Facebook, Twitter, eBay & Other Big Internet Companies Come Out Against SOPA
from the good-for-them dept
While Google has been pretty vocal about its complaints concerning PROTECT IP and SOPA, and Yahoo, LinkedIn and Zynga have expressed concerns elsewhere, the silence of large companies like Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Mozilla and AOL had been unfortunate. That appears to be changing. As a group, they have now all sent a letter to the key sponsors of both bills, arguing that the approach here is the exact wrong approach, and will do significant damage to the parts of the economy that are innovating and creating jobs today:We are very concerned that the bills as written would seriously undermine the effective mechanism Congress enacted in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to provide a safe harbor for Internet companies that act in good faith to remove infringing content from their sites. Since their enactment in 1998, the DMCA's safe harbor provisions for online service providers have been a cornerstone of the U.S. Internet and technology industry's growth and success. While we work together to find additional ways to target foreign "rogue" sites, we should not jeopardize a foundational structure that has worked for content owners and Internet companies alike and provides certainty to innovators with new ideas for how people create, find, discuss, and share information lawfully online.Can't wait to see the usual commenters stop by to insist that basically every big company on the internet is only saying this because they're dedicated to infringement. But the real question is: at what point does Congress realize that there's real opposition to this bill from one of the few industries out there that's actually doing well these days?
We are proud to be a part of an industry that has been crucial to U.S. economic growth and job creation. A recent McKinsey Global Institute report found that the Internet accounts for 3.4% of GDP in the 13 countries that McKinsey studied, and, in the U.S., the Internet's contribution to GDP is even larger. If Internet consumption and expenditure were a sector, its contribution to GDP would be greater than energy, agriculture, communication, mining, or utilities. In addition, the Internet industry has increased productivity for small and medium-sized businesses by 10%. We urge you not to risk either this success or the tremendous benefits the Internet has brought to hundreds of millions of Americans and people around the world.
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Filed Under: censorship, copyright, innovation, internet, sopa, tech
Companies: ebay, facebook, google, linkedin, mozilla, twitter, yahoo, zynga
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Caution: Comments by lawyers and copyright shill bellow this line. Other commentators please watch your step, the traps have been set and are armed.
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Gawwwwwlee Gee, I am shocked.
Oh yeah, the sky is blue.
As for their "internet is 3.4%", it's a pretty dishonest attempt to color themselves as "the industry", when they are just one part of it. Sorry for them, their attempts to play the numbers like that is just a little too obvious.
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Seriously, anybody who thinks the world should work on the principle of secondary & tertiary liability ad infinitum exhibits an apparent complete inability to reason.
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But we do get to sue the motel for third-party liability for failing to protect us from getting beaten/slashed after we a.)interrupt an impromptu porno shoot and b.) "order off the menu" when presented with a list of sexual services that present porn star/hooker might be willing to provide.
http://www.pointoflaw.com/archives/2011/09/gabriel-bonilla.php
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http://boards.medscape.com/forums?128@352.1e01ajrnCNE@.2a0ef977!comment=1
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Sorry, you fail.
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Now let me help clue you in, the internet and the web-walkers that understand it will be disrupted for about 10 minutes by what you purpose, then the internet (as is its nature) will route around the problem (IE stupidity caused by Ass-hats)... that's the nature of the beast, how it was made, you don't blame the lion for killing the zebra. So what will happen is the recording industry will keep pushing and pushing because the last law didn't go far enough, and will keep passing step after step of lock down on the internet, in America (home of the free, irony anyone), till the average users that grew up with the internet in its present very happy configuration consider broken, then they will look for who kill golden goose, and there lo and behold will sit big content with feathers still in its mouth and the the legislators that they bought to do it... then the wheels come off as they say and a extreme reaction to it will happen, I figure it will be total kill off of IP / Copyright, and then you will truly be done... you will have bought maybe 2 - 3 years of further survival before extinction.
There is one other path that does not lead to total destruction of IP (Copyright and all the rest) but we will have to see if you ever even try (and thus will be judged).... Or acknowledge a different way besides name calling/labeling/lying/bribing
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Irony
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'it's a pretty dishonest attempt to color themselves as "the industry", when they are just one part of it.'
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Let's take YouTube, one of the biggest sites. They have (on average) roughly 48 hours (172800 seconds) of video uploaded to them every second of every day. Let's assume that they have to review between 1/2 and 2/3 of that in order to pick out infringing content; that's 100000 seconds worth of video to be reviewed, every second.
In order to review all of that content with minimal delays, they would need 100000 reviewers working at any one time. If those reviewers were being paid a mere $1 per hour, it would still cost YouTube $876 million a year in review costs ($100000/hr x 24 hrs/day x 365 days/year).
The real costs to YouTube would be a lot more than this. For starters, competent reviewers would most likely cost a lot more that $1 per hour. There would be small delays between watching each video, meaning that more reviewers would be needed. There are also management costs, the costs of implementing the review system, etc. The true costs are more likely to be upwards of $5 billion a year.
And that's just YouTube. I'm not even thinking about sites like Facebook, MySpace, Vimeo, web forums, etc. The total cost to the tech industry would be hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and that's just to keep the legitimate sites running. Piracy might drop slightly, but illegitimate sites would still continue to run in dark corners of the web, and would still drive the vast majority of the world's piracy.
SOPA is not going to stop piracy. It's barely going to make a dent. And yet it will cost legitimate web sites billions of dollars a year, just so they can avoid being blocked or having their revenue streams cut off. This is why SOPA should be stopped dead in its tracks.
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After Viacom sued them, they had to.
The tech to do so has been available for years.
You idiots act like technology stopped evolving the day you were able to start ripping off music...
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Yes it has. It's also completely imperfect despite being able to do the volume of work that would be almost impossible for human being to do. YouTube also has vital protections in the DMCA to stop you idiots from shutting down a service that's extremely useful to you because it can't catch everything, something that you apparently want to see stopped.
"You idiots act like technology stopped evolving the day you were able to start ripping off music..."
Again, one day you'll realise that many of us don't do that. One day, an adult discussion will ensue...
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That is absolutely the FUNNIEST comment that is denying reality of all time.
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I can see the others, but AOL is still a large company? They should start sending out disks/cd's again so that the congress people can get online to learn about this internet thing.
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Second: Read
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In the words of so many Internet forums and imageboards: THIS.
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Right now Amazon's homepage has an ad for the Kindle, eBay's pushing their daily deals, and AOL's full of news stories. Heck, even Google uses the space below their famous search box from time to time to spread awareness about things such as cancer research.
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Plus, if one gives into this legislation, what will be next? You're basically allowing a gang of government-granted monopolists - looters to the core - to have a legislative veto over your business model.
If you pay ransom to hostage takers, you only encourage hostage taking in the future. If you pay Danesgeld, you never will be rid of the Dane.
Google should account for it as a one time charge and explain to shareholders that it was necessary so as to stay in business.
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If a tech company's business model is based around illegal infringement, they need to adapt and find a better business model.
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That's a laugh. This is all about money. You act like Google has principles. They are soulless bloodsuckers.
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As opposed to the record labels, who are paragons of virtue and honest accounting, right?
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uh huh. gotcha.
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And the outlier examples of malfeasance you like to focus on, even if they were all added up together for decades, don't match the ripping off that was done by you pirates in the last month alone.
So just shut your greedy, whining, lying, entitlement-mentality piehole already.
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And I say, good sir (and I use that term lightly), the vitriol in your response is what I've come to expect from those who support the labels. Especially when you tell me to shut up. I don't tell the labels to shut up. I think that what they and you are saying is ridiculous, but at no point, will I ever advocate for your speech to be silenced.
After all, the last sentence...all those adjectives can be easily applied to the labels themselves.
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No, content creators provide the content we like ("addicted to" is a ridiculous overstatement). Record labels provide me absolutely nothing of value these days.
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They contract artists to provide them with content and then try every way NOT to pay them.
They don't provide me with anything except DRM and a lot of hassle even when I do fork over the (outrageous amount of) money.
I'd much rather buy (not license) directly from the artist. That way I'm sure the artist gets payed and I'm not conned.
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I love the way you pretend to know the tastes and consumption habits of others. Just another one of your tactics to avoid dealing with the real opinions of those you're address, right?
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The RIAA/MPAA has had to descend into parasitical seeking of legislation to protect their monopolies and failed business models, while Google simply requires that government leave them alone.
As such, I would prefer Google to exist and make their profit rather than the RIAA/MPAA.
In fact, I hope the RIAA/MPAA goes out of business and they have to get real jobs. They are parasites.
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Better than that, just turn off and stop using the internet for a month. You can stop watching all that copyrighted content too, all those movies and music and TV shows that you hate so much that you insist on downloading them all.
Live without it for a month. See how it really feels.
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I only ask that they leave the Internet alone. The Internet isn't their property. They should stop treating it like it is.
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You dorks wouldn't know what to do with yourselves if you had to actually leave the house, instead of being glued to the screen all day.
All of you here are hopelessly addicted to content. And you resent the creators because of that. And also because they're more talented and popular than you, have a cooler job, and get laid, whereas you don't...
The reason you're panicking is because your easy free lunch is about to get taken away and you're worried about not getting your fix.
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Shut the fuck up.
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Heh. See, this is the problem: you status-quo types claim to embrace change and new technology, but in your heart of hearts, you still think you live in a world that hasn't existed in more than a decade. For example, a world where consuming media means staying at home, glued to a screen, as an antisocial dork. I mean really now. Ever heard of an iPhone old man? They can do pretty crazy stuff! And they fit in your pocket! You should play with one some time - but try not to let your head explode. Actually what am I saying - the head wants what it wants - go for it.
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Change the subject much?
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I don't resent the RIAA/MPAA. I have no use for them. They're obsolete buggy whip manufacturers. If they leave me and what I value alone, I hope they die a natural death through obsolescence. They tamper with the Internet, I hope the Internet tampers with them through a boycott and they go out of business.
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http://openpaleo.blogspot.com/2008/12/3d-slicer-tutorial.html
3D-Slicer doesn't even need installation just download it and click on the binary and it just starts its just magical.
http://slicer.org/
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What the heck is a rogue website?
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Re: What the heck is a rogue website?
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No, it's still basically producers of content versus grifters.
out_of_the_blue, Nov 15th, 2011 @ 7:30am
Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla, eBay all RE-distribute previously existing wealth, DO NOT create it. Yes, they make "jobs", but those jobs are similar to stealing the copper sword off Lincoln's tomb, are "monetizing" what they can snatch into a quick buck now.
Recently Google has become MORE embedded into many file-sharing sites, requires allowing javascript to run Google captcha. While you try to inoculate it here by a mention, it's still in practice /directly/ profiting from file-sharing.
(Add: Mozilla thrives on Google's money, coding it in as the preferred search engine.)
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Re: No, it's still basically producers of content versus grifters.
You're right! In a perfect world we would go online without a stupid worthless web browser, and we'd only bother with content that we already knew the location of - not waste our time with pointless indexes that help us find it. And if we want to tell anyone about it, we'd just call them, or better yet walk over to their house because telephones are bullshit too. And eBay? What a leech. If I want to sell something I own, I will put up posters all over town thank you very much. And I'll do it myself - I'm not paying some damn postering service to do it; those parasites are just redistributing wealth.
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Re: No, it's still basically producers of content versus grifters.
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Re: No, it's still basically producers of content versus grifters.
Exactly the same can be said of every other company on this planet. Creation of wealth is, of course, quite impossible -- not that this stops inferior people like you from claiming otherwise.
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Re: Re: No, it's still basically producers of content versus grifters.
Or lets say you have some time to look at websites, and I know how to get to the sites you are interested in. We could exchange my knowledge of where those websites are for your viewing of an ad. (ala Google)
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Re: No, it's still basically producers of content versus grifters.
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Re: No, it's still basically producers of content versus grifters.
"Fail. Complete fail.
Javascript is developed by Netscape Communications Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation. Netscape is a subsidiary of AOL. Neither Netscape, Mozilla or AOL are a part of Google in any way shape or form. They may do business with Google, I don't know if they do or do not, but they are completely separate entities.
Plus, your last paragraph is laughable. It only proves Mike's point about second and third party liability. Now you want Google to be held liable for the actions of others simply for putting up a captcha? (which is false by the way, as I said above) Real world analogy: a storage shed business is investigated and the guy who built the locks for the sheds is also held liable...wait what?"
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Re: No, it's still basically producers of content versus grifters.
Neither do the media corporations create content. The artists create the content, the media corps only RE-distribute it after encapsulating it in 3000 layers of DRM, EULA and proprietary formats...
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Re: Re: No, it's still basically producers of content versus grifters.
VC is yet another idea that the dorks in silicon valley ripped off.
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Way more than videos and music here...
1. Register an account.
2. Throw a link to a random pirated torrent in your forum sig or profile. If the site in question has neither sigs nor profiles, throw the link up in a long-dead discussion that no one will see instead.
3. Report the site for infringement.
The site now has 5 days to hire a lawyer and respond, and the censors have no penalty for choosing to err on the side of shutting the site down.
It is impossible to get the services of a lawyer in 5 days, so only huge sites with an on-staff lawyers have ANY chance of responding. It is likewise impossible for >90% of websites to AFFORD to hire a lawyer, even if they had months to respond. For the few sites that actually can submit a valid response, again, the censors risk massive penalties if they guess wrong that you're sufficiently responding, but none at all if they just ban you. What this means is that unless you're an enormous, famous site, you're shut down with no trial.
If you can't see how this would not only shatter the entire net industry, but also have an insanely huge negative impact on free speech, then you're probably one of the Hollywood shills currently posting here.
This bill would not only be the final push into a new Depression, but would pretty much be the end of democracy as we know it... and to do what, stop a handful of pirates who will just register a new site the next day?
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Re: Way more than videos and music here...
Sounds like a really smooth move, start doing it now so we can stop listening to your shit.
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Aww, that's so sweet. I agree: websites should invite all their users over for a nice cup of tea and a chit-chat before allowing them to post anything.
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Enjoy your copyright fed job, prick.
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He gets all his insults from A Young Man's Compendium Of Bilious Jibes And Witty Retorts, 1922 Edition.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Way more than videos and music here...
I want to stimate your brain capacity measuring the void space in your skull, it shouldn't take long since it appears to be the size of a pea.
http://openpaleo.blogspot.com/2008/12/3d-slicer-tutorial.html
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Look, we all know how much you love anonymous prick, but I'm afraid you're wrong: I don't know who was in the stall next to you, but it wasn't me.
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Why are you guys doing business with drug addicts, pedophiles, murderers and thieves?
Roman Polanski is a pedophile, yet studios do business with him.
Lindsay Lohan is a thief yet studios are still doing business with her.
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So I assume you have given Mike your name, address, personal bio, last 3 employers, credit card info, and notarized letter from your 3rd grade teacher that you're a good little boy and don't tell lies or post infringing material?
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Imagine the hilarity that would ensue once their accounts are frozen.
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Wanking with words, you must be surrounded by crusty tissues as you obviously get your rocks off spouting this rubbish.
I'd recommend a session at Pornhub or Redtube.
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