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Tech at Night: War on Copyright intensifies as infringers fall, Grassley hacked

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 23rd, 2012 at 11:30 PM  | 

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Tech at Night

Filesonic stops infringing. I guess the site’s leadership didn’t want to go to jail like Ninjavideo, or get hit like Megaupload did. People put up with ad-laden, obnoxious ‘file sharing’ sites when they want to download something that can’t be distributed legally, by less annoying sites. Everyone knows this.

It’s a good thing that Megaupload was taken down. That was a blow for property rights. But not all in the anti-SOPA coalition support property rights. They don’t want prudent copyright protection laws to fix the problem of foreign free riders, and want us to wink and nod at infringers. Look, even if we repealed the Sonny Bono act, or even the copyright act before that, we’d still have copyrights that needed protection.

Europe regulates the Internet again. “Right to be forgotten?” I say Brussels has a right to take a long walk off a short pier.

Chuck Grassley, convert to our side on SOPA, gets his Twitter account attacked. Hijacking someone’s communications accounts is to attack political discourse in an open society. I hope those responsible are prosecuted. Also, way to reward people for doing the right thing, not.

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COMMENTS

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  • trickamsterdam

    Also, got link to Wyden/Issa in another diary of yours.

    Haven’t read the details yet, but Wyden is clearly one of the smartest and most reasonable Democrats and Issa and Chavetz are two of the best Republicans, so that gives me some confidence that maybe there can be some consensus at some point.

    Also didn’t know Dodd (as a joke people should start pronouncing his last name “dude”) was peddling SOPA until it crashed…

    LOL…why him? Watching Chris Dodd try to get something done successfully, is like watching a one-armed monkey eat a banana. I wonder if Romney would consider him an “influence peddler”?

    If he is, it makes sense: no one in Hollywood ever gets what they pay for.

  • aesthete

    What is a bill that smirks at our common law system and presumed innocence, if not anti-rule of law?

  • Adjoran

    “If you don’t support this bill you support piracy” – I believe it is called a “false dichotomy” because it ain’t necessarily so.

    Copyright law deserves equal force with other property protections, not greater. Waiving the rights of the accused or setting up presumptions of guilt are against the fundamentals of our legal system. At the modest end, present law already allowed such scams as the Righthaven “business model” until the courts ruled against them.

    If your rights can only be enforced by the rest of us giving up ours, you are going to have a tough sell.

  • renl57

    …before taking action on the copyright issue.

    Because we’re in a fast-changing, fast-moving new digital environment here on the Internet (which now includes smartphones). So any legislation likely to come out of Congress may be obsolete months after it’s signed into law anyway.

    It’s a good thing that Congress didn’t jump the gun when the VCR was first marketed in the late 1970s. Back then, these same Hollywood figures were demanding protection from folks using their VCRs to record TV shows and movies broadcast on TV. In the end, all this panic about the VCR turned out to be much ado about nothing. The overwhelming majority of VCR recording turned out to be for fair use–timeshifting and so on.

    I saw one survey where folks were asked: “If you were unable to copy a current Hollywood hit movie for free, would you pay to watch it?” The overwhelming majority of respondents answered No. Which means that Hollywood isn’t losing any money off these people. They wouldn’t pay to see the movie anyway–which tells you how much current Hollywood movies are really worth.

    The dirty little secret that Hollywood doesn’t like to admit is that a lot of folks copy their products because most of their products just aren’t worth paying for.

    I would definitely pay money to see some movies–the Dark Knight and so on. And I have paid. But a lot of other Hollywood stuff is such garbage that zero is exactly the price that it’s worth.

  • jaydickb

    is only part of the question. “How much” is also part of the equation. I used to copy music from friends, but now that I can download it for $1 or less per song, it’s not worth the trouble to copy it. I just download what I want and pay for it. I do download only unprotected versions because I don’t want the hassles of dealing with the protection schemes, but I don’t give copies to other people any more or get copies from them.