SOPA - more diarrhea from Washington

There is a piece of diarrhea wending its way through the intestines of congressional committee. It is a mixture of scum and rancid semen, the semen being from the collective wet dream of the entertainment industry which many in our corrupt congress were more than eager to swallow. It is a pair of bills, the Protect IP Act and SOPA ( The Stop Online Piracy Act )

To big music and the film industry MAFIAA groups like the RIAA and MPAA nothing, and I mean NOTHING is more important than copyright, which if left up to them will NEVER expire.

Make no mistake about it, these greedheads want your money and will do ANYTHING to get it. If they could figure out how to squeeze money out of kids for singing Happy Birthday(a copyrighted song) they would do so. These people don't like the internet as it is now. They don't like the fact that people have made an end run around them by file sharing and streaming.

The music industry could have gotten in on the ground floor, Shawn Fanning, the original owner of Napster wanted to work a deal with them. They had no interest, making the inane statement "we sell records", and shut him down. The rest is history, every time they shut down a file sharing network another one pops up immediately. Their greatest "victory" winning a court battle against the Pirate Bay turned into a total flop. The original owners passed it on to other people, no one knows who these new people are, servers were moved, and the Pirate Bay is still alive and well, in spite of the judicial decision against its original owners.

Such is the internet, a free wheeling unimpeded network that is hated by both politicians and many corporations as well. They hate it because with all their power, all their money, on the net they are FORCED to play on an equal field with the hoi polloy and they don't like it. These are people who LOVE to grind people down, and do so every day.

Now, with the help of their paid "rent boys" in congress, they may just get what they are after. Of the two bills I mentioned above SOPA is the worst, so that is the one I will discuss.

What SOPA does in place into the hands of MAFIAA groups the ability to censor sites they feel are infringing copyright.
From lifehacker.com

SOPA makes it possible for companies to block the domain names of web sites that are simple capable of, or seem to encourage copyright infringement.

All About SOPA, the Bill That Wants to Cripple Your Internet This means that if Lifehacker happened to have an article or two that could be interpreted as piracy-friendly, our domain could be blocked so it's unaccessible by visiting lifehacker.com.

Here is where it gets funny, because while this will certainly confuse grandma and grandpa, as well as the less web savvy, there is a way around it, which you can be sure the pirates will use.

What the bill can't do is block numeric IP addresses, so you could still access Lifehacker, or any other site that could be censored, if you knew that address. This is important because it means this bill can't do much to stop downloaders of pirated content. If a domain name is blocked, everything will still work via the numeric IP address. Basically, the bill will be no good at stopping piracy—what it was apparently designed to do

This quote from Techdirt illustrates just how low the entertainment industry is willing to go.

In the hearings today, the MPAA's Michael O'Leary somewhat stunningly suggested that repressive regimes that censor the internet are a model worth emulating in the US, since they didn't "break the internet." Perhaps he should speak to those who have had their speech blocked in countries like China and Iran to see how they really feel about that. And is he really comfortable setting up the same system here in the US? Is he convinced that it won't be abused, despite the long history of abuse we've seen by the members of the MPAA? Just last week alone we heard a story about how MPAA member Warner Bros., took down tons of content it had no right to, including some open source software it just didn't like.

This bill gives both corporations and the government the ability to control the flow of information as they can arbitrarily block domain names to ANY site accused of copyright violation. If this bill passes the intro for the old scifi series The Outer Limits, slightly updated, will become fact.

There is nothing wrong with your computer. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image; make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next lifetime, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear.

Mickey Rat and Zombie Sonny Bono - the murder of public domain

Hey Mickey, go suck a cock you dirty rat, and zombie Sonny Bono, that goes for you too.

Right now there is a steaming, STINKING pile of filth wending it's way through congress. It started out as the Senate's Protect-IP, a similar and even worse bill called E-Parasites/SOPA has been defecated in the house. I may blog about this pos later, for now you can read about it here and here.

MAFIAA groups have for YEARS been attempting, sometimes successfully, to push swill like this through as law, and not just in the U.S either.

What I'm going to talk about is just what makes all bills like this suck so bad. See, in the U.S. we used to have this thing called public domain. If you view the link you will see that in the U.S. when copyright became law in 1790 it had a duration of 14 years, with the option to renew for another 14 years of the author of the work was still alive. Relatives and descendants were expected to get jobs and support themselves, not live off a dead creators work in perpetuity. If that had not changed author renewed works from 1983 and before would now be in public domain. So for all those works MAFIAA groups would be unable to sue people for sharing them, Beatles, Led Zep, Stones, all the old stuff would be in public domain as well as all the classic movies.

So it would have been so sorry RIAA/MPAA, no lawsuit 4 U. In a strange way I think it would be MORE of a discouragement to piracy, as they still COULD sue people for sharing over 1984 and up intellectual property; with the older public domain stuff being new and relevant enough to be worth sharing a lot of people just wouldn't risk making the newer stuff available.

But of course such was not the case, as through the years copyright duration became longer and longer and longer.

So here we are in bicentennial 1976 and copyright has gone from a total of 28 years, and that ONLY if the living author renews it after 14 years, to 75 years OR the life of the author plus another 50 years. Hey, those no talent descendants have to eat too!

This looked like a pretty sweet deal, I mean not only is the author of the work covered for life, his relatives get to feed off the gravy train for another 50 years. Who could complain! Well, unbenounce to most people in reality land, legally, corporations are people too! But unlike a living, breathing person, unless they go out of business, corporations NEVER DIE. Works made for hire, which would be works owned by corporations were covered by copyright for a static 75 years. Not that long a time period for an eternal entity.

A scary thing was about to happen. It was looking like Disney's prize mouse, Mickey could actually wind up in the public domain. But there's no need to fear sleaze congress is here, and with intense lobbying by Disney:

Prompted perhaps by the Disney group's lavish donations of campaign cash - more than $6.3 million in 1997-98, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics - Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

At the beginning I made reference to "zombie Sonny Bono". The term fits, as this bill was passed nine months after his death.
Mary Bono, speaking on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, said:

Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. ... As you know, there is also [then-MPAA president] Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

Kind of reminds me of Orwell's 1984's O'Brien talking about his mental picture of the state as a "boot stamping on a human face, forever". When it comes to control enforced by government, "forever" is usually NOT a good thing. So now its the life of the author plus 70 years, and for Mr. Corporation eternius 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier. Sweet dreams Mickey Rat!!

Joyjoy citizen, it doesn't end here noooo. Because sure as shit when Mickey is again about to go into the public domain in 2023 Disney will be there, lobbying yet another iteration of the corrupt U.S. congress for an extension to copyright. Thanks to the Supreme Court, there is NO limit to how many times congress can extend the length of copyright duration, effectively making the possibility of anything covered under copyright now entering the public domain as dead as Sonny Bono. For murdering public domain it's debatable who smells worse, that dirty, stinking rat Mickey or the rotting corpse of his partner, zombie Sonny Bono.