We’ll see, but I’m not as pessimistic as you are. The dynamics of this are interesting. First of all, the anti-SOPA forces are pretty powerful, too. Google, as has been mentioned, for example, and lots of other big players in the Internet industry. Second, if you have been following the news, it’s not just that the pro-SOPA senators were outnumbered. It’s that many of them actually changed their mind. Which is a hard thing to get a senator to do.
I would guess it’s less “changed their minds” and more “got someone to explain what the bill that they never read but supported anyway because it’s got a catchy name actually says and means”.
I am, but as I explained earlier with my metaphor about someone with no sense of perspective comparing a pat on the back to rape, calling copyright violation “piracy” is so excessive that it is truly offensive. Copyright owners losing out on a sale is nothing like Somali pirates murdering men, women and children on a ship. There are reasonable metaphors, and excessively strained ones.
Here’s the amusing thing…I know people who have starved by having their copyrights stolen. But they have been ripped off by the record and movie companies. Finding someone who has been cheated by a record company is easy. Hearing a giant record label talk about “piracy” is like being lectured on the evils of it by Bluebeard.
Bullshit. “Theft” has a specific meaning. If I steal something from you, you no longer have it. If I violate your copyright, you still have it. This is a binary distinction, and if you won’t admit it, we cannot discuss the matter sensibly.
I hope I’m right, too. Because if you’re right… well… fuck.
Okay, let’s take your example from an earlier post and use “rape” as a metaphor for copyright violation. Copyright violation, like rape, isn’t taking anything from somebody. They’re both just the use of something that doesn’t belong to you against the owner’s wishes. But after you’re done, the owner still has everything they started with. So by your logic, no crime was committed.
What an astonishingly tortured bit of logic on your part.
A copyright violation can, and usually does, occur without the knowledge of the “victim”. Find another “crime” where these things are true:
The victim can be completely unaware that the crime has been committed, and is unlikely to find out that it happened at any point in the future.
The victim is not deprived of the ownership or use of the item. They have promoted the concept of “intellectual property” to get around these difficult facts, and have promoted the idea that IP can be stolen.
So rape’s okay, if the victim is passed out?
Obviously, I don’t really equate rape with copyright violation. But the reasoning you’re using to try to establish copyright violation is not theft is just as convoluted as the reasoning I’ve used.
Is there an argument to be made that copyright violation is different than theft? Yes. Is it as absolute and clear-cut as you’re claiming? No. People can claim that copyright violation is theft and make as good an argument as yours. If you’re refusing to admit this is possible, you’re just demonstrating you can’t take an objective look at the issue.
gaffa, nemo, both of you need to stop the pedantry. Talk about SOPA and PIPA.
IIRC, when they had the Weapon’s Ban bill debate in the early 90s, I went to bed on a Friday night hearing that the Ban was dead. On Sunday morning, we had a Weapons Ban. (Whatever it was called… the one where all of the ‘assault rifle’ arguments were being used)
hh
I won’t trust that this danger is over until I see it has been voted down and repudiated as the bag of bird droppings that it is.
Until then, I will be vigilant.
As an aside, do you think Jimmy Wales made a difference here?
No, it isn’t, because theft is NOT used as a metaphor. If so, then you’d often hear it also used as a simile. It’s quite clear that the term is being used as a classification. And pointing out where a classification fails does indicate that the subject does not fall under that classification.
If piracy is theft, then, other than possibly a dire need, there is no argument that any of it acceptable. And i don’t accept that. I don’t see how playing an abandonware game is wrong. I don’t see how choosing to watch something on the Internet that I could have recorded from my TV is wrong. And I definitely don’t see why backing up my DVD on my computer is wrong, nor making it where I don’t have to use the CD to play a game I purchased, or hacking my own hardware. Yet all of these fall under copyright violations.
And as for your rape analogy: copyright violations would be better modeled as being able to make a copy of the person in question and then having sex with the copy, and then arguing that the original has no right to be upset. The copying part is what makes things so incredibly different from anything we’ve dealt with before.
And I say this as someone who, other than what I said above, refuses to pirate.
As for PIPA/SOPA: the Internet is never not going to be watching for threats against its continued existence.
Back to my original point, this isn’t about theft and piracy - the legislators are pretending it is, but it’s about control - the legislators and businesses don’t have it, and they want it. They don’t like us common folk able to just chat with each other in different countries, and share ideas about what’s good and what’s bad about our different existences. Informed sheep aren’t docile sheep.
Just now on CNN’s coverage of South Carolina, there was an advert urging people to support SOPA and PIPA. Given how expensive that particular advert spot would likely be, somebody doesn’t think SOPA is dead.
The “common people” aren’t so “common” now.
Here’s a good headline: SOPA DOA
Watch and wait, y’all.
Be vigilant.
Really. This is important.
When the dang PATRIOT thing came poking its nose into every nook and cranny, people were so freaked by the disaster not to say “HEY, WAIT A MINUTE!”.
Watch out for what happens next.
Mr Obama will almost certainly be the next POTUS, but that doesn’t mean everything is going to be ‘peaches and cream’ for personal liberties here in the USA (and in other Internet connected countries). We are all connected in such ways that a single decision by some elected guy from a single state of the USA could actually cause millions of folks ALL OVER THE WORLD notice and actually in a level above ‘meh’ care about it.
That, my fellow Dopers, is power.
Do not forget, this guy still is a senator.
And who was Emperor Palpatine before he was Emperor?
OK, ok ok… maybe that was over the top.
But y’all get the idea.