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http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/fccs-wheeler-net-neutrality-106465.html?hp=l4 Looks like politicians (on both sides of the aisle) are wary about wading into the tech waters after SOPA. This Wheeler guy may be left holding the bag.

Tell to RIAA, MPAA and all the acta/sopa/pipa supporters.. For them it's very much a business affair and each work of art, every color, every rhythm and every word should be copyrighted. My artist inside says BS, i do what ever i like even if only one person ever hears or sees the results.

Art was doing great until 50s. Since, everything is getting harder and more protected. Art does not thrive on profit driven world. And we as a global community will never reach peace until our artists are free to communicate.

Know Your Meme: A SOPA/PIPA PSA has been added as a related post - related requested by braschlosan on that post.

Game of Thrones = Sopa Opera for guys.

Aaron Swartz keynote - "How we stopped SOPA" at F2C:Freedom to Connect 2012, Washington DC on May 21 2012.

>> ^VoodooV:

first sentence into the interview and yeah, I have to agree, he sounds like he's trying to wash his hands of any responsibility. If he wanted to just be a good engineer, he didn't have to become a co-founder. He could have said "thanks steve, but no thanks, I like working in my garage"
as corporations get more and more powerful, the issues of their responsibility are going to be bigger and bigger.
I dunno, the way I see it, the internet is too big to be cracked down on and locked down. Of course there are always going to be people who try to lock it down but it will be temporary at best. sure there are always going to be your walled gardens and areas where things are locked down, but the internet at large will probably always be free.
There would be too much outrage if they were actually successful in locking people out.
but like anything, you can't just rest on your laurels and do nothing and assume it will be free without doing anything. freedom has to be fought for. There has to be pushback. The protests of PIPA/SOPA did have an effect and if someone tries to take something away from you, you fight to keep it.


Yeah the first sentence is do important people have a responsibility to speak out about regulation of the internet! No questions about taking responsibility for the actions of ones company. Of course the people running a company are responsible for the actions of the company. This was never talked about in this video. Woz states he likes it when anyone in the public eye speaks out for what they think is right. I cannot believe people are trying to correct me and still completely fail to understand basic English. Whether or not Woz is defensive about Apple in other situations I don't know anything about and is also irrelevant since he hasn't had any influence there for decades.

first sentence into the interview and yeah, I have to agree, he sounds like he's trying to wash his hands of any responsibility. If he wanted to just be a good engineer, he didn't have to become a co-founder. He could have said "thanks steve, but no thanks, I like working in my garage"

as corporations get more and more powerful, the issues of their responsibility are going to be bigger and bigger.

I dunno, the way I see it, the internet is too big to be cracked down on and locked down. Of course there are always going to be people who try to lock it down but it will be temporary at best. sure there are always going to be your walled gardens and areas where things are locked down, but the internet at large will probably always be free.

There would be too much outrage if they were actually successful in locking people out.

but like anything, you can't just rest on your laurels and do nothing and assume it will be free without doing anything. freedom has to be fought for. There has to be pushback. The protests of PIPA/SOPA did have an effect and if someone tries to take something away from you, you fight to keep it.

Well, the question is does the coach's face make it transformative?

God I have been way too into copyright law. Thanks SOPA!

>> ^legacy0100:

I remember having this conversation with my brother few months ago. I compared the Occupy movement with the Stop SOPA/PIPA movement, and how the Stop SOPA movement was so successful in such short period of time, when Occupy movement has been going on for a longer period of time but couldn't materialize any 'real change'.
For one thing, the occupy movement started out demanding accountability in the bank/finance industry. Then the agenda blew up to having social equality of laborers, minority rights, states rights, environmental rights etc etc. It tried taking in EVERY social reform agenda that was out there, taking the focus away from the original efforts demanding real reform in the financial industry.
Last year I remember Occupy protesters coordinating a march on Martin Luther King Jr day. Now I'm sure this is all a good message, but what does this have to do with Wall Street? This only goes to show that this mass movement is lacking focus, and in desperate need of core representatives, like we did during SOPA/PIPA movement when Reddit.com first lead the march, and other giants such as Wikipedia had moved in.


I think the major success of the SOPA/PIPA protests was that there were several very large corporations like google and facebook supporting and participating in the protests. It made it very hard for the media to ignore and detractors to dismiss the protestors as jobless smelly hippies.

And I think you're right about them losing focus. If they start to include every liberal cause under the sun they're going to alienate a lot of people who support financial reform, but may not support gay marriage, or increased environmental regulations.

While more successful over all, the tea party also lost a lot of support when they started subverting the economic reform message with social conservative agendas.

I remember having this conversation with my brother few months ago. I compared the Occupy movement with the Stop SOPA/PIPA movement, and how the Stop SOPA movement was so successful in such short period of time, when Occupy movement has been going on for a longer period of time but couldn't materialize any 'real change'.

For one thing, the occupy movement started out demanding accountability in the bank/finance industry. Then the agenda blew up to having social equality of laborers, minority rights, states rights, environmental rights etc etc. It tried taking in EVERY social reform agenda that was out there, taking the focus away from the original efforts demanding real reform in the financial industry.

Last year I remember Occupy protesters coordinating a march on Martin Luther King Jr day. Now I'm sure this is all a good message, but what does this have to do with Wall Street? This only goes to show that this mass movement is lacking focus, and in desperate need of core representatives, like we did during SOPA/PIPA movement when Reddit.com first lead the march, and other giants such as Wikipedia had moved in.

@renatojj

Church has high interested in religious candidates being elected. Most of the debates going on in politics are based on religious philosophy. Few off the top of my head are abortion, creationism, and women's rights. They've been going against the grain of the Constitution trying to get creationism which is a arguably religion based subject taught in schools. Which in turn possibly gets them more followers, which in turn gets them more tithing and more people in their "group" giving them more power. In fact I would argue they are specifically trying to erode the line between church and state with these arguments, injecting religion based reasons into many of the arguments.

Big media networks push for things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 where the reason for the bill is not actually what ends up happening. It was supposed to deregulate and open up the market for competition and instead it allowed them to reconsolidate by buying up competitors. And they largely don't fight with censorship on curse words because generally it drives off their audience, and those networks that don't have to censor curse words charge for the privilege of hearing them and seeing some nudity to boot. And they also support SOPA-like bills which are essential a blanket tool to censor the web....they also support monitoring and traffic shaping on the networks they control...which is another potential avenue for censorship.

You'll have to be more specific on what you're getting at......all these groups are eroding divisions we built through regulation and have been doing so steadily since the 80s at every opportunity across industries.

I've already shown that given the chance, they buy up competition to remain a monopoly. Look at ISPs, look at all the oil companies we USED to have. Look at the media conglomerates that own the majority of your radio stations ( I think there's two major radio networks, but they have like a million different stations under the same banners so it LOOKS like choice). How the record labels and movie industries are all tied together and often even tied into the same parent company that owns your ISP. Cell phone industry, ATT trying to buy T Mobile which would have brought it down to 3 major providers and they did it in the name of "better service" but still haven't announced plans to build out their infrastructure since the deal went through...why? Because it wasn't about better service, it was about buying up a competitor that offered plans at prices people preferred.

When people are unhappy with their ISPs they've tried to form local government run coop non-profit ISPs, and they get sued by the huge companies who refuse to service their area. It's happened multiple times. With regulation, they would have to provide internet to those places in a timely manner instead of preventing people from doing their own thing.

Did GoDaddy pay dearly for supporting SOPA? I heard they lost 30k subscribers at some point, but did they really? You'll have to show me on that. GoDaddy did lots of terrible things before it, yet they were still a huge provider and still are. They cybersquat on domain names people search for and allow you to buy them at "auction" from them when you try to look up if it's taken or not..they snatch it up to sell to you. They also give away people's domain names with no repercussions and a myriad of other things. Sounds like it needs a regulatory body with some teeth on it to make them act right or shut them down.

Unions are actually a really good way to fight monopolies and under the table deals, but they've been systematically villified. And unions aren't monopolies if they aren't mandatory, and most places are not fully unionized anymore. Often times they will have sections with union employees to do government work and non-union to do non-government work. Non-union guys make half the rate of union guys usually, and have less protections in place to keep themselves from getting shafted. But I don't really see how a union is a monopoly when there are lots of unions and lots of individuals in a union who make decisions for themselves and not as a collective like a company would. IE a company has a "head" that directs it and unions are a collective of individuals. Companies are people after all, unions are not (they are made up of people).

There are laws governing behavior usually based roughly on societal standards. Like pot being illegal is kind of against most of the societies beliefs, yet it remains illegal is an example of where it doesn't quite track. But overall we have laws that say you can't write a check that you know won't cash. Drunk driving, trespassing, vandalism, theft.....yelling fire in a crowded building.......setting off the fire alarm for fun.....etc. Giving people the finger isn't against the law....well probably not in most places so that might fall under social pressure. But we see that social pressure fails miserably at stopping bad behavior, so we have laws to enforce behavior...like not stealing and not murdering. This is society and people holding other people to standards, without the law to judge and convict them by the only thing you have left is personal interpretation and meeting out punishment by each individual or vigilante justice.

If you don't regulate business there is nothing stopping them, because nothing about our market is free. You can't have a free market without perfect information. You can't know every possible thing going on, so you will never have perfect information even if it was possible. So you will have swindlers and knock offs, pyramid schemes, etc. And without laws and regulations on these things, you will never be able to punish the company for what they did in a court of law.

Even if they were 100% above the board honest, they'd still be sourcing their materials from overseas and getting inferior materials to what you are paying for. It happens to the military all the time right now. They buy a bunch of nuts and bolts and some of them are chinese knockoffs that fail well after the installation is done and the machine is in operation. They can't catch them because china is basically lawless when it comes to producing goods for knock off purposes. It could just as easily be a US source doing it if we de-regulated everything and made no way for people to sue them into oblivion...because the damage would be done as soon as you buy a knock off and it fries the rest of your stuff.

The definition of "free market" right now means they want to be able to buy stuff cheap as shit from overseas and charge you US built prices for it. And when it comes to financial industry "free market" means they want to have speculation upon speculation to where the financial industry has 10-100x more money leveraged than what actually exists. It's a house of cards if they can just inflate it without any kind of acceptable risks being enforced.

@Porksandwich all good points. There is corruption and a lot of collusion between government and corporations. Can we consider the possibility that this collusion happens mostly because the role of government is not well defined, because the economy is a grey area, because businesses covet the power politicians have?

I don't see churches fighting over privileges with politicians, not since a clear separation of church and state was established.

I don't see big media networks fighting over censorship rights with politicians, because freedom of speech mostly outlaws censorship by the government.

Do you see where I'm getting at?

The businesses that hold a monopoly, most of the time, hold it because of regulation. If you remove the regulation, you remove the obstacles for competition. The business might still hold the monopoly even for a long while, maybe decades, but any dissatisfaction by consumers is an opportunity for competitors to step in, slowly pushing the monopoly to be more efficient or risk being toppled.

If we dial back regulation, that doesn't mean there won't be any regulation, that the industry will only answer to itself. Regulation will come from consumers, clients, advertisers, consumer groups, unions, shareholders, and competitors. Didn't GoDaddy pay dearly for supporting SOPA? That's a great example of society punishing a business for an unpopular decision.

Besides, we can't consider it unfair for a business to establish a monopoly or a cartel, if we're ok with workers forming a union. That's a double standard because, in essence, they're basically the same thing. I don't judge either to be good or bad, fair or unfair, it's all part of the market and the right for people to freely associate.

You are absolutely right when you say people are held to more standards than just making money, but who establishes those standards? Are there laws dictating that we shouldn't be dicks, that we should never take advantage of others or "negatively impact people"? Those aren't laws, it's social pressure and your reputation that ****regulate**** you to act as a better person.

Let society and people hold businesses to better standards, not laws and politicians.