Jon Stewart and SOPA (please)

Got to see The Daily Show Wednesday night and in the pre-show conversation with Jon Stewart, an audience member said he was sent by The Internet to ask about SOPA. Stewart professed (not feigned, I think) ignorance, asking whether that was net neutrality, and excusing himself, what with their "heads being up their asses" in the election and all. But he said he'd do his homework and he looked at writer Steve Bodow when he said that. Let's hope he comes out loud.

Confidential to Mr. Stewart: The problem here is that [cough] your industry, entertainment, is trying to give power the power to blacklist and turn off sites if they're so much as accused of "pirating" (their word, not ours) content. This changes the fundamental architecture of the net, giving *government* the power and means to kill sites for this and then other reasons. That threatens to destroy this, our greatest tool of publicness (book plug). So please, sir we need your force of virtue to beat down this, another evil. On behalf of The Internet, thank you.

 

 

 

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Comments

[yt7509]

01:57 PM on 01/15/2012

I don' know SOPA in details, but for me regarding piracy, if the basic principles are :
1) against piracy centers and not end users (always centers in piracy due to the need for catalogs and search amongst other things, "peer to peer" also a lot of hypocrisy in the terms and everybody knows it)
2) No monitoring at all of end users flow, collect of their IPs a formal complaint from somebody about a user acting as a center
3) All procedures are legal and public
Then it clearly is the right way to do it, not to forget that if piracy doesn't create any revenues for authors and creators, it does create some (and not a little) for some people :
http://owni.fr/2011/12/14/secret-megaupload-streaming-kim-schmitz-david-robb/
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10626044

Note : above more developed below (but in French) :
http://iiscn.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/piratage-hadopi-etc/
And "zero piracy" doesn't matter in anyway (not more than school kids exchanging files), problem is when it becomes the default and easiest access method for works and publications.
But on this, in order to have a real "user experience" added value in buying instead of pirating, and this in a non quasi monopolistic environment (or with just 2 or three "monsters"), clearly something like below would be required :
http://iiscn.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/concepts-economie-numerique-draft/

[Ralph Reinhold]

08:50 PM on 01/18/2012

The vast majority of "piracy" results in zero loss to the producers. Most of the stuff that I have heard downloaded was because it was handy. If they actually had to have had to pay for the stuff it wasn't worth the price. There is about a 2% loss to the producers from people downloading media. This is less than the loss from employee leakage (internal shoplifting) or shoplifting. Before Congress considers this, they need to conduct a survey to see what the true losses are to the media industry. My guess is that it is much much less than the losses that will be sustained by the internet from its implementation.