It looks like the protests made a dent on the collective awareness of Congress. Harry Reid and Mitch McConnel have agreed to delay a vote on SOPA/PIPA and several sponsors jumped ship when the shit hit the fan. I'm sure there's an anti piracy case to be made but I'm equally sure the problem can be addressed without crippling the Internet. LINK
I am ashamed my congress critter supported, and still supports this. They think that if they keep saying "off shore" we'll "get it." Idiots.
Anything that gets Reid and McConnell on the same page is intriguing. I've been trying to look at this argument from both sides, and the problems seem to be that (A) the technology has run way ahead of the legal ramifications and (B) the average Congresscritter still hasn't a clue how those Interweb tubes work.
Funny thing. Lefty bloggers irked that SOPA activism is moving Republicans and not Democrats in Congress.
Yeah, FOX made SOPA the top story on their website yesterday, CNN wasn't talking about it. I went to MSNBC for the first time this morning, the one article I found calls it "anti-piracy" legislation and talks about the delay like it's a bad thing.
this legislation tarnished the name of my favorite dish, i can no longer look at delicious, delicious sopapillas the same way Can I sue someone for that? mental anguish and all?
Of course the Democrats would rather keep those check rolling in from Hollywood. In fact President Obama has been threatened by former Senator Chris Dodd who is now the head of the Motion Picture Association of America.
The media companies have every right to fight piracy, and they should. Piracy costs artists and studios money. Bottom line. The more material that gets pirated and shared, the less incentive there is for artists to create new work. It's killing the music industry and hurting the film industry badly. I have friends who've lost thousands of dollars in royalties because of piracy, and it's got to be solved. However, SOPA and PIPA aren't the answer.
I'm very skeptical of claims like that. Even if that's a roughly accurate accounting of how much he/she would have been paid for an equivalent quantity of legitimate sales, there's no guarantee whatsoever that those same quantities would have been sold at the price the studio is asking. Both the music and the movie industries try to pin their failures to produce something appealing (while still having the audacity to gouge the fuck out of the consumer) on "piracy."
Unless the numbers are based on prior sales. Certainly true of any entertainment medium. And you'd be amazed at the contortions they sometimes go through to gouge the artists as well. That's why there are several ways of thinking about this. Should anybody be able to grab onto any media anywhere, anytime, and for free? Certainly the Self-Esteem Generation thinks so. But take that argument to its logical conclusion, and no one should get paid for anything. We should all just give our work away for free and then go pick daisies or something.
The thing that bewilders me about this is that this type of shit would be ILLEGAL in so many other countries. I've heard stories where some third world shithole has an election and when a company is found funding some politician's campaign, it's considered corruption. Yet, in the good ol' US of A, it's openly allowed and encouraged! I mean, holy fuck!
Delay, not shit can. They are just gonna take it back to committee and see how they can reword it and still get the same or nearly the same powers.
Indeed, studies have shown that the bulk of piracy is committed by people who wouldn't buy the products if they had to pay for them.
Still very hard to establish how much of the change in numbers is due to piracy, and how much is due to changing tastes in the market with the emergence of new entertainment options. I rarely download any music, however I also rarely buy any music anymore because for the cost of a cd I can get much more entertainment value elsewhere.
Question is, as Bailey points out, how much of the lost revenue seen by the RIAA is due to music piracy, and how much is due to the fact that they're predominantly peddling shit that most people just don't like? Frankly, I don't mind losing a tiny percentage of sales to piracy compared to the popularity and exposure it generates resulting in sales. Another point to consider in this is that if music DRM worked properly, piracy would be far, far more difficult to accomplish, which would leave content providers free to gain exposure through 30-second audiovisual or 3-page textual grabber samples. Another thought to consider is how much the RIAA/MPAA is actually bitching on behalf of content creators (IMO, not fucking much) and how much they're bitching because they lose out on retarded markup. Maybe, and Skin may catch some flack from this from opposing viewpoints which is all right, is not to flatly censor sites like MegaUpload and the like, but to institute rules of operation under which their traffic is regulated. Yes, you can potentially get that Lady Gaga album for free, but you'll have to wait 20 minutes for the download queue to let you in first, and then it'll take an hour or so for the download to complete. That would both limit the volume of piracy and still retain the freedom of sites which do nothing more offensive than provide links and trackers to such services. Making it impossible to get content through illegal channels carries too many incursions into civil liberties -- making it easier to get that content through artists' voluntary promotions and sampling doesn't.
I can honestly say that there are DVDs on my shelf right now that wouldn't be there if not for MegaUpload.
Skin can't say that. On the other hand, Skin considers television shows fair game, since they cost nothing to viewers even in their original distribution model. Certainly, the original distribution model is financed by sponsors, but Skin funds those sponsors through his patronage regardless of whether or not they support shows like "The Mentalist", "Boston Legal", "Bones", or "Burn Notice." The sponsors are making their money off Skin even if he does pirate episodes of the television shows they sponsor. Skin sees no breach of ethics there, and neither should any other reasonable person.
Except that I did end up paying for it, dumbass, and the point is that these companies would not have money they now have if not for downloading.
You know how the MPAA could save money? Offer streaming videos from their websites for anyone who wants to see a movie thats been released to dvd/bluray for $2. People won't pirate if its convenient, and you'd destroy redbox overnight while making a mint.
HAHA. One day without Wikipedia must have flooded those Congressional phone lines. Did anyone speak to one of their reps. I actually got hold of Sen. Toomey. Nice guy. We talked for about twenty minutes and I could tell he was actually processing what I was saying... unlike my stupid House rep who goes "I hear what you're saying, I hear what you're saying..." That's 'Dumbassian' for "I don't care, nor understand what you're saying."
There's nothing on HBO Skin cares to watch. Skin doesn't watch much television, actually, and most of the shows Skin does watch are on Hulu. The exception would be The Mentalist, and as Skin mentioned, he's no more or less likely to buy the sponsors' products whether he sees it on television or whether he gets the episodes via torrent, so nobody's losing any revenue they would otherwise have had anyway. Movies would be an exception, but Skin doesn't do a whole lot of movie torrents, and the ones Skin does do are usually "cams" for the purpose of finding out whether the film's good enough to want to see it in HD quality. If it is, Skin rents it on iTunes. That's rare, though -- usually the trailer is a good answer to that question.
