rather than reform or destruction is to develop an alternative with a new name, institute it in parallel, and over a decade or so phase out copyright.

People just won't go for that, though.

I mean, I t—

No, no copyright derail.

Basically, I think this bill is bleh in the theoretical, and bad in the actual, since it can and will be abused. It'll probably get passed anyway, though, so...