Recall some of the earlier threads about SOPA, where proponents or sympathizers of the deranged bill spoke of how "Internet Freedom" was infringing on poor, starving artists, intellectual property and how there weren't any tools, whatsoever, under America's already draconian copyright laws to address the matter? Well, looks like they've been proven wrong by reality.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvsC2k3HAKo[/youtube]
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/21/two_les ... singleton/
Glenn Greenwald wrote:
In other words, many SOPA opponents were confused and even shocked when they learned that the very power they feared the most in that bill — the power of the U.S. Government to seize and shut down websites based solely on accusations, with no trial — is a power the U.S. Government already possesses and, obviously, is willing and able to exercise even against the world’s largest sites (they have this power thanks to the the 2008 PRO-IP Act pushed by the same industry servants in Congress behind SOPA as well as by forfeiture laws used to seize the property of accused-but-not-convicted drug dealers). This all reminded me quite a bit of the shock and outrage that arose last month over the fact that Barack Obama signed into law a bill (the NDAA) vesting him with the power to militarily detain people without charges, even though, as I pointed out the very first time I wrote about that bill, indefinite detention is already a power the U.S. Government under both Bush and Obama has seized and routinely and aggressively exercises.
I must ask strident copyrightists - when is enough, enough? Will it take the government issuing death sentences over ambiguous-case copyright disputes before you develop sympathy for proponents of a free Internet?
22 Jan 2012, 1:49 am
