see but a lot of the 18-25 yr old who helped win him the election last time are probably the same ones who are being outspoken and rallying to defeat this right now. they know what these bills do, if obama allows them to go through without a veto, i can see him losing a lot of support from that demographic. that demographic grew up with the internet, and its entrenched in their lives probably more so than any other demographic. yea both parties here really can't blame one another because both sides have people signed onto these bills.
I'm picturing a presidential debate right now, Paul's giving some speech about Orwell and auditing the Fed, and brings up SOPA. Obama says he opposed SOPA- sort of. Romney has a weird laugh, says something weird to Obama, then flip flops over his opinion for the next 3 weeks.
Facebook has been directly working with Congress on the issue: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399039,00.asp
Please explain further (the Hollywood/Edison part). It's not like I can look it up on Wiki right now.
Actually, you can---there's a number of ways. Easiest is to load the page you want, click the ESC button before the banner kicks in (if your computer is fast, it's good reflexes practice). In either case---
Senate Democrats hold fast to anti-piracy bill http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/19/senate-democrats-hold-fast-to-anti-piracy-bill/ By all accounts, the Internet’s first politically motivated mass work-stoppage on Wednesday was a rousing success, and so far 13 U.S. Senators have flipped their stance on pending anti-piracy legislation that critics say would severely harm the freedom of speech online. But the real story is, all but two of them were Republicans. While Silicon Valley may have found their voice echos on Capitol Hill more loudly than expected, what remains after Wednesday’s protest is even more telling that what provoked it: Senate Democrats are now the core pillars of support for the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), which has not otherwise engendered a strict partisan divide among lawmakers. Far and away, the top beneficiary in the Senate from interest groups that support PIPA is Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who’s taken in just short of a million dollars from those groups, according to data from OpenSecrets.org. She’s also the most recent Senator to co-sponsor PIPA, adding her name to the list on Dec. 12. The runner-up is Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), who’s taken $777,383 from PIPA-supporting interest groups, and has co-sponsored the bill since May 2011. In fact, a list of the top 20 beneficiaries of special interest money in favor of PIPA reads like a list of the Senate’s most influential Democrats: Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) in third; Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) in fourth; Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in fifth; Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the bill’s primary sponsor, in sixth; Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) in seventh; Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in eighth; Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in ninth; and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) in tenth. The list goes on like that until Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who places 15th with $274,600 in special interest money promoting PIPA. He has not yet announced an official position on the bill. The only other Republican on the list of the top 20 PIPA beneficiaries in the Senate is Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), in 19th place with $212,312. Corker is one of the bill’s co-sponsors. In total, only two Democrats changed their minds on PIPA during Wednesday’s blackouts: Sens. Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR). The other 11 to walk away were all Republicans, who seem more open to Silicon Valley’s warnings against onerous, job-killing regulations. That may be due to the total sum donated to Democrats on the top 20 list: groups supporting PIPA have given over $7,319,983 to the 18 Democrats on the top 20 list, according to a Raw Story analysis. By contrast, those same Democrats have only taken in $807,502 from groups opposing the legislation. It could also be attributed to a smart hire by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the primary industry group behind the anti-piracy bills, which snapped up former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) to be their chief lobbyist. Amid Wednesday’s online blackouts, Dodd issued a statement condemning the protest as a “dangerous gimmick,” and chastised Internet companies for abusing their freedoms in the marketplace. As yesterday’s strike wore on, Raw Story reached out to all the leading Democratic senators supporting PIPA, in hopes they would step up to defend the bill. Not a single one did, and none of Raw Story’s requests for comments defending PIPA received responses. Google reported that over 4 million people signed their anti-piracy petition on Wednesday, and technology advocacy group The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told Raw Story that over 350,000 people used their website to communicate their displeasure to Congress, sending more than 1 million letters. “I hope to see more Democrats turn around on this,” said Parker Higgins, an activist with the EFF who’s focused on the anti-piracy bills. “I don’t know if it’s a question of party politics or whether there’s still something they see in the bill that we don’t think there should be. We’re hoping that in the next couple of days they’ll wake up to this. It’s not a good thing to be supporting.” The Obama administration said recently that it was hedging its bets on the anti-piracy bills as well, saying on Saturday that any anti-piracy legislation passed by Congress must balance concerns about censorship with the need to enforce intellectual property rights. The White House said they hope such a balance would “avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press that he would move forward with a full Senate vote on PIPA in the coming weeks, once some of the text had been altered to build consensus on the legislation. It is not yet clear if it will pass, but that may not even matter because in the House, PIPA’s sister-bill the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is now stalled indefinitely. Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has said he will not bring it to a vote until there’s wide bipartisan agreement, and fellow influential Republicans Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) have insisted they will go to the mat to block the bill in its current form. Because of the House-Senate divergence on both bills, it looks like the anti-piracy legislation is impossibly stalled for the time being unless significant changes somehow break the logjam. In the first major battle over U.S. Internet policy, Silicon Valley appears to have won — but the war has only just begun. Another day of action against PIPA was planned for Jan. 23, one day before Senators are expected to vote on the bill. (Disclosure: Raw Story Media, Inc. was one of the companies that blacked-out on Wednesday after the site’s owner and publisher determined the bills pose a threat to continued business operations.)
I think a big part of this (and I know this will sound silly) is that a lot of these old politicians don't really know how the internet works. I'm dead serious on this too. I was talking to a lawyer the other day who is in his 50s and the way he talked about the internet as a "thing" was laughable. He even joked about not understanding how all this information is out there. "Who put it there" was one of the things he said. Now this is a smart, successful and well off man sounding no more intelligent on the subject than "effing magnets, how do they work?" Imagine what some of these dunces in office are like when someone opposed to this bill tries to explain the damage it will do.
I think this is exactly right. I would guess a lot of these people have no understanding of technology and are just writing the bill that the people they listen to (ie, the lobbyists) are telling them to write. I don't think it's so much a problem of not caring about the consequences as not really understanding what the the consequences are.
Agreed completely. Can you imagine Harry Reid or John McCain sitting down with a tech guy trying to learn why a bill like this would hurt the internet? I think for most of them it is as simple as "pirating=bad." Throw in some campaign contributions and they probably felt really proud to get behind a bill that was doing good and getting paid for it.
Exactly right - case in point, look at what they were proposing for DNS...DNS filtering would seriously **** up the internet and cripple security. Idiots.
Hahaha. The point I was making was if even a 50ish year old man who is smart, successful and actually uses a computer doesn't understand it, then what are the hopes for some of those fossils in Washington who haven't had to do "real" work in years? Most politicians don't have to use the internet for their research. They have staffers who do it. They don't run their own websites. Most of them are too old to have been raised with computers, let alone the internet, and have had no need to understand it.
And meanwhile he was using a simple model to explain things to the real morons. And meanwhile he used that model to have an amendment struck down that would have really fugged up the internets and the google.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes Sounds like he was arguing for something that actually would've completely fudged up the internets. I'm also assuming he was arguing in defense of his Communications Act of 2006, which was a complete abomination.
I did. All I'm finding is that he was arguing against net neutrality and trying to push along/protect his telecomm bill. Both of which would've broked the webbernets. Anyway, you probably shouldn't read too much into my useage of a meme. Referencing the goofy, rambling, disjointed way he explained this is only meant to illustrate how out of touch Congress is when it comes to tech in general, even if his "tubes" analogy was fairly appropriate.
ok, glad I wasn't the only who thought this. I was about to seriously question my understanding of the netwebz. In context though, it does seem silly.
