SOPA is a Scam

The solution is to let the punishment fit the crime. Put up some guy on food stamps downloading movies from a cafe in prison for five years? That SOPA's solution. Ands it's going to cost the tax payers upwards to $200,000 for that luxury state in the penitentary. Now that's a real plan. Right! Instead, why not let the poor guy have his dam movies, he would have never been able to buy them any, there's no loss! The tax payers have enough burden paying for his food. Why give the tax payers 30 times the bill he already costs? (Some prisons are that much!) Over a dvd? Wake up! SOPA is a Scam!

You know the same guys who are behind all this promoted the file sharing software and promoted list of songs they owned copyrights to! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJIuYgIvKsc

 

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Well you are referring to S-978 dealing with stopping people who are Streaming content they don't own. This is NOT SOPA which is S-968.

http://gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112s978rs/pdf/BILLS-112s978rs.pdf

So, no, some guy downloading movies from a cafe doesn't come under S-978 or SOPA.

No, that's not SOPA's solution, and even though you have your bills confused, laws like the proposed S-968, which allow incarceration to a maximum of 5 years, doesn't mean that people who break the law automatically get sentenced to prison. That's why we have judges, to make the penalty appropriate to the crime, and only in the most extreme cases would jail likely even be considered.

 

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Most thieves in poor American cities would argue they were given no other way out than to steal and break the law as well...

 

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No, I'm not confused. PROTECT IP Act of 2011, S. 968 and S.978 - Commercial Felony Streaming Act spawed H.R.3261 - Stop Online Piracy Act. They borrow the same ideas and language. And of course, the people who are behind SOPA support the language from the two Acts it evolved from.

Just saying that it not's SOPA's solution, doesn't change the fact that the language is broad enough to be interpreted that way. They are asking for five years because that's what they want to do. This act does not designate your 'worst case scenario'. If you think they probably wouldn't get jail time, then what's the purpose of going through all this trouble to threaten to give 5 years in prison, spend millitons doing so, then not carry it out if everything passes?

I'm sure those top people behind SOPA will have no problem taking the tax payer dollars to punish those who've they induced and trained internet users to use the excusive software to steal their movies and music. This was obviously set up long ago for them to cash in on, at the expense of the tax payers.

 

Good point. I would like add that duplication and sharing has changed the playing field considerabley since those days. The sharing of intellectual property first began as a tax payer idea of public and school libraries. We have been cultivated to share books from early on. Librarys soon began adding music and movies to their collections in which anyone may listen to with a shared cost. We extended that sharing practice with our friends when we made them a copy with our duel VCR drive, duel cassette tape, then cd burners and mp3s players today. With the advent of the Internet, we were able to share with all the other fans of our favorite music, movies and software.

Infomation in general has went through an evolution of sharing, and one important principle of the evolution of sharing information is that we improved our accuracy of the shared information (data). In days of old we used to share what we witnessed in life through word of mouth. Then, we created a symbol system called writing. This improved things quite a bit. Even better than this was audio and video recording. Now we all have disk drives and solid state memory devices. In the past it makes no sense a person would be sued for recounting a situation that they remember of a live play or sing part of a song from a concert they had attended. It appears what has become illegal is not the distribution of the property, but rather the ability to recount it through the extension of our new technological devices and memory disks. Although no one is saying it is illegal to remember, this essentially is what is happening underneath it all. This is why i don't think sharing is a problem, I think when you begin to make money from intellectual property you do not own is when you have then broken a law. Communal sharing no matter how big is not a problem, because I feel if people really care for content they view, they will put their money where there mouth is and buy it. I'm not a Nietzsche fam, I don't think we evolved with selfishnes towards each other, instead evolution required good will and cooperation.

Mettallica was one of the outspoken proponents against file sharing back in the 90's. I love their music but I don't always agree with their political standpoints. If it weren't for sharing, would Metallica exist? Look at this quote from James, the lead singer. He made this at a crucial point in the bands formation. Perhaps sharing the music collection was the reason why they kept up their relationship. Mabe not, but anyway, ironically, it's od school music sharing and distribution:

Also, Imagine the ignorance that would have prevailed had we put money as a barrier vs. sharing our books in schools and public libraries!

How many people got a record scratch, had cassette tape each your music or scratch a cd? How about loose your iTunes back up or forget a login. Is this justification to have to buy the entire collection over at face value? Technology is preventing memory loss. One thing file sharing is good for against the corrupt entertainment industry is allow us to get new copies of what we already purchased long ago without being charged again.

Sharing is an American and human tradition.

 

I've never had a need to download pirated stuff, but I can see where many people would be tempted, and the fact that the big boys were culpable in the practice, what more needs to be said?

I see shit on YouTube that is questionable, but nobody is profiting from it. It would be very easy to unintentionally step into copyright infringement, like a sound bite from your television while you're video taping your dog.

 

Indeed, can you imagine the number of infringements that would be caused now by the "Ghettoblaster" of the 1980's? No more flashdancing, breakdancing or bodypopping

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Ech... just because you all seem to have made theft ingrained into your culture doesn't mean the rest of have.

 

If you see £10 ($, or whatever other currency you want to use) laying on the road in front of you, do you pick it up and hand it in at the local police station or stick it in your pocket?

This trivial point is that you would likely stick it in your pocket, assume it's lost by an anonymous benefactor that apparently can live without it and go about spending it. The truth is that it is someone else's money, they might well attempt to look for it *if it was still there", they might even ask a policeman (if it was of greater value or a particular item)

In some respects you could take a denominated note out, lace it with some invisible ink to identify it was your note and entrap any passer-by into a crime, obviously the courts would be happy about entrapment, however since you aren't a multi-million dollar corporation paying vast amounts of taxes, they aren't really going to be siding with your methods of entrapment.

 

The question REALLY should be. "If you see a $10 bill laying on the ground with an address and name attached to it, what do you do?" You subtract the cost of mailing from the 10 and mail it to them. If you see $100 you leave it.

 

Okay if we follow that, then this is what you need to do:

download a film from online. Burn it to a DVD. find out the film distributor/company, subtract the cost for the DVD, Postage and any specific equipment required to "Copy" it and send it back to them.

If everyone does this, it generates a rather unique and puzzling affair in regards to the movie industries sudden levels of monetary losses.

 

That's nothing like my logic at all. The case from an online case is simply NOT downloading it. How hard is it for you to not download something illegal? I thought that was easy.

 

Who says I download anything illegal???

While I might argue, it doesn't necessarily mean I participate in the posed crime, just understand the crime itself obfuscates the various points in regards to how mass marketing strategies are actually on par with "brain washing".

I would consider that advertisements (especially repetitive ones) can be seen as undermining the Universal Declaration of Human Rights based on the article in reference to a persons freedoms, one such freedom is the right not to be harassed, advertisements are an eye sore and visual harassment. I'm also pretty sure that "Brain washing" undermines a number of those articles too, however have we been too dumbed down as a "Cargo Culture" to actually identify are loss of rights and who we lost them to.

 

SOPA has nothing to do with piracy on the internet.

I mean good grief, you guys bought that?

"What luck for the rulers that men do not think."

 

No it isn't.

The legislation doesn't target the downloaders, that's pointless, it's the people who are making it available for illegal download and who are profiting from it.

Sharing what you own is not the same as giving someone a copy of their own.
The library doesn't print everyone a copy of the book, they lend out for a short time the copies they paid for.
Big difference.

 

Be that as it may, copyright infringement is not theft. The Supreme Court has ruled decisively on this subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985)

Theft requires depriving people of property. Making a copy of something doesn't fulfill that requirement.

No, they're a copyright infringer. No theft occurs in the process making and distributing copies of copyrighted work.

If by "crook" you mean "thief," then no. If you mean "criminal" then I suppose so.

There are no thieves involved. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement, not theft. None of these new laws would be required if actual theft was occurring - existing laws would already cover that.

 

Total DVD sales last year was around 450million.
Total JP Morgan Bankster bonuses last year was around 10 BILLION.

To put things in perspective.

 

No, to put things in perspective you need to point out that it's not just their bonuses, it's their entire yearly compensation for over 26,000 investment bankers which averages $369,000 per.

And is because their profits are up 47%

You have to pay people what they are worth to retain them

 

No theft? Really?
If you want artists to continue doing what they do - they need to eat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFle2YoQwWg

 

It's a semantic point, has nothing to do with the fact that both theft and copyright infringement cheat the owner of the value of their intellectual property.