The Obama Administration just replied to the "Stop SOPA 2013" and "Stop SOPA 2014" petitions on their "We The People" petition platform. The reply in short says that the Obama Administration wants to "protect our artists and entrepreneurs" by making punishment those who stream and upload illegal copyrighted content more severe, including FELONY CHARGES.
You can read the reply for yourself here: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/protecting-our-artists-and-entrepreneurs-innovation-economy
ehhh.
not a surprising position.
Get rid of DRM and then maybe this will be acceptable.
Get rid of superpacs and then maybe we can get a hold of our politicians ears.
The last time the government tried to crack down on something this big organized crime found a place in the U.S. Supply and Demand plays its part no matter where you live.
When will people learn? piracy is not a criminal problem, Its an economic problem. If it is not within someones means to get something they want, Food, water, entertainment. They will find other means. There is of cause exceptions to this but the majority if it was well within their means would pay for that movie, they would pay for that game. Most people are happy to pay for goods they want. Its a simple distribution problem and when you force people into this situation with high cost products out of reach of many yet marketed for all then they will find themselves finding a different way of getting what they want.
In the past what happened when no one had money for food but there was plenty of food in the shops? Illegal activity. Make food more affordable and the majority will pay for it. Thanks to services like netflix and steam, Many countries dont have major distribution problem with media. With that lower levels of piracy. However in countries where there are distribution problems for example America with ISP throttling and Australia where you have to spend $160 a month to gain access to pay for the content you want. bundled with shit you dont want to watch. yea thats right. Foxtel makes you pay a shit load just to be able to have access to the store to rent the goods that are well behind in terms of release dates compared to the rest of the world and cost a huge amount in itself. Renting 3 movies. Only 1 watch then have to pay again, costs more than a months subscription to netflix. These countries have a piracy problem.
Thank god Chorus here in New Zealand is providing tools to watch netflix however Sky is lobbying to have that stopped and is trying to stop Netflix from coming to New Zealand all together.
Food, water, and shelter. Entertainment is another word for abolishing boredom. Boredom is what allowed us to evolve. I hear this one on the internet all over the fucking place. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
We can pick apart digital piracy if we take a look at it and think about the best policy to deal with this. This issue is dead on a Federal level. If anyone in the U.S. wants to help create an effective policy it has to be done at a state level. Just don't look at the East Coast, or California for a lead.
This is a pretty dangerous position to take for society. Felons are (should be) dangers to society. An entity that has been harmed by piracy can be made whole purely monetarily. It does not make sense to make this type of crime a felony.
Too many crimes are already felonies that should not be. The US prison system is off the rails already and this will not help.
Even after you have served your time, a felony follows you around. It makes it difficult-to-impossible to find a job and one becomes a kind of social pariah even after you have "served your time." Too often folks that need adequate mental health care become felons mainly because of medical neglect for mental health issues and this is very sad that we as a society can't seem to take care of our fellow man. It is certainly not for lack of funds -- the costs of running a prison certainly would be about the same or more than the equivalent costs for healthcare.
And we're in a dangerous slippery slope right now in the US where prisoners are able to work for private corporations. It creates a commercial interest in incarcerating as many people as possible.
Consider that 100 years ago what someone had to do to be charged with a felony has changed dramatically vs today. If our society has decided that the rule of law is so important that piracy becomes a felony, I would expect our justice system to have every single financial institution and mortgage company under a microscope at this point. They do not, so I fear this will be abused to keep the types of people that would appear at e.g. Occupy WallS t in line. That may sound crazy, but 30 years ago if you told american citizens there would be 'free speech zones' or that 'civil forfeiture' means that 'the man' can seize your property without trial or due process, and they would have also said that's crazy.
Routine traffic stop? Mp3s on your phone? That's a $10,000 fine or 6 months working nights/weekends making paint for US Corrections Corp.
It is deeply troubling not that these things are illegal but that these types of infractions would be in the same class of crime as murders, arson, home invasion, etc .
I am pretty sure that is not the definition of insanity. It is just some stupid thing people on the internet have been saying for ages that far cry 3 gave a bump in popularity.
My hope is one of the more left wing countries makes an example of the rest of the world. Just like Australia did with gun control. Oh wait.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVuspKSjfgA
I totally agree, the prosecution for non-violent crimes has gotten way out of hand. We have more people in prison than any other country, including China and Russia.
The whole privatization of the prison system has created an atmosphere of incentive that encourages incarceration. It is like a new form a slavery.
Even though violent crime has been a very large down trend, we keep locking up more and more people.
The recidivism rates in America show that prison doesn't deter people and in some cases encourages crime for those who wish to go back. The system is so bad at getting people ready for the outside world, that people willingly try to go back because they can't cope.
With all this said why do we do it? Cheap labor:
http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-ff-pol-state-prisons-20141115-story.html
They even admit to it.
Most Americans don't even realize how much crime has dropped are since the media only focuses on high profile crime stories. This creates an electorate that wants tougher laws and thus feeds the prisions.
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2014/11/11/why-the-ignorance-index-matters/
Looks like we need more labor drugs aren't even enough to feed this monster we have turned to even more petty crime to enslave people for.
Australia is the Canadia of the Southern hemisphere. Nobody cares because Australia doesn't care.
Just one more thing that the government is wasting its time on. And I was told to get a life... when did people's IQ drop below 0.1? The fact that this is a felon is just unacceptable. There are REAL criminals out there, not people just looking to get DIGITAL media for free. Thank you Obama Ben Ladin for making the stupidest time consuming choices ever. Oh, and get a life :)...
Couldn't agree more.
Five years ago I would have agreed with you but now its a complete mind fuck in Australia.
I think you got Australia mixed up with New Zealand.
New Zealand was ranked number one for offering the highest level of freedom worldwide, followed by the Netherlands then Hong Kong.Australia, Canada and Ireland tied for fourth spot, with the United States and Denmark tied for seventh. The lowest-ranked countries were Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Syria.
Debt slave or prison slave? Its the great American Dream. It's called institutionalized. Real freedom is a much harder way to live. As far as piracy goes, Ya, we see that coming from a mile away. They are going to be burning books next.
Something is broken with our system. I don't know if it is the checks and balances, or if money really does control the federal government at this point. All of these mortgage lenders, and banking institutions have gotten away with a lot. Even government agencies have gotten away with a lot. If you look at the ATF and the rest of the alphabet, it kinda makes you wonder. Are there all these different agencies governing everyday life so that we don't know who is responsible for all of this?
Your sense of what should be a law probably differs from mine. What we need is some way to simplify all of this.
My only solution is to think locally. For me it keeps things simple. I know who I am voting for, they might even be a neighbor, and they know my community.
I saw a thing somewhere (I can't for the life of me remember where I saw it) which was an interview of a felony who explained what it was like from the inside of the system. He said that your prison sentence doesn't end just because you leave prison. A felony will follow you for the rest of your life because everywhere you go when you try to re-create yourself, you will always have to check that "felon" box. You will forever be a felon, which makes it really hard to move forward with your life. He said that the only legit places that you can get work as a felon are places like McDonald's. At that point, with that sign over your head all the time, struggling to get enough money to live (even McDonald's admits that you can't live on their servers' wage), you might as well just go back to selling drugs. At least then you will have the money to live decently. You might end up back in prison, but it isn't like you ever really left in the first place.
The whole system is broken, and there is no easy fix for it. Kids caught with weed are jailed longer than rich snobs who kill four people. It is all completely ridiculous. They want to make it a felony? Well then they better start converting the school buildings (which are also part of a broken system) to prisons or something becasue the prisons are already over capacity, and this plan would make millions and millions across the country into felons over night.
Just to further show how broken the system is is the crack vs cocaine disparity both pretty much the same drug but one is associated with wealth and the other is with homelessness
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2010/08/03/data-show-racial-disparity-in-crack-sentencing
Being rich is now considered and affliction and you can use it to avoid real punishment:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/05/no-jail-for-teen/5242173/
Wow, just f*cking wow. Hearing all this crap is honestly just truly mind-boggling. To think, 30-years-ago this was all tin-foil hat conspiracy crap, but its actually happening. The system is broken to the point of no return. Its incredible.
Is there honestly anything we can do? I truly doubt it. The majority of the world stays completely ignorant to this kind of crap, until of-cause it is too late. The majority of people (the only ones who can help the situation) honestly just don't care. It happens throughout history so much yet people just don't want to see or learn.
Seriously. What is "all this" heading to? It has to go somewhere... whether it be good or bad. We cant just continue to run a world the way we are yet have a functional society 30-years from now. Perhaps we are looking at a fully blown world-war? Who knows. Its a scary thought.
Or maybe im just being paranoid as fuck.
I feel like this is just mirroring everything that was just said, but I couldn't agree more. The system is broken, and finding a fix isn't going to be easy. For there to be a solution, people have to care. I'll bet you that most people aren't hearing about all this, and even if they did they wouldn't understand or care. Most people all get their news from CNN or Fox News which are owned by giant corporations who support this kind of stuff, so of course they're not going to mention it. I feel like we live in a society that doesn't place much value in freedom. Instead they just get fired up about whatever the media tells them to get fired up about. You see other countries when something like this happens, and everyone raises their pitchforks and marches to the capital. Here in America that doesn't happen. We just worry about washed up celebrities and whatever else the media distracts us with.