It is likely that most of you in the U.S. know about the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) that is advancing in the U.S. House of Representatives. The corresponding bill in the U.S. Senate is the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Of course I encourage you to contact your local Representatives and Senators to voice your, hopefully strong, opposition to this pair of draconian bills.

At the moment I'm too angry over some of the statements of Rep. Lamar Smith (R) that I can't make too much of a coherent case against the measures that these bills would allow. It seems to me that they might even be quite unconstitutional.

Here is a link to the article that upset me so much: Article

Rep. Smith thinks that the way to defend his indefensible bill is to cast aspersions upon all that oppose him. He is a real coward, and idiot. It is horrifying that an idiot like that got elected to congress.

Even more frightening than Smith's hollow, ignorant rhetoric is that fact that there are lots of people in the U.S. that will believe the sewage that spills from his mouth, and support him and his bill. They don't even care to find the facts and come to their own conclusion. Then there are the members of the "Tea-Party." I know one, and she is so stupid that I am amazed she can breathe without someone telling her to do it. They would also have to tell her that not breathing is either a tax, socialistic, or anti-American. From conversations with this friend, I have learned that the local Tea-Party members go to meetings or rallies where they are basically told what to believe and think. Note that I did NOT say "what to say to others," or anything like that. They are literally told what to believe in. They then cling firmly to what they have been told.

If you are in the United States, and you oppose SOPA and PIPA, please write to your Reps. and Senators. And, please write to them via a letter, on a piece of paper (remember that stuff?), sent in an envelope and with a stamp on it. The very effective Aircraft Owner's and Pilot's Association (AOPA), of which I am a member, is a very potent lobbying organization and they advise us to all write regular letters to the members of Congress that represent us. Politicians take much more notice of written and mailed letters than they do of emails or FAXs. The mailing address of your congressmen (or women) can usually be found in the front of your local phone book.

In a little bit, I'll post some links to the U.S. government sites that can also provide you with your congressman's contact info. But right now dinner awaits and it smells mighty good.

If he's such an idiot, why has he won the election? Why couldn't someone smarter defeat him?
They're not idiots. They're winning. They're in charge.
The reason they don't act in your interest is not because they're too stupid to see things your way. It's because they're your ennemies.

By all means follow the example of successful organizations and write letters.
But keep in mind there are more powerful organizations in politics than the Aircraft Owner's and Pilot's Association. Watch what they're doing. There's a friendly way to put pressure on elected officials and there's a hostile way... both are important if you don't have loads of money to make things easier.

And don't forget to support the EFF.

Wikipedia is protesting against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out English Wikipedia for 24 hours, Jan 18, 2012. SOPA and PIPA represent two US bills in the House of Representatives and the Senate respectively. Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but in Wikipedia's opinion, do so in a way that infringes free expression while harming the Internet.

"They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. And, SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression."

Wikipedia (and SPCR) urges US citizens to call your government representatives and tell them you oppose SOPA, PIPA and any similar legislation. For more information, please visit Wikipedia's SOPA and PIPA page

You mean to say "Right-Wing Christian Nutters", they are like "American presidents of the 80's and 00's, they cant chew gum and piss at the same time"........... forgive me for paraphrasing the dates INTO the sentence.

Anyway forgive the American bashing (it's only for a laugh), both of these bills need to be scrapped, they are badly written and will cover a huge amount of stuff that they will interfere with, and they will not in any way stop the "illegal duplication of data" that some morons call "piracy".

Piracy involves someone coming aboard your maritime vessel and looting it and possibly taking you as well.

Illegally copying someone's data does not destroy anything, or harm lives in any way at all, it merely stops (possible) profits from going to the maker of said "digital property".

Piracy is "Piracy", "Copyright Infringement" is a totally different matter and has never killed anyone or taken "their" money.


Andy

SOPA's basically dead thanks to wiki, reddit, google ect.


interesting how america was know originally as the pirates, now it want to kill off piracy despite our country's early roots.



normally id link to wiki...but for some reason that's down today...

Quite correct Andy. Copyright infringement does not "take" any money away from the companies that gripe about "piracy" hurting them. As you said, it merely stops estimated and potential, but not guaranteed, profit from going to them. Further, the supporters of SOPA and PIPA seem to be large corporations that turn big (HUGE) profits. I've never heard of an individual or small company that has been harmed, in reality or in projected profit not gained, by copyright infringement or "piracy."

To see how absurd the claims about lost profit are, and get an idea about how much "damage" software or content theft has damaged these corporations, lets look at two well-known corporations that support SOPA and PIPA:
Time Warner, (owns TNT, TBS, HBO, Cinemax pay TV services, Cartoon Network, Warner Bros. Pictures, New Line Cinema, Castle Rock, Time Inc. [22 magazines in the US, 70 outside US. Largest magazine publisher in US, based on advertising revenue] and more.). Data is for the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2011.
Total operating income (more or less the net profits of a company): 4.132 BILLION dollars.

Adobe Systems, Inc. (Acrobat, Photoshop, InDesign, Creative Suites, Flash, Dreamweaver, Premiere Pro, hundreds of fonts, hundreds of other software titles, etc.)
Data is for the year ended Dec. 2, 2011. Net income (more or less the net profit): 832,847,000 dollars.

I can't quickly find any data on how many copies of Time Warner's products are stolen every year. Nor can I find what kind of loss to their (astronomical) profit they estimate. However, a profit of 4.132 billion dollars is pretty healthy, and I find it impossible to have any sympathy for them. Please also note that their top executives are not struggling to get by on the average wages of the average American, they are probably making millions per year. And the "creators" of their digital content (directors, producers, writers, actors, etc. of movies, tv shows, etc.) are making big, very big bucks, so again, difficult to claim that they are damaged, or to feel sympathy for them.

As for Adobe Systems, They are members of the Business Software Alliance that supports SOPA and PIPA. This is not surprising given Adobe's intense effort to combat piracy. It makes even more sense that Adobe would support SOPA and PIPA after a report that they published last year claiming that, of all the copies of Photoshop in use world wide, 53% were pirated. But they seem to make a nice profit anyway. Their operating margin, which I think is sort of an indicator of profit to gross income was 26.1% That is a pretty high margin especially with the majority of copies of Photoshop out there being pirated.

If you look at the lists of business or corporate supporters of SOPA and PIPA that are available on the web, you will note that all of them are big (relative to us individuals) corporations that have the ability to turn very big profits. Many or all of them do make substantial profits. The kind of profits that the corporate supporters bring in every year makes mincemeat out of their arguments that they are losing income due to what they call piracy, and that the inventors or creators of media or software aren't getting rewarded for their efforts. Further, their spurious claim that piracy costs the US jobs is simply a way to scare the public into supporting these bills. Right now the US economy is struggling and joblessness is pretty high, so availability of jobs is something everyone is concerned about. Linking SOPA and PIPA to creation of jobs is highly cynical, manipulative, and unsupported. That argument is used by the politicians to make themselves look good (so they think) to the public.

Again, Andy, you are correct in stating that copyright infringement only stops estimated or possible profit, and has never taken anyone's money from them.

PIPA has been shelved:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/01/20/145508307/senate-vote-delayed-on-pipa-its-anti-piracy-bill

I emailed both my Senators and my Representative on this issue.