Okay, so it turns out that the United States Congress is trying to put through a bill that will censor the Internet, like in China or Iran. But it gets better, this is going to be at the behest of Corporations to preserve their copyrights, and, those arrogant fucks are planing on simply removing the blacklisted sites from the net period, not just censoring them for the people they have actual jurisdiction over.


Those Americans among us who are of the age of majority should contact their congressmen and tell them that you would not support this bull...I mean bill


Congratulations are in order I suppose, the US has become a fascist state (for those too ignorant to know, fascists aren't the same as Nazis, the Nazis were just fascists. Fascism is when corporations control government that is the dictionary definition, not the misguided cultural definition)

FUCK THAT

Welcome to the Socialist States of America. We are already approaching 40% socialism in our policies (I'm in Economics right now).

We've got welfare, social security, food stamps, public housing, now medical care.... all that's left is to control the media, religion, and guns.

I would say we are not fascist, as a lot of the stuff that's been going down is going to cripple some pretty large corps (specifically the medical industry). Yes, corps do have lobbyists, but how things are going, it would appear the government listens to them about as much as it listens to us: AKA it doesn't.

If they weren't listening to lobbyists why would this bill exist? did you forget that the health care bill only barely got through? Anyway on paper it looks like you've become like your friendly neighbours to the north, but have you noticed that most of the media outlets have a majorly conservative bent? And the one that doesn't has demonstrated incompetence all throughout its existence? No, your right, government doesn't control media at the moment, the opposition controls the media and I'd say that thats just as bad.

There's also this.

It's also funny to me that the person many people like to blame for the "socialist shift" is opposed to this bill.

I'll be surprised if they ever start to control religion, considering the state of it in the US. Seems too wide-open for the government to snatch control.
If they ever actually control the media instead of the mass media being just, y'know, bad, I will be sad but unsurprised. Controlling internet censorship would certainly help that happen. I don't like that my government wants to control the flow of information.

...Can't say I give much of a shit about guns. <<

[citation needed]

Can you post some links for us please so we can read through it? I mean... no offense but taking one person's word for it on the internet isn't that reliable.

Well guns are a right because when the constitution was written the founding fathers had just fought a war against government, the right to bear arms isn't there for self defense against crooks (though they certainly help) they're there to defend against the government if they become like the state that they had just fought off, you'll have a tougher time enforcing martial law with an armed populous.


Also of course Obama is against this, the proposed bill is fascism at it's most basic, as in as far right as you can go, Democrats tend to be on the left.


Also the government will never control religion, its in your constitution, "separation of church and state" and "freedom of religion."

and Republican governments may as well control media, during Democrat administration the opposition controls the media

Pom, follow the link in my post and you'll find links to news stories about the bill, as well as a link to a page that goes over some implications of it.

Edit: Or I can just do the work for you because I'm bored.

COICA bill

If the corps were really in power, it WOULDN'T have.

Ever thought the other reason it didn't get through is how many people oppose it? NOBODY I have talked to wanted it through.

I'm not familiar with the bill you refer to, but you sound like a whiny little bitch. "Wah, they want to preserve their copyrighted material and not let us pirate it for free!" Bawww.

As far as the standard net-neutrality issue as always comes up in this sort of threat, it's going to happen eventually by necessity. The internet is growing too quickly for every page to remain free-access regardless of size. I read an interesting article on it, basically saying "yes it sucks but it's the only way for people to put up websites without going broke in the future." I'll see if I can find it. Even ignoring copyright breaking, it was pretty damn compelling.

But by all means, compare a simple anti-piracy measure to the systematic extermination of anyone who dares defy a fascist government.

Kids these days.

This is the foothold.

Start somewhere and expand: its how most things happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery-slope_fallacy

That refers to things like pornography and gore, to my reading--it is irrelevant to the removal of piracy.

Well then, you could argue the way that the Nazis slowly expanded their dealings with the Jews was a fallacy.

Game developers are already changing their business model to adapt to the prevalence of piracy. For example, subscription systems as with MMOs or invasive DRM like SecuROM.

If I could find the damn link... I could link you to a really interesting article discussing the issue of video game piracy...

But no, I don't necessarily think the government should get involved with this. If things are allowed to take their course, the industries will evolve around such problems and update their business models.

Don't forget that anything can and will be pirated/counterfeited from high-end purses to video games. Even console games can and will be pirated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

Game, Set, and Match. :P

Anyway, Piracy has certainly increased to an unprecedented point during the internet age. It's easy to say that corporations will catch up, and find out ways to stop piracy. The problem is that it's nigh impossible to catch up with millions of users who are out to find the quickest way to make these products free.

A corporation could implement a hundred different ways to counter piracy, and the internet would have their CD or movie on a torrent site by the end of the week. It's not necessarily about what is being pirated, and more about the fact that everything that is electronic is being pirated and distributed to millions of users in a matter of days for free. Corporations can't make any money because piracy is giving everyone their product before it even hits store shelves.

Disclaimer: Playing Devil's advocate here, and that's about it.

Every developer should start resorting to online distribution. Steam has a relatively low piracy rate, and I'm sure Valve could cut it even farther if they had the backing of every company on it. PSN and Xbox live could probably do pretty good too.

If EVERY game came through a system like that, they could hard wire into the games they had to connect for authentication.


Then again, that would suck for people like me who have slow internet. :P

Wait don't you have a godlike rig? And you have a slow internet?

Does anyone else see a discrepancy here?

Well Ubisoft is already doing that with their games on PC, its been bummed past but its still there.


and censorship, whether it be about 'obscene' things (like in Australia already) or piracy (like this proposed bill.) How long until outsiders (like myself) who criticize the government or just ask logical questions get blocked? It IS a slippery slope when you're dealing with censorship of any kind.

Swan: They could start doing what Blizzard was doing back in the day, and give incentive to buy the game (battle.net), rather than what they're doing now: forcing everyone to play online only and stripping LAN, giving them built-in DRM. (battle.net 2.0)

The former probably leads to more piracy, but I would argue it doesn't necessarily lead to fewer sales, and it certainly garners better reviews, praise, and word-of-mouth "advertising" than the latter.
In my opinion, focus on combating piracy less and on reasons to buy your game (rather than pirate) more.

Edit: And the fact that Starcraft 1 is STILL selling new copies despite how easy it is to pirate must mean something.

I'd link the article again, but clearly you lack the mental facilities necessary to understand what a fucktwat you're being right now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_%28internet%29

Or perhaps I just disagree with that article?

I'd make an immature comment about mental facilities as well bit you're an admin.

Moreover what they plan to do also infringes on laws of other countries and their rights, shut down foreign sites, pah, what the hell do they think they are god?

You disagree with what exactly? The most basic of argument fallacies? That's not exactly a topic up for debate there. "Slippery slope" is almost never a valid argument, especially when you're comparing anti-piracy to blacklisting of dissenting opinions. That's completely idiotic.

They can't shut down foreign sites without the cooperation of said country. They have no jurisdiction there, no amount of lawmaking can change that. See the Large Hadron Collider lawsuit for a perfect example of that.

Infringing on what rights exactly? That's just offensive to anyone who knows about actual infringement issues. There is no inalienable right to pirate a movie. There is no right to steal music.

Not exactly sure what God has to do with anti-piracy laws.

What about nations without copyright laws? This plan of theirs infringes on the rights of those citizens, or do the rights of nations without corporate masters not matter to the US anymore?

On the subject of your argument fallacies, perhaps we have reached a fundamental disagreement in ways of thinking, I believe every action has consequences and every action leads to another by the same party, thus, slippery slope can in fact apply, regardless of what Wikipedia has to say on the matter.

The fact that you think "what Wikipedia has to say on the matter" is relevant at all shows how completely ignorant you are of debate techniques and fallacies. That's just not how formal arguments work, sorry.

And what the hell are you talking about with that copyright law nonsense? How does this plan infringe on any rights at all? It's taking copyrighted material off the internet. Again, there is no fundamental right to piracy. I'm not sure if there even are any major countries without copyright laws... but that's hardly relevant.

How are any rights infringed in any way? Again, legally American courts cannot force foreign nations to do anything, so even if they did have a right to piracy (?!), we couldn't do anything to infringe it.

Unless you're saying their rights are infringed because they lose access to American sites, which is complete nonsense as far as the law is concerned. If the sites and servers are hosted on American soil or owned by American citizens, they must abide by American laws. I'm pretty sure no one's ever successfully used the "my target demographic is African natives so you can't shut me down" defense in court.

I'd just like to state here that in the article you linked, daz, it states in the first sentence that:

So there are some instances where the slippery slope argument is, in fact, applicable.

Okay, but again, a slippery slope between anti-piracy and fascist censorship is completely fucking ridiculous.

It's less ridiculous when the bill's not about removal of content, but rather blacklisting of domain names. Which, if I follow what you were trying to say, doesn't actually help with the bit you posted earlier about the internet's growth, since the domain names are still unavailable.

If I understand it correctly, websites can be added to the secondary blacklist by the attorney general without going through court at all. It seems like that's an easy place for a slippery slope to develop, even if you do think it's just paranoia.

Well, I'd love to discuss the finer points of the bill itself, but the original post didn't link anything. All it said was "they want to enact an anti piracy bill they're fascists wah they want to take copyright-infringing websites offline as per existing laws."

And I'm far too busy to be googling bills for the sake of an internet debate.

Maybe Zurg actually has a point, but it's all in the presentation sometimes.

Either way, I'm having trouble seeing how there's any possible negative to a bill that would only--as far as the topic so far indicates--remove copyright-infringing sites.

Books that publish copyrighted material without permission are illegal. Music sampling, video games, etc. can all be guilty of illegal plagiarism -- and those are subsequently prevented from sale. However, freedom of expression has remained intact despite that. No amount of "you can't make money off someone else's hard work" has ever led to someone getting their book banned because it said a bad word about the president.

Why should this be any different? It's nothing more than enforcing existing copyright laws. If they break the law, they get punished and their website goes offline.

Shocking concept, right?

In the original post, this is compared to China, which ... does China actually have censored internet? I'm not sure. For the sake of argument, let's say he meant North Korea. There, yes, they have media embargoes and ban anti-government messages and such.

That's not what this is about. This is about protecting existing copyrighted material by removing the offending material from the internet. Single-region censorship wouldn't really help either. That's the funny thing about the internet. Once it gets out online, it's REALLY damn hard to get rid of it. Just ask any regretful camwhore.

If they do end up enacting a dubious bill like this, don't blame the government. Blame the dumbass pirates that forced their hand to do this to begin with.

Yeah, it kinda seemed like a few people in this conversation weren't actually sure what the bill did.

The original intent for the bill is, for the most part, fine... Aside from the fact that Viacom is going to take another swing at Youtube as soon as the bill gets pushed through, and projectplaylist might have some trouble. I'm mostly worried about someone twisting the power that this bill grants and taking it in a bad direction. And in general, I'd rather see removal of content than outright blacklisting of domain names. It gives a chance to appeal on charges before punishment is administered, rather than appealing punishment afterwords, causing downtime/drama/profit loss/whatever.

So was that post referring to domain name supply, or something else entirely? (And if you do find that link somewhere, I'm actually interested in checking it out, but don't go out of your way to look for it.)

The internet is a form of press. Therefore, it is protected in our Constitutional rights. I know you're thinking, hey, torrent sites don't count, and neither does porn. Well, in a way it does.

As seen above, THE RIGHT TO RECIVE INFORMATION regardless of medium used. Censoring the internet goes against our first Constitutional right. And I am concerned that our Nation is becoming more and more facist, and this is just another step. We're on our way to being controled by the Government.

So, to sum this all up, LETS GO TO CANADA!!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

Thats my info source.

:)

Very much so. Google has actually gotten a lot of grief over allowing their engine to be filtered over there.

google china search: democracy

0 results

Yup, that's me, right there. Not kidding, I have no clue what exactly the bill entails. I mean, I'm kind of getting the gist of it (thanks to your posts, Cloud), but I'm still pretty much in the dark.

Short version: The bill creates two domain name blacklists. One can be added to by a court, and the other is controlled by the attorney general. All ISPs in the US must block the domains listed in the first, while they are "strongly encouraged" to block the ones on the second. I haven't read the bill in its entirety (too busy), but on the website I linked to earlier, "strongly encouraged" was summarized as such:

They didn't specify what that immunity really did for the ISPs, but I can't say I like certain ISPs from having immunity to much of anything.

Here is the bill in .pdf form for your perusal, this is assuming that you are capable (as I am barely so) of understanding legalese.

*already posted that on the first page, which everyone ignored*