SOPA and PIPA
The movement to fight against SOPA and PIPA, bills that would destroy much of what the internet is good for, is winning. When Marco Rubio and John Cornyn back away from a corporate-driven bill, you know it is dead. It’s another of the still too few but growing examples of how people are effectively protesting the corporate dominated world. Personally, while I’m glad Wikipedia stepped up to the plate on this and shut down its site for the day, I would have opposed, say, shutting down LGM, because what good would it possibly do? It’s better to talk about this stuff.
And the one point worth discussing that I have is to wonder what causes some of our most progressive legislators to support such a bad bill. Patrick Leahy is a big mover of SOPA, Al Franken of PIPA. This kind of thing is hardly uncommon. I guess they see something as a problem and make poor decisions on how to fight it. Or they are looking for huge campaign donations. But it’s frustrating.
“And the one point worth discussing that I have is to wonder what causes some of our most progressive legislators to support such a bad bill.”
Bad views about copyright laws I would guess.
Yeah, I think these guys are clueless about the stupidity of current US IP law as many elites are. It’s not a left-right issue so much as a clueless one.
Well, Franken spent his pre-Senate career in Hollywood, so there’s probably that. And Laehy is old and got to be in the Dark Knight.
(1) The effect of Hollywood, which is generally progressive, but horribly reactionary on copyright issues.
(2) The desperate hunger of all politicians, progressive or otherwise, for campaign contributions.
(3) The last two factor combined have more weight then they have separately, as Hollywood is a major source of campaign donations to progressive candidates.
I think the entertainment industry is key, though I would add high-tech/bio-tech and also other science-intensive industry. Firms and executives in these industries stand to benefit disproportionately from stronger IP protection, but they’re likely to be much mores sensitive to (and vulnerable to) GOP culture war in general and anti-science stuff in particular.
This. Both major parties are effectively ownded by (parts of) corporate America. And one of the parts of corporate America that owns the Democrats is the entertainment industry, who are progressive on a lot of “cultural” issues, but otherwise often have the kinds of positions that one would usually expect large, capitalist entities to have. And they have a special interest in draconian expansions of intellectual property rights and the virtual elimination of the public domain.
Luckily for us, some other corporate players (e.g. Google) are opposed to PIPA and SOPA. I see this as less a victory of the people over the corporate world than it is a very successful exploitation by the people of internal rifts within the corporate world. And that is something we can learn from and reproduce.
Ditto, and it was not for nothing that the MPAA hired Chris Dodd to be their new Director and Chief Lobbiest. Al Franken comes out of the entertainment industry and he does feel irked when sees things he created as actor, director, writer, producer, and stand-up comic converted to monetary profit for someone else’s benefit. Senator Leahy has been carring water for MPAA and RIAA for a long time. And don’t forget the unions, the Screen Actors Guild, Writers Union, and Director’s Guild, etc., which is why the AFL-CIO is behind these bills as well.
Dean Baker points out that this vast extension of copyright and patent, beyond the original Constitutional purpose ton incentivized living individuals, is a classic use of the Stated to create and empower monopolies with all the accompanying evils of corruption and rent seeking. Seee http://www.cepr.net and Beat the Press,http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/activist-supreme-court-makes-government-bigger
it is a complete lack of understanding in how the internet functions. and the fact that law makers are NOT required to read the legislation they are voting on.
Similarly, liberal icon Patty Murray is on record in favor of estate tax “reform”. Go figure.
The only people I’ve ever heard talk about Patty Murray were conservatives who got all bent out of shape when she said Osama bin Laden was popular in the Middle East.
Apologies. In WA St. Democratic circles she is considered a liberal icon, such as it were.
And as far as I can tell, they do talk about her.
Makes sense. Didn’t mean to come across as an ass.
Like many Washington politicians, she lives in fear of the Blethen family.
Patrick Leahy is not a big mover on SOPA, which is a House bill. He did introduce PIPA in the Senate, however.
Every time someone pirates Stuart Saves His Family, Franken thinks about the money he’s losing.
Really, I’d guess that he knows a lot of people who think they’re being hurt by internet piracy or are being hurt by internet piracy. Plus, he’s old enough to not really get the internet.
That would be my guess, too. Franken is probably thinking like the SNL writer that he once was.
As to conjecturing about his motives, this makes sense.
“Plus, he’s old enough to not really get the internet.”
This is an issue with a lot of moving parts and a lot of interested parties, but that’s one thing that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. For people born before about 1970, the internet (and computers more generally) are often mysterious. Obviously plenty of individuals over that age cutoff are savvy internet users, but for a population that mostly didn’t have a home computer until they were in their thirties or later, picking it up is a lot harder.
What we often think of as “web culture” (YouTube, memes, etcetera) didn’t really get started until the middle of the 2000s, when Franken was already in his fifties. And he’s on the young side for the Senate. You know those charts that show how much older Congress is than the American median? This is one of the side effects.
On this particular issue, the issue of age and cluelessness makes a lot of sense. But there’s the broader issue of why seemingly progressive legislators often do this, including the example of Murray and the estate tax mentioned above.
Maybe they think of “creative” industries as liberal, friendly parts of the corporate world. They think MPAA and RIAA are their friends.
I’m sure they do, but I suspect it’s because of the money they get from the motion picture and recording industries rather than the clearly ridiculous notion that everything these industries support is “liberal.”
Yes. It’s not as if she has taken this position due to political considerations or some heartfelt need for gaining badly needed votes she wouldn’t get otherwise.
Similarly, my “progressive” Congressman Adam Smith co-sponsors a local meeting with the Concord Coalition (a Pete Peterson anti Social Security front) to discuss our “impending fiscal crisis”.
I strongly suspect that if the Seattle Times were owned by a major media corporation rather than the Blethens, Murray would be an orthodox liberal Democrat on the estate tax.
Maybe because they’re only seemingly progressive?
Bankruptcy “reform” (which in 2006 got exactly sixty votes, including those of Byrd, Rockefeller, and Clinton) and EFCA are two other great examples of bills that made clear that some seemingly progressive Senators were more responsive to capital than labor.
Often bills like bankruptcy and estate tax “reform” get the bare minimum of “Yes” votes, which allows other seeming progressives to keep up the charade.
I don’t know much about Murray specifically, but a lot of liberal politicians seem to like having an issue or two to which they can point and say, “See? I’m not a starry eyed leftist.” Also, how rich are/were her parents? She might just not want to pay the estate tax or have personal experience that makes her think it’s unfair.
For people born before about 1970, the internet (and computers more generally) are often mysterious. Obviously plenty of individuals over that age cutoff are savvy internet users, but for a population that mostly didn’t have a home computer until they were in their thirties or later, picking it up is a lot harder.
You have your dates a bit off. When I began college, computers were something you went to a lab for, signed out your copy of DOS on a 5.25″ floppy, and saved a document on the other 5.25 floppy.
My the time I began grad school at age 21, pretty much everyone had a 386. The change happened very very fast in the late Reagan/early Bush the Less Dumb years. So I’d say your cutoff birthdate is somewhere between 1955-1960.
I stand by my 1970 figure. Circa 1990 a home computer didn’t have speakers, maybe had a 256 color monitor, likely didn’t have a modem, and if it did have Windows, required that it be booted from DOS. They were a lot more common and capable than ten years before, but having one in a home and using it all the time was still far from the norm.
It wasn’t until ten years after that, roughly 2000, that standard, off the shelf PCs became more or less what we think of as a computer today: sound, capable of playing video, full spectrum color, and standard connectivity with the internet and other machines. I’m typing this in 2012 on mid-range laptop I bought in 2004, and while it’s slower than the shiny new ones sitting at Best Buy, it has all of the same core functionality. The same wouldn’t be true of a PC from 1996 in 2004.
See this Census report from 2001 (http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p23-207.pdf):
“In August 2000, 54 million households, or 51 percent, had one or more computers, up from 42 percent in December 1998 (Figure 1).”
If you owned or routinely used computers in the 1980s and 1990s, you likely were around a lot of other people doing the same, and so that’s what you think of as normal. (I include myself in this group.) But computer use for non-technical people didn’t become the norm until the tail end of the Clinton years. That’s where I get 1970 as my date. Someone born in 1960 was well into adulthood and working life before computers became anything even approaching standard. Again, individuals vary, but for the overall population regular computer use didn’t ramp up until quite recently.
I’m nearly 49, and everyone my age who I know is computer and internet savvy. I’d say those 40-55 are probably the most knowledgeable about the web. People who are older haven’t lived with it, and people who are younger tend to view it as magic.
Most people who are outside the IT community don’t even understand how the internet works. From the way the bill was written, the entertainment IP lawyers who authored these two bills also don’t know how the internet works, or else they would understand that a workaround for a US-wide DNS blacklist is relatively easy.
Of course, having Americans manually re-configure their networks to use dubious foreign DNS servers would be massively insecure. A few of those being operated by international criminals could cause tens of billions of dollars in losses.
Relegating free speech to the Darknet would be incredibly chilling as well. Not only are you turning law-abiding people into criminals, but you will bolster the infrastructure of a truly lawless part of the internet. Which of course will make the sorts of activities they hate much easier, but also the sorts of stuff we all hate(like child pornography) much easier as well.
Prohibition never works. Trying once again to implement an internet equivalent of the drug war is typical of crazy people that somehow believe that if they keep doing what they have always done they will somehow get a different result.
Prohibition never eliminates the targeted behavior, but it most certainly does work to reduce it in general, which is the proper measure of whether it works; elimination, on the other hand, is a ridiculous measure. The problem with prohibition isn’t that it doesn’t work; it’s that prohibition is often applied in cases where it shouldn’t be and without proper consideration and respect for the potentially disastrous side effects that go along with it.
I really don’t think Prohibition could make such a claim as to always reduce the target behaviour, that’s a long bow to draw.
That’s pretty meaningless. I was born in 1964, and have no problem understanding why SOPA and PIPA are horrible ideas. And before you yell “anecdata”, I also help people learn to use computers and computer applications and databases, and have done so since the early nineties, and while there are people who will never “get” the internet or computers in general, that’s more of a function of the way that a certain personality type thinks about and deals with the world, not a generational thing. (See, for example, this study on how current college students use the internet for schoolwork.) People who insist that they’re “computer-illiterate” (a term that I hate) and even sort of brag about it will turn that around if they have a killer app to motivate them; FreeCell and Minesweeper are unsung heroes in this regard.
At any rate, even though I don’t know anything about Al Franken’s l33t sk1llz or lack thereof, he’s certainly a smart guy, and at any rate, he has no excuse because, like any member of Congress, he has a big budget to hire people to understand issues that he doesn’t and break them down for him.
I’m old enough to retire and I get the internet, so age isn’t an excuse. Or maybe it is an excuse, wait what was I saying?
Me too, but are you as rich as the average Senator? ANY Senator? Srsly, $>clue
yes, the average senator has interns to surf the Internet for him/sometimes her.
Sounds like “I was born poor, and I worked my way to the top!” Good for you, dude – seriously – but that doesn’t exactly tell us a whole lot about the broader social trend.
I don’t know… to be perfectly honest it still shocks me just how little my co-workers know about computers, and quite a few are a good 10 years younger than me by now.
I think a lot of people, regardless of era, are used to computers in the same way we’re used to cars: We don’t care what happens under the hood until it makes funny noises or emits smoke, and don’t give a lot of thought into the way the parts or how the infrastructure works as a system.
Julian Sanchez (formerly of Ars Technica) has a must read on this.
Meh on Wikipedia’s shutdown. It’s been clear for a while now that SOPA was DOA, and it wasn’t activism on the part of websites and internet users that killed it. Rather, it was the fact that basically every large internet company turned against the bill once it became clear that the law would completely screw them over. It’s nice to see online activism coalescing, but most of it is purely symbolic at this point.
You’re wrong. Lamar Smith just said he’d put SOPA back on the committee schedule next month.
Internet companies have much less pull than you let on. They are outspent by entertainment companies(some of which are producers AND ISPs) by about 10 to 1 in lobbying and campaign contributions.
The only strange thing is this had quick and strong popular opposition right away. The terrible DMCA flew through Congress, and SOPA in some form still has a very good chance of passing.
This doesn’t say anything about the vitality of SOPA, though. Plenty of hopeless bills get onto the committee schedule — and since SOPA is Lamar’s baby, of course he’s going to keep pushing.
Determining whether a bill is likely to pass is not just a matter of looking at the relative amounts of money the two sides spend on lobbying generally. Even if the 10-to-1 number is true, it’s relevant how much of their lobbying efforts are tied to this issue; and you can be sure Google and Facebook (among others) would have started throwing a lot more money at this issue if it looked like that was going to be necessary. Moreover, when there are signicant moneyed interests operating on both sides of an issue, congressional inertia favors the status quo unless there’s strong interest in the issue among the congresscritters. That’s simply not the case here: most legislators really don’t care much about copyright law, most constituents don’t care about copyright law, and copyright is not an issue that helps or hurts reelection chances.
Finally, there’s also the fact that the Obama administration has been lending its ear to companies like Google for some time now — which probably goes some way in explaining why the administration came down against SOPA.
The answer, I suspect, is that they don’t see this as an issue involving fundamental rights — they see it as just a squabble between two powerful industries. If you think that’s all it is, then you may as well just favor whichever industry group you consider to more important. (For any of several possible definitions of importance.)
What is reprehensible about SOPA can be explained rather simply, and has been quite often by people with intimate knowledge of its consequences.
The “they’re too old to get it” line is a huge cop out.
Could you explain it to me, simply, so I can explain it to my 70 yr old dad? He is more savvy than the average computer user but not much of a user in terms of social networking, and is way too susceptible to FOX news et al.
The potential destruction of all sites containing user-created content.
For the Fox News sort, I would explain
1. That the law is horribly written and excessively vague. It defines a website as being “dedicated to theft of U.S. property” if (and this is one of several definitions)it:
2. Copyright holders do not need to take anyone to court to take rather harmful steps towards websites. The owner of the copyright only needs a “good faith belief” that copyright infringement is occurring to demand that advertisers and payment companies cease doing business with the website in question. These payment systems and advertisers are legally bound to comply until they receive a counter-notice, at which point the courts will then intervene.
Both of these are also exacerbated by the fact that companies dedicated to fishing with frivolous copyright infringement claims already exist and are doing damage.
Here is my favorite football blog giving its perspective for an example of this.
What this all adds up to is a de facto requirement that companies such as Wikipedia and Youtube who have large amounts of user-generated content (both are networks where people go on and share stuff with others) that are plainly not dedicated to the theft of property are forced out of business by the costs of compliance and risk of falling afoul of this law.
Add to that that experts fairly universally think that it will not work in the slightest because the security measures used to prevent people from using foreign sites that do skirt copyright laws are easily avoided.
In the end, you have a law that is ineffective in preventing what it is supposed to prevent, yet extremely effective in preventing perfectly legal commerce.
All fine logical points, but for the FOX News crowd, let me suggest:
Internet Fairness Doctrine!
It’s three words that will push their buttons plus a New York Post exclamation point headline, and it sounds like something the liberal tyrant Obama would love.
Explain it to your dad like this:
SOPA and PIPA are like trying to swat a mosquito with an axe. Yes, mosquitoes are bad–at the very least, they’re very irritating, and at worst, they spread fatal diseases–but not only will the axe probably cause destruction and injury, it probably won’t even hurt the mosquito.
But then the other side explains why that explanation is bullshit, and the members of Congress lack the basic vocabulary and understandings to effectively decide who’s right.
I don’t believe that is the root of this one bit. Like this bill wasn’t read and summarized for them by staffers anyway.
You sound like you would bend over backwards to apologize for these jerks.
Imagine trying to explain an amendment to a defense bill regarding submarines to someone who isn’t just a non-expert on naval technology, but who doesn’t know what “boats” and “floating” mean, and has only a hazy understanding of what “the ocean” and “war” are.
And I’ve mentioned this idea about Future Shock and the problem of older lawmakers regulating what they don’t understand several times in the past. You seem to be quite emotional, and projecting devil horns onto anyone who disagrees with you.
Is it really any mystery why some “progressive” members of congress are supporting (and even cosponsoring) this legislation? Lets face it, the only thing we have going for us is that google and facebook are against it.
Google is gonna go Galt over this one.
Heh.
Its not really a bad analogy.
These websites like wiki or youtube and even P2P sites like Pirate Bay, that serve as a hub and organizing tool for a collective looking to accomplish the same thing, could actually serve as a substitute for the creative superpowers Rand dreamed up for her fantasy heroes.
Of course, the property rights as a tool of deprivation is a concept Ayn Rand would have never set to paper, but it certainly fits the libertarian arguments that have persuaded me.
In fact, this whole battle really is an agorist’s dream. Its a counter-economic revolution.
I think this is exactly it, and it stems for a generational divide in technology skills.
It’s like Future Shock is here: the people voting on public policy on new – and not even all that new – technology have a poor understanding of it, so they’re easy marks for more savvy people pushing an agenda that they’re hiding in the details.
And it’s only going to get worse as the rate of technological advance speeds up.
And to make the problem of technological illiteracy even worse: most of the people in Congress are lawyers.
“Honey, could you print out my messages?”
Present company excluded, obviously.
Outside of Facebook, I know a number of 20-year-olds who don’t know how to use the web.
So how about some data to shed light on the question.
18-30: 91%
…
62-71: 56%
71+: 21%
Lots of people browse the internet without having any idea how to use it. Hence things like phishing scams and the vast majority of trojan/virus infections.
Indeed. Those numbers probably understate the difference between the generations.
It’s probably safe to assume that there aren’t too many 18-29-year-olds who “yes” answer translates to having memorized (or written down) specific steps to download photos.
Like I said, being able to use Facebook (for literally hours a day) and search Google with very basic searches doesn’t mean they know how to use the Internet, or how it works.
Even so, if you can tell them “it would mean Facebook could get shut down if someone posted a copyrighted image somewhere” you’ve explained it decently. If you have to explain what Facebook is, it’s harder.
I used to spend a lot of time explaining various internet things to a 70-something coworker. He was perfectly able to understand stuff, but stuff I’d been familiar with for 10 15 years was new to him.
And like I said, the number of people whose “yes” answer amounts to the ability to follow a limited number of directions to perform discreet tasks is almost certainly higher among the download-photos-of-the-grandkids crows than among younger users.