Jimmer's Colossal Waste of Time

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryg5kFgarBo&feature=share

Dear Tripp,

Your world view would be hard to implement. Our whole culture is based on the concept of personal property and of the right to control that property. It is the basis of western law and a capitalistic society. Buying, selling and the control of merchandise is what it's all about.

What's happened here is that the concept of personal property has been corrupted by massive corporations. And since a large corporation is considered to be a person "under the law" and that "Person" has all the rights and privileges granted them by God and Government; they have the right to use all the resources at their disposal to transform their environment into something that supports their own growth and comfort.

All living things do this, it's only natural.

The problem with giving corporation these rights is that a corporation is essentially a communal life form. Not an individual. That gives the corporate entity a collection of advantages over individuals. Primarily being the ability to leverage all of its assets to an end, where an individual cannot compete.

In the case of the intellectual content industry; they have been able to, from very early on in our culture, write the rules that govern patent, copyright and corporate law. They have been able to lever their assets and move the government to their will and the create draconian control over IP that will last generations. In essence they are creating an inheritance for themselves, because a corporation can live forever (unless they go bankrupt and even then there are ways to preserve their property).

The original US copyright law was written as a part of the Constitution and granted the Congress the right to enact copyright law .

Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

This is known as the copyright clause and is the basis for all copyright law from the beginning of our republic. At that time copyright was only a whopping 14 years. Since then term of copyright has been changed many times to satisfy cultural and technological changes, more recently the 1998 Sonny Bono/Mickey Mouse Act which extended copyright on existing and future IP  to 75 and 120 years.

I won't bore you with a tic-toc of how we got from this single line in the Constitution to a perpetual copyright with heavy handed, monololistic civil and criminal penalties, but the fact is that we are here and there must be changes in the way that things are done.

But your point that content shouldn't be property goes against the Constitution and..... our.... basic.... culture.

So what do we do?

First: I think we should roll back the time that a work of art or science can be held privately, just because your grandfather doodled a mouse on a napkin and the neighorhood kids liked it so much that they were willing to pay just to see it, does not mean your doodle should support your family, or their families, or their investors in perpetuity.

Second: Return copyright enforcement to the civil courts, sunset most criminal penalties for copyright infringement except for all but the worst offenders. And in those cases throw the book at them.

Third: Limit the civil rights of Corporations. Corporations should not have access to the rights granted by Constitutional Bill of Rights and should be nothing more than an entity that is used to limit business' liabilities or for tax purposes.

I know that my answers to these problems have as much chance as do yours, but if they were used it would make for a more civil (pun intended) discourse and a freer society.

Thanks for reading and be well

Jimmer

Link: http://www.keepthewebopen.com/sopa

Ms. Adams,

I have written to you and called your office in the past to express my feelings regarding the passage of the misguided bill known as SOPA and it's cousin PIPA.

To be clear, I do acknowledge that there must be measures taken to stifle the blatant and unrepentant piracy of intellectual property. But having encountered the implementation of such measures in the past I must point out, for all of the hand wringing that the Intellectual Property (IP) owners have done in the past, all they have really succeeded in doing was limiting access to legal forms of entertainment for law abiding individuals and delaying the progress of technology.

I am and have been an electronic service technician specializing in television repair since 1978 and have watched as the studios made war against the electronic manufacturers during the advent of VHS and Beta home recording (Sony Corp v. Universal Studios Group) as well as the design and implementation of  high definition TV and the internet. Every step along the way the studios have cried that with each of these technological advances they might lose money and product to supposed pirates. Each and every time having lost in the courts and in the court of public opinion they have come to congress to protect their failed business model with new legislation limiting the implementation  and uses of these technologies.

But for all of this legal wrangling and crawfishing, the American people would have had high definition television 10 years earlier and DVDs or BlueRay technology much sooner.

As an example; there was the failed mandate that required that all high definition TVs contain a tamper-proof interlock preventing anyone from removing the back from their television, purportedly to prevent hooking physically to the signals in able to make an HD duplicate. To my knowledge very few of these TVs were actually produced and the only  thing that this prevented was the televisions owner from enjoying the use of their property when the circuit that controlled this feature eventually failed.

There was also the badly designed and useless broadcast flag provision which caused a whole generation of HD Televisions and computer equipment to never work as they were intended. The courts eventually ruled (American Library Association v FCC) that Broadcast flagging was unlawful and the FCC repealed this decision earlier this year.

Even the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is regularly used as a SLAP to stifle dissent or just maliciously by anyone who can fill out a form . Most recently there is a case of MegaUpload v. Univeral Entertainment group where MegaUpload asserts that Universal has filed fraudulent DMCA take down notices on property that they do not own. Universal has gone as far as filing DMCA takedown claims against valid news reporting of these events to squelch discussion. This is all very troubling.

The most appalling aspect of the whole thing is the lack of ANY coverage of this legislation by ANY of the major corporate news services.

And we want to pass a law giving entertainment lawyers the ability to wage war on the public internet?

Please Ms. Adams, ask more questions and do more research before unleashing a potentially devastating law on the ability of the American people to get the whole true story.

Any legislation must contain due process protections and severe civil and criminal penalties for fraudulent misuse of these laws as well as strict guidelines for their use.

Yours Truly,

Jimmersd

Representative Adams,

I am writing to express my firm opposition to HR II otherwise known as SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act). I have watched with a great deal of interest, as companies who comprise the majority of the intellectual property holders in this country attempt to protect their Seventeenth Century business model through legislation and intimidation, rather than adapting and evolving. SOPA is no different.

If passed, SOPA would erect restrictions on well established freedoms and create unreasonable criminal standards, well beyond those that any free society should have to endure. This bill actually allows IP holders to act as a non-governmental and unregulated police force whose sole purpose would be to shutdown and prosecute alleged offenders without oversight or recourse.

In addition; I have learned that Congress has decided to hold hearings for this monumental change without the benefit of alternative views. This is unconscionable and would, if SOPA should pass, be held as yet another example of Congress' legislating in a vacuum without regard to freedom or to the views and opinions of its constituents.

Ms. Adams, please allow the full story to be presented and I urge you to oppose the passage of HR II, SOPA.

Yours Truly,


Jimmersd