SOPA/PIPA - My Rant!

[RyanRed]

MY SOPA/PIPA RANT! (It was time)

Do you realize that the US is the #1 country in the world for imprisonment? We have around 74,300,000 people in prison, and the next closest to this number is roughly 20% less. Guess who it is.. Russia, at around 58,200,000 people. In the US, this averages out to about 1 in 100 people in our entire population. Police State? If your a California native like myself, you should be quite aware of our prison population problem, the amount of tax dollars California spends on housing inmates, debates behind privatizing California prisons, and the early release program. Yeah, we Californians are up **** creek when it comes to our prison system. But to the point.

What do you thinks going to happen if SOPA/PIPA passes? Everyone is suddenly going to stop downloading copyrighted material? Bulls**t people! Examples will be made. Soccer moms will be imprisoned, thirteen year old kids will be sued. But more importantly its creating a policed censored internet where we surf in fear of clicking a wrong link. You might as well throw the first amendment out the window as well because it falls inline with this. "Click here for a completely none copyrighted song!" "HAHAHA you just click on Metallicas - Fade to Black, and now your going to jail! SUCKER!!!!"

So whats your plan here America? Are you trying to sardine can the already full prisons? Lets just smash a few more people in, and see how many we can fit. Then create a 2 hour special on CNN about how broke America is. Why do you think people are pirating software in the first place? Because were f'in broke! We cant afford to buy the latest copy of Mirco$oft windows for $189 bucks. But don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying piracy is right. But what did you expect. You give us super mega fast internet speeds, and the ability to connect with the entire would, but thought we would all just sit idle in chat room playing trivia bot games together? Hoooorrssseeee sh*t! Protocols were designed, minds were brainstormed, and ideas were created. We built the internet people, not the government. Sure, they invented it, but we designed it. They have no right to regulate our creation. There is copyrighted material all over the internet now because that's the way WE wanted it. I spit on you SOPA/PIPA.

If this does pass, things will change, and I don't just mean here on the internet you know. I foresee the internet 2. Where new protocols are created, new networks are established, and we are free again to roam in a non censored environment. Maybe that's just what we need? Ill go back to the BBS days if I have too. Here I come 14.4k modem!

-Ryan

[BennyHill]

Ryan,

I like the way you think. The prison situation in the US is messy, to say the least. There seem to be daily stories of inmates being released who were belatedly proven innocent. Makes you wonder how many more there are?
This is only my opinion, but I think prisons as we know them should only be for any violent crime and repeat burglars, vandals, etc. I personally feel that rapists and child molesters should be in separate facilities, but never allowed out. Sort of like old-fashioned asylums. They are too unstable, and mixing them with the general population usually makes them worse when they get out. I am not defending their crimes. I find rape and molestation abhorent.

As for the internet, the idea of the money the US government is wasting on this censorship rubbish and the costs to enforce it is madness.
Deal w/hunger and regulating the f'ing blood suckers on Wall Street who have almost destroyed the world economy!

Well, I'm off for some blood pressure meds.
Thanks for this thread, Ryan!

[Done_With_It]

If Sopa passed and you downloaded a Michael Jackson song, you could get more years than Conrad Murray....
It's (Sopa) one of the stupidest thing I've ever heard of.

Great post!!

[Peter G]

/rant

SOPA has been shelved, thank God. Problem is that the powers that be will just alter it, try and slip it a little more under the radar and throw it back at congress as a "kinder and gentler" bill; which will inevitably contain the same ridiculous and Draconian policies that the current incarnation contained. And Ryan, you're absolutely right. The ridiculous failed policies causing such inflated incarceration rates in the US already makes the "free-est country in the world" seem more restrictive in some ways than communist China. When you see bills like SOPA/PIPA come up time and again it should make people everywhere shudder at the state of the union. When is enough enough?

I have a massive rant about this on some music blog, but I'm too tired right now to go ahead and find it. Bottom line is that SOPA in any incarnation cannot, under any circumstances, ever be allowed to pass. Placing the internet under any punitive management/rule will simply break the internet. Freedom of anonymous digital exchange is inherent in the design of the WWW. Take that away and it's de-evolution. Once there are government bodies in charge of what people get to see, read, and hear, well trust me, it makes for a really lousy experience. I've lived in restricted countries in the middle east. It truly felt like the dark ages.

Besides, the way these bills were penned amounts to nothing less than the robbery of freedom. Hell, there is literally so much that could be destroyed - just the collateral damage alone would rip apart the way the internet now works. If something even remotely close to SOPA/PIPA ever passes should give people nightmares IMO. What amazes me is that it took Wikipedia, Google, and a few other companies boycotting it to bring it enough attention to get people talking and worried. But really, the possibility that it was taken seriously in the first place is truly frightening.

Considering this bill was written ostensibly about piracy, well that's nothing more than smoke and mirrors. That argument is an effort to pull wool over people's eyes and lead people away from the true intent of bills like this. But even to argue on it's surface point; in reality piracy hurts nothing but the gigantic profit margins of corporations who have been gouging and stealing, commanding a ridiculously inflated market share in music and movies since the beginning of the entertainment industry. In the music business alone, companies have been literally raping the artist of their fair share for decades. Just as one of many examples; in the mid 90's my band had a number 1 hit in Canada, it was also charting well in the US and around the world. I was headlining concert venues in some countries, and backing some extremly famous artists in the US. How's this... I was making 650.00 per week! WEA (Warner/Electra/Atlantic) on the other hand was getting paid hand over fist, to the tune of around 11,000.00 every 3.x days from that CD. Buggers still make money from it. I don't. And get this... they were recouping every penny initially invested in our band on top of that profit. So out of the band's piddly 650.00 salary we were still paying back the company for studio costs, marketing, consulting, legal, e.t.c... Bloody highway robbery. And they frikin knew it.

Back then they did so because they could get away with it, having proprietary technology that everyone wanted but no one could afford. The cost of producing and promoting an album back then was far too prohibitive to do it independently. It turns out that now this technology is available to everyone with a fast enough desktop/laptop, (and a skill set), and they no longer have scarcity, as such their million dollar studios are now Starbucks. Halley-frikin-lluyah. But instead of embracing this and evolving like the artists they once enslaved, these witless idiots want to stifle it, squashing this progress with iron fists because they can't figure out a way to sleaze a buck behind it.

I'll tell you this also from experience: in MANY cases it is exactly because of "piracy" and peer to peer file sharing that the independent artist has a promotional/marketing tool that ultimately leads to real revenue from their artistic work, revenue that excludes having to pay fat, sleazy, corporate talking heads who wouldn't know proper art if it fell on their fat heads. There are kids now producing albums on their laptops and selling them on their sites and iTunes making 10 to 15 times what I made in the '90's with a "major label" deal! And in almost every case, these kids have had their songs pirated. Hell, most times it's the artists uploading their stuff to those pirate torrent sites. Why? Because P2P is NOT the big, bad, soul sucking, revenue killing demon everyone is being told it is. In fact, the entire concept of "digital piracy" is PROPAGANDA. All it really is, is an alternate revenue stream for the new artist. A promotional tool. It's just word of mouth, internet style. The only souls being sucked away from "piracy" are those who want to keep an archaic and utterly criminal business model working as it did "back in the day", all because they are being finally nudged out of an industry they have pillaged for far too long.

SOPA was written by those folks and their governmental counterparts. Scummy profit mongers who would gleefully squash the evolution of technology, art, and even commerce, if it lowered their bottom dollar. Hell, on a wider scope from SOPA I'd even go so far as to say people like Julian Assange and the hacker collective "Anonymous" are vanguards at the forefront of protecting freedom from all types of tyranny in this digital age. Mark my words, people like those cats will be found as heroes in future historical text, because it's only through cats like that, organizations willing to take the kinds of risks they take every day, that we are not at the complete mercy of a bill like SOPA and it's consequential legislation and punitive actions. I can guarantee that one day not too far away we are going to need people like "Anonymous" and sites like "Wikileaks" in a far greater capacity.

Clay Shirky has an immutable argument for why SOPA/PIPA is a really really bad idea. When it comes to the internet that guy knows what he's on about. You can watch his talk on TED.com (Clay Shirky: Why SOPA is a bad idea | Video on TED.com) That link will take you directly to his video. If you're really interested in this issue he has a few points there that easily explain what the authors of that bill are on about - and it's not pretty.



/endrant

[Done_With_It]

Well Said!!!