Megaupload closed down by the Feds.

I've been through that already (though I forget exactly where--OP is getting real busy lately): no, I don't see a bypass around due process anywhere within SOPA. But, even assuming there was such a thing: so what? You still have to go through due process to arrest people. Web sites are inanimate piles of circuitry, and except for Johnny Five, inanimate piles of circuitry do not have rights.
But websites are property, and people, as I understand American law, are in possession of certain property rights, first among which is the right not to be deprived of property in an arbitrary fashion. The proposed legislation would appear to blur the boundaries on that, by allowing the state to seize property on the basis of very much less than complete information. Which is kinda iffy.

It's sad to see how the FBI is used to silence people the entertainment industry wants silenced.
As much because that's such a pansy industry to be in the pocket of as anything else. Remember when they used to murder striking minders? That was real corruption, proper manly corruption. This is just kinda embarrassing for them.
 
Yep. They can break. If I can't live without the files on them then, in some cases, I can have the data professionally recovered. The same can't be said if I upload them to the wild blue yonder of cyberspace and *poof* one day they're gone.

That's exactly why relying on ONE mode of digital storage is a bad idea. Back ups of back ups of back up is the only thing that really works. Uploading your home movies to storestuff.net and then erasing them from your HDD to make space isn't a secure method of data storage. Granted, peither is putting them on a single DVDR. I just don't get what's so bad/inconvenient about backing up important files.
But you told him to quit using those sites! Surely using those sites AND backing up data on physical media is preferable to backing up data on physical media alone? I mean, you're saying that it's bad to rely on one form of backup, but at the same time telling someone to quit using online file storage services. Uploading stuff to cloud storage means that you aren't relying on physical media alone.
 
How is that in any way "better yet"? If I use Dropbox, iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive, or some other cloud storage service to store files, it means I can retreive them from any computer. So if I go home to visit my parents, all my files will be there waiting for me, without me having to carry anything extra with me. What advantage do expensive DVRs and offline storage media have over cheap or free cloud storage?

It's only cheap and convenient for small amounts of data.
 
The whole thing makes me think that I dont care if the U.S. goes bankrupt if they waste their resources on silly stuff like shutting down websites.

There are totally legitimate reasons to shut down a site ;).
e.g. I totally support that kino.to was shut down, because that was really to 100% a piracy site.
But here you have to see that file hosting is not an exclusive piracy activity, that is the problem.

Yep. They can break. If I can't live without the files on them then, in some cases, I can have the data professionally recovered. The same can't be said if I upload them to the wild blue yonder of cyberspace and *poof* one day they're gone.

That's exactly why relying on ONE mode of digital storage is a bad idea. Back ups of back ups of back up is the only thing that really works. Uploading your home movies to storestuff.net and then erasing them from your HDD to make space isn't a secure method of data storage. Granted, peither is putting them on a single DVDR. I just don't get what's so bad/inconvenient about backing up important files.

While you're right here, there are also occassions where this is not enough.
I already mentioned that we lost at least one Civ4 mod.
I'm pretty sure that the author has it on his hard drive. But the author is not anymore active. Relying only on a single source is not clever. And this might not be the case here, and still it is a problem for us :/.
 
But you told him to quit using those sites!

I suggested that people quit using these sites to store important files. Granted I should have used the words "quit relying on" which would have made my position a lot more clearer.
 
It's impossible to stop piracy. The internet is inherently uber-decentralized.

Its also impossible to stop all crime. Doesnt mean we shouldnt try to still do something about it.
 
they will not rest until they have laws saying you can be arrested for "piracy" for telling someone else the plot of a movie
 
they will not rest until they have laws saying you can be arrested for "piracy" for telling someone else the plot of a movie
That's alarmist. Intellectual property laws haven't actually become any more strict in recent years, what's changed is how they try to enforce them on the one hand, and people's increasing dissatisfaction with them on the other. It was illegal to copy a VHS tape and give it you friend, but it wasn't something that cause the industry many problems or something they could do much about anyway. Digital technology, though, has made it a much bigger problem, and, while in certain respects its harder to do anything about, its also easier in others, because they had no way of tracking down people who taped things off the radio or of shutting down some central distribution point for things photocopied out of books. So what we're seeing here isn't really some aggressive march towards a novel breed of copyright fascism, it's an escalation of tensions between those who want to copy, and those who want to stop them.

Its also impossible to stop all crime. Doesnt mean we shouldnt try to still do something about it.
Hm.
 
maybe i'm being cynical, but i can see them wanting to try to make that law.
 
I'm sorry to see it go. There were some mods on there that were for a game I used. Now I have to try and recover them. :(
 
The whole thing makes me think that I dont care if the U.S. goes bankrupt if they waste their resources on silly stuff like shutting down websites.

Considering it's the FBI, it's kind of their job to do this.
 
When enforcement is impossible in any meaningful way, yes, it means exactly that.

And the best way to stop crimes that you can't enforce against is to legislate the activities to no longer be criminal.

This is what almost every American right-wing nutter fails to understand.
 
When enforcement is impossible in any meaningful way, yes, it means exactly that.

And the best way to stop crimes that you can't enforce against is to legislate the activities to no longer be criminal.

You know, author SIR Terry Prachett has outlined in his Discworld novels what, IMO, is nearly the ideal government: Namely the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork realized that, no matter how much money he spent and effort he put forth, he'd never be able to eliminate crime on the streets of the city-state (particularly since, prior to his rise to power, Ankh-Morpork made modern Chicago look downright safe!), so what he did was basically authorized the thieves' guild and the assassins' guild, along with the city watch, to go after unlicensed thieves and murderers, while keeping their own authorized thievery and killing under a certain level (not hard with the Assassins' Guild, since, as Terry pointed out in one of his infamous footnotes, "The Assassins' Guild puts a high value on human life, which is why they charge such hefty fees to take it away...").


...ANYWAYS, to make a long story short, I think that if the government REALLY wanted to do something to help offset the costs of piracy, then they should just do like certain other countries have done (or for that matter similar laws that have been passed in the US in the past), and just leverage a small tax on each blank CD, DVD and Blu-Ray Disc sold and/or on internet data transfer usage, and use the revenue generated thusly to compensate the entertainment industry for lost revenue from piracy and be done with it!
 
You know, author SIR Terry Prachett has outlined in his Discworld novels what, IMO, is nearly the ideal government: Namely the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork realized that, no matter how much money he spent and effort he put forth, he'd never be able to eliminate crime on the streets of the city-state (particularly since, prior to his rise to power, Ankh-Morpork made modern Chicago look downright safe!), so what he did was basically authorized the thieves' guild and the assassins' guild, along with the city watch, to go after unlicensed thieves and murderers, while keeping their own authorized thievery and killing under a certain level (not hard with the Assassins' Guild, since, as Terry pointed out in one of his infamous footnotes, "The Assassins' Guild puts a high value on human life, which is why they charge such hefty fees to take it away...").
I wholeheartedly support this (in theory, not so much in practice). Nac Mac Feegle! Crivens!
 
...ANYWAYS, to make a long story short, I think that if the government REALLY wanted to do something to help offset the costs of piracy, then they should just do like certain other countries have done (or for that matter similar laws that have been passed in the US in the past), and just leverage a small tax on each blank CD, DVD and Blu-Ray Disc sold and/or on internet data transfer usage, and use the revenue generated thusly to compensate the entertainment industry for lost revenue from piracy and be done with it!
Because if there's one thing America needs, its more government subsidise for bloated, malfunctioning industries.
 
no. it's just me being overly cynical as usual.
 
That's why SOPA Is so dangerous. It would allow the feds to shut down any site without due process.

This means that if you own a site and one of your users posts something that is copyrighted material, and the entertainment industry complains. Your site is gone.. No hearing, no trial, no nothing.

That's why it's so dangerous - there's no way a website operator could ever sort through all the links submitted every day - especially on large sites like youtube, reddit, facebook, etc. Maybe we should let Congress do that job, if they really want to.
Google and YouTube and several other of the big Internet companies oppose it because any one of them could force each other off the web with ridiculous unfounded comments making the Internet a worse place than a flamewar.
The whole thing makes me think that I dont care if the U.S. goes bankrupt if they waste their resources on silly stuff like shutting down websites.
People could take your Tom petty fansite because you display pictures of TP which come from a video which you didn't buy the rights to reproduce and so on.
Because if there's one thing America needs, its more government subsidise for bloated, malfunctioning industries.
Isn't most stuff subsidised, including agricultural and indsutrial production? Most of those subsidies are proposed by the 'small government' mentality types.
 
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