Congress Proposes Giving Another $10 Million To ICE To Censor More Websites For Hollywood
from the not-cool dept
Ever wonder how many of your tax dollars are going to the federal government censoring music blogs based on no real evidence, but just the say so of the RIAA and MPAA? Well, in the newly proposed Homeland Security Appropriations Bill, just introduced in the Senate by Mary Landrieu, the federal government would like to set aside the following for the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) unit that is in charge of being Hollywood's private law enforcement wing:Provided further, That not less than $10,000,000 shall be available for investigation of intellectual property rights violations, including the National Intellectual Property Rights CoordinationYup. At least $10 million of your hard earned dollars may be going to ICE to help them continue to be Hollywood's private police force, censoring websites without evidence. This is for just one year. You'd think with that kind of money, ICE could actually hire its own actors for the PSAs it's been putting on censored sites, rather than "pirating" a video put together by NBC Universal.
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Filed Under: censorship, congress, hollywood, ice
Companies: mpaa, nbc universal
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Just sayin...
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I wonder if Masnick dresses up in pirate costumes at home.
I'm guessing yes.
But still too much of a spineless coward to actually admit he supports piracy.
What a complete sociopath.
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Do you never get tired of being so completely wrong? Mike has been 100% solid on this point: He does not condone copyright infringement. Nothing he has said/written has been in support of people copying/sharing. What he has said many times is that Intellectual Property enforcement is a no-win game. How, unless you yourself are a sociopath, do you read that as an endorsement? Telling someone that you can't stop the rain by waving your arms at it is not condoning rain, it's just a statement of fact!
p.s. Since we're going for the personal insults, you're a douchebag.
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Nothing he has said/written has been in support of people illegally copying/sharing.
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That's obviously incorrect and you're a moron for actually trying to pass that off as an intelligent statement.
It's the same as saying "Despite laws against speeding, people still speed. Ergo, speeding laws should not be enforced".
That's an institution full of retardation there.
That you people are so deluded as to think your trope actually comes off as believable, is hilarious.
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Err, no.
It's more like saying "despite laws against speeding, people still speed. Ergo, we should look at other ways of increasing the safety of the roads that might be more effective."
That you get so outraged over arguments that exist only in your own head is hilarious.
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That you people are so deluded as to think your trope actually comes off as believable, is hilarious."
You're overly aggressive responses and complete unwillingness to to debate with facts makes it quite clear that you are trying very hard to promote a position you don't even believe yourself. You simply sound like you're writing this stuff because you're being paid to push a message.
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Also an awesome analogy, because as soon as a speeder has received his ticket and is back on the road, he's probably speeding again in less than five minutes. So you've just made Mike's case. What do you want to bet that Intellectual Property Enforcement is getting a lot more money thrown at it than speeding?
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You should have supported SOPA which put more of the onus back on the companies, but you didn't. Let's face it, all these objections are so much bullshit. What you want is to have no copyrights laws/enforcement at all.
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I will take an order of that with a side order of no more patents.
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I should have supported legislation that further entrenches belligerent corporate power at the expense of civil rights in general? And what do you mean by "put more of the onus back on the companies"? Which companies? Why do we need legislation for that?
I can't speak for other, but what I want is reasonable copyright laws, not the absence of them. However, if the choice is between copyright laws as they are now and no copyright laws at all (a false dichotomy) then no copyright laws at all is clearly the lesser of two evils.
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Actually, we'd rather have copyright law/enforcement that prevents greedy companies form milking the money out of IP.
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Absolutely, I want IP abolition. and I expect a representative government to be proportionally representative of that. Instead, our government is disproportionately representative of government established monopolists which is why we have 95+ year copy protection lengths. ABOLISH IP!!!!
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A musician (or "artist", when dealing with illiterates) DOES create a product: his performance. That's what he is paid to do--to make music. Not digital approximations of music, but the music itself. It can't be duplicated. Everything else is weird version of his art, in the way that a Xerox of the Mona Lisa isn't the Mona Lisa.
Record companies are paid to sell copies of music, digital versions that are _similar_ to a proper performance, but not the same. There's a difference between a porno movie and a stripper, right? In the old days, they could maintain this silly business because it was too expensive for regular people to make little copies of music themselves--who could press vinyl. Now it's really cheap. What are record companies selling again?
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A musician (or "artist", when dealing with illiterates) DOES create a product: his performance. That's what he is paid to do--to make music. Not digital approximations of music, but the music itself. It can't be duplicated. Everything else is weird version of his art, in the way that a Xerox of the Mona Lisa isn't the Mona Lisa.
Record companies are paid to sell copies of music, digital versions that are _similar_ to a proper performance, but not the same. There's a difference between a porno movie and a stripper, right? In the old days, they could maintain this silly business because it was too expensive for regular people to make little copies of music themselves--who could press vinyl. Now it's really cheap. What are record companies selling again?
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This is not censorship
The irony is that pirate sites do more to shut off artists from making a living than any government censorship. These pirate sites are the real censors.
You can keep repeating that it's censorship, but that doesn't make it true.
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Re: This is not censorship
There is indeed. However, the censorship being discussed here is the "stops you from circulating your OWN opinions" part.
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I'm not saying that ICE should go seizing web sites whenever they feel like. They should have evidence. But given what I've seen on the web, there are plenty of bad sites that can be detected in 1 or 2 minutes of browsing. Whamo. Probable cause.
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In the mean time, you will lose over 50% of your readership as they won't know where to find you because their RSS feeds are now busted, navigating to the site URL redirects them to ICE and they are lost at where to go.
You are an idiot. Losing a domain is damaging to a site.
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The main point, that a DoS is structually the same as a redirect, i.e. your business is hurt (unfairly), still holds.
Both are worth debating and fighting abuses of.
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Not that a line is necessary. You can't be prevented from filing a lawsuit even in prison and nothing says your lawsuit can't have your opinions in it. So even if you're in prison you could state your opinions.
Tell us, since you don't consider the government illegally taking down a website as censorship, what do you consider censorship?
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A while back, I use to play a popular game on Facebook. After a while of playing and becoming decent at it, I joined a Facebook Page that focused on sharing tips for playing the game better. I was eventually asked to become a contributor to it. The page was really popular and had over 100,000 members.
Then one day, Facebook shut the page down. No warning. No explanation. Nothing. We could no longer post. We could no longer communicate with our fans.
After fruitlessly trying to get our page unbanned, we started up a new one. Same content, same writers. Sadly, we no longer had the same membership. After being live on the new page for the same length of time as the other page was active, we still had less than half the membership. Why? Because there was no way for us to communicate with our fans that we had a new page. We were harmed beyond repair by the banning of the original page.
So tell me again how websites being blocked is only an "inconvenience"
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An honest answer would require knowledge of how the internet actually work. Our usual trolls have demonstrated a woeful lack of this.
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Irrelevant and misleading. Besides, the courts have already established that the fact that censoring protected speech can be a violation of the Constitution even if that speech can be made elsewhere.
And yet, that's exactly what's happening.
This is clearly true, and the actions of ICE would probably be a lot less controversial if they even did that much due diligence, instead of shutting down sites that weren't actually engaging in or promoting piracy.
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Agree...
"And yet, that's exactly what's happening."
Indeed it is...
"This is clearly true, and the actions of ICE would probably be a lot less controversial if they even did that much due diligence, instead of shutting down sites that weren't actually engaging in or promoting piracy."
Maybe...
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"I can be up and running in 10 minutes"
Then tell us oh master if internet wizardry. How do you get your users updated links to your free speech? You cant.
www.suspected.pirate.site.com/my_stuff/MyFreeSpeech.whatever is gone.
So you may have your whatever available on the internet in 10 min, but your users will be lost.
"I'm not saying that ICE should go seizing web sites whenever they feel like."
No boB, it appears you do.
"there are plenty of bad sites that can be detected in 1 or 2 minutes of browsing. Whamo. Probable cause."
Whamo, another search of those sites will also turn up legitimate content as well. But you dont look for that stuff do ya boBBy boy? You just ASSume that since you found something that may be illegal, and you truly dont know if it is or if a website has licensed that content, that it must be and BAM! Probable cause. FAIL in so many ways as usual.
You keep trying to hit that ammo depot but miss every time.
At least you are consistent.
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Plus, surely this is the sort of thing a DMCA notice is intended for? It looks extra suspicious when ICE seem to just be diving in there without DMCA and other avenue having been tried and failed, let alone the question of whether the content was infringing in the first place...
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So...
That's what? 912 failures?
Come on, bob, and you were doing so well when you were playing in the street.
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I for one truely hate everything about this Government and one day it will come crashing down on all their Corrupted Sold-Out Heads.
Sounds to me like you would of supported SOPA/PIPA/CISPA/ACTA/TPP
Not Me ! I believe in our Constitution and our way of life and seeing the crimes in Washington makes me want to vomit.
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Re: This is not censorship
boB, you're so cute. Like 5 o'clock charlie from M.A.S.H.
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Right?
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I expected the EFF to drag up a handful of innocent users, but I'm beginning to wonder if there are any. My guess is that the people who stored their own files at MegaUpload were also downloading unlicensed content-- something I would call "theft" but you will no doubt feel is something almost as saintly as the way Mother Theresa treats the lepers of Calcutta. These folks aren't going to come forward. They should hope and pray that the Feds will destroy the log files that prove their guilt.
And get a clue. No one is censoring everything. You can still get legit copies from iTunes, Amazon and a few other sites. If you want to self-publish, there are hundreds of legit sites out there.
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Some businesses lost a considerable number of backups that they had made of their data.
Moreover, a good number of people uploaded their legitimately purchased content so that they could re-download it later (for example, when replacing a computer.)
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That's like me storing my cash with a bank robber.
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So this was bullshit. You didn't lose anything. Isn't that the rationale you use to counter arguments that infringement is stealing? You didn't lose anything but a copy that didn't cost you a thing. Glad to see that you're a liar and not the imbecile I had you figured for.
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Pick an argument. You contradict yourselves so many times when you try moving the goalposts, it's silly. Just as your arguments change from "it works for a small artist but not a big one" to "it works for a big artist but not for a small one" depending on the article posted, you both contradict and ridicule your own arguments here.
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Anyone can take a peek, and it could be gone tomorrow.
But it's a REALLY BIG cardboard box. You could put anything in it!
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Too bad "legit" means approved by the middle-man industry.
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But exactly none that can be trusted, thanks to these legal actions. Megaupload was considered a legit site by quite a lot of self-publishers, after all.
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boB, why do you ask questions you know the answers to? You know from reading TD everyday that there have been examples given here.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120402/03423718322/megaupload-user-asks-court-to-return-le gitimate-files-he-uploaded-to-megaupload.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120313/04350018 087/megaupload-negotiating-to-let-us-govt-officials-everyone-else-retrieve-their-legit-files-that-we re-taken-down.shtml
boB, you suck.
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And there were lots of warnings that planes might be hijacked, but airlines kept flying and people kept getting on airplanes. Those idiots deserve no sympathy.
Parents have been warned that evil people will kidnap their kids, but do they lock up their kids in bank vaults? No, they don't, so they get no sympathy when their kids go missing.
Sheesh, I'm glad you, oh great anonymous coward, were here to say boldly what needed to be said. If you don't heed warnings, then you deserve no sympathy when others do illegal things to you.
By the way, RIAA and MPAA, you have been warned. If you release content publicly, someone will try to copy it. You'll get no sympathy from me if you release movies and music and someone copies it.
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Then you bitch about us not wanting there to be copyright law.
Which is it?
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You find it hard to believe that some people saw a warning and ignored it?
Well, that says how little you know about people. That and how little you realize that not all people pay attention to warnings or know about technology. Most people who aren't as up to date on tech as some of us here would feel more than secure in the thinking that if they had ONE back up available in one place, say an online cloud storage site which for this example we'll call MegAnonCowardUpload, that it would be perfectly secure and always available to them should they need it.
"I believe that Megaupload was rife with warnings about not using it as a sole backup."
What you believe is irrelevant. What you know is relevant. So you obviously DO NOT know for a fact that any warnings at all were on the site about backing up data in more than one place. That is what I'm gathering from your statement.
And whether eejit had more copies or not is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is had he had no other copies elsewhere he would have suffered irretrievable losses. Now tell me, is that acceptable in your book? (Although the answer seems quite obvious I'd still like to hear you say it.)
Also, since you had to take a shot at "high powered academic researchers and teachers", might I point out that one of those Congressman aggressively pushing for SOPA legislation was made to look like a fool when his own website had evidence of copyright infringement. Did you know this? If you didn't I can get you a link to some of the articles on the matter. Now isn't it a bit odd that a man looking to censor websites and severely punish those who commit copyright infringement is himself guilty of the same crime? Guess it shows that no matter who you are or what you do, sometimes you just don't know better.
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Hard to check that though now, isn't it?
Anyway, regardless of warnings, if Megaupload had gone bankrupt or the servers had died or some other natural/unforeseen catastrophe had happened, then most of us would be there with you, saying "well, you learned your lesson...". Cloud storage will always be regarded by suspicion by the educated.
But, that's not what happened. The site was shut down based on accusations of infringement. On claims that perfectly legitimate content like the above was not stored there. To protect the profits of a 3rd party who had nothing to do with more of the content being shut down. Despite the fact that artists not only used it as a mean of backup, but as a form of monetised distribution for their own legally produced content.
Surely, even someone as dense as yourself can see a difference between unavoidable natural failure and malicious action by a government agency acting on the orders of a biased 3rd party to protect their own profit over and above smaller players?
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Hey I like it. If you get warned, even once and don't change then too fucking bad if anything happens to ruin your day. No bitching allowed. Sounds good to me.
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I like this line of thinking; we should apply this to supposed rightsholders. "You were warned about safe harbours before you were allowed to fire DMCA notices willy-nilly. If you don't like them, vote it out or it's too damn bad."
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So, no answer, you just consider it OK for people to lose things as long as they're not a corporation. Then you expect everybody to bow down to their demands when they want something, no matter the cost. Got it.
"Sounds like you were one of those dopes"
Your psychic abilities and attempts to assume what I am doing, as ever, fail you miserably. I've never used the site, either as an uploader or downloader.
Perhaps you could try dealing with reality? Your fictions are increasingly laughable.
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But that's ignoring the shutdowns of sites which were not infringing anything, or those which were used—not exclusively—for some infringement but cannot sanely be held culpable for the same reason that you cannot blame a gun for whom it is used to shoot.
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Fixed it for you.
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The only so-called suits that are left in the business are ones that are adding real value to the product. Artists often aren't great marketing geniuses and 99% of the people I've met who've drank Mike's Kool-Aid go crawling back to the suits with their tail between their legs. Selling is hard work and the suits earn their money.
The vision of a suit leeching off of artists is just an easy rationalization by the P2P crowd. Ask yourself this: how has Courtney Love's career gone since she told those nasty suits to shove it? I bet her music career has been stellar since got rid of those leeches, right?
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She was not always that way:
http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
http://www.gerryhemingway.com/piracy2.html
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Re: Re: Re: This is not censorship
Quit failing so hard, please? It's painful.
As for your comment, let me fix your comment to be accurate, okay?
"Oh, that hasn't been true for more than a decade now. Get a clue. Amazon, Apple and others have been dragging the RIAA and other gatekeepers into the internet age kicking and screaming. After all, iTunes has a very lucrative deal with the music industry because the music industry took so long to get into the game and focused on shutting down Napster that Apple's made a killing on legal downloads."
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Re: This is not censorship
Anything you post on the internet is your speech. If you post a video-clip, you are entitled to a court hearing before your post is taken down.
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No. You're just blinded by the "without their permission" part that gets you frothing at the proboscis.
Imagine this scenario: You are a Marxist (I know, that's absurd to imagine a corporate shill as a Marxist...) and you post Karl Marx's public domain work Das Kapital online and the government pulls it down because the government doesn't like Marxism. That's censorship. And not only is it censorship, but it's censoring the person who posted it, not the person who wrote it. The act of posting is speech and the act of removing that posting is censorship.
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Plus if the domain is shutdown, there's a possibility you won't have access to your database. If you run Wordpress, all the article information is contained within your database, so at that point in time you're SOL.
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Umm, no. The source of the opinions has sweet fuck all to with whether blocking that speech is censorship. A news site may report nothing but opinions pieces from other people, but if you take it down without any kind of adversarial hearing it's censorship.
"The irony is that pirate sites do more to shut off artists from making a living than any government censorship. These pirate sites are the real censors."
Right, you know that this is a complete non-sequitur don't you? Even if pirate sites were stopping someone making a living, that's not censorship.
"You can keep repeating that it's censorship, but that doesn't make it true."
You might want to swat up on this: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/censorship?s=t&ld=1031
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If these artists were so broke, why are they living in million dollar homes, flying G7s around the globe, and living the high life. Let the industry do their own dirty work, not the tax payers.
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I'm leaning towards the second.
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$10 Million is neccessary
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Oh, im sure there are artists who feel that way, and its a shame they trully do not identify themselfs, would make it alot easier to know, exactly who NOT to throw my money at
One man, one voice
Who cares right
I do
Anyone else who feels that way, means more to me then some guy in a suit living in a white house, unless that guy in the white house feels the same
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But if you give money to any of the following then it's not a handout!
-Stopping IP theft for the companies that own the IP.
-Stopping people from buying illegal drugs that there's a market demand for.
-Wall Street companies that are in danger of going bankrupt from too many risky bets (don't get this confused with giving money to poor individual gambling addicts who lost all their money at casinos or playing state lotteries! Giving them money is a handout!).
-Banning government run Medicare from negotiating better prices for prescription drugs just like any other private insurance company would.
-Giving people in hurricane prone areas free hurricane insurance AFTER a hurricane strikes, simply because a pro-free market US congressmen owned a house in the hurricane prone area (don't get this confused with areas that DON'T have influential US congressmen living there, that would then make it a hand out).
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if ( beneficiary->is_future_or_current_large_campaign_contributor() || beneficiary->is_family() ) {
handout = false;
} else {
handout = true;
}
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It's only a handout if I don't get a cut of it.
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handout = beneficiary->is_future_or_current_large_campaign_contributor() || beneficiary->is_family();
No need for branch. I assume your logic was inverted, also.
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Re: Re: Re:
handout = !beneficiary->is_future_or_current_large_campaign_contributor() && !beneficiary->is_family();
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Do you know what makes the whole ball of wax shiver in it's boots? I can tell you in one phrase.
At a time when we are experiencing a second Great Depression this is what the government deems 'most important'?
That one phrase that all the corporations, the government, Wall Street, and the established and entrenched monopolies fear? It's called Peasants with Pitchforks. If you've any doubt it's coming, you should look around at the real grass roots movements.
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Call Mary Landrieu
Washington, D.C. Office
431 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Telephone: (202) 224-5824
Fax: (202) 224-9735
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Federal waste and duplicatoin - intellectual property rights violations
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Better Proposal
That should help get our priorities in order.
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Sad
this is ridiculousness the government is no longer for the people.
sincerely, In the heard
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RE
is driving a CAR before you buy it stealing Bob?
In your world it seems it is...
Some of us are just not that foolish
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Damn the entertainment industry & Congress
Just don't buy anything from them - bring them to their knees and let them come begging to consumers.
Drive them out of business. They are scum.
And, of equal importance;
Vote against any elected official that pimps for them.
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Re: Damn the entertainment industry & Congress
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Re: Damn the entertainment industry & Congress
But that's lost sales due to PIRACY (not customer choice). They've already lost 2 generations due to video games and other interests. In 10 years there has been ZERO change. It's an industry (trade organizations) that deserve to die.
Better;
- send a dollar to every artist that you download (that's about what they'd get from the labels and they didn't have to file a lawsuit or pay for an audit to get it. Tell them why.
- support local independent artists and tell your friends about stuff you like.
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How close is Louisiana to Hollywood?
Is there a Hollywood Louisiana?
Are things going so well in Louisiana that their senator needs to be concerned with the entertainment business in Hollywood?
Something stinks here.
Maybe it just the smell of crony capitalism.
(This is a joke, right?)
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Re: How close is Louisiana to Hollywood?
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Missing a piece of info
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Re: Missing a piece of info
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$10 Million To ICE To Censor More Websites For Hollywood
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ICE
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Pay back
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L!ar
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L!ar
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How bout a refund by hollywood and the unions for all the fucking subsidies they've recieved or shut the fuck up
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RIAA et. al.
Why am I so hostile sounding? Because the recording industry artists can't keep their big fat political opinions to themselves. They don't care that they insult half of the population. Shut the hell up and sing.
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Authority?
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Re: Authority?
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Re: Re: Authority?
This may be cause and effect but it sure doesn't answer the question of why tax dollars are being allocated to protect an industry that is failing to adapt.
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Re: Re: Authority?
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Re: Federal waste and duplication
I suspect two reasons: 1.)Homeland Security was created with a huge budget they didn't know how to spend, so the powers that be threw this on their plate, 2.)DHS/ICE was given extraordinary license to conduct investigations in ways that are constitutionally questionable, which proves very useful for going after copyright infringement on the Internet.
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Hollywood $$$
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Re: Hollywood $$$
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At what point did ICE become an arm of the general police state over keeping the countries immigration under control?
It seems to have happened rather quickly.
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