Just got this SOPA-related response from Sen. Durbin’s office in my email, regarding my earlier email. Suffice it to say that this doesn’t go into any details about how “reasonable steps to cease doing business” is a can of worms big enough to fit, like, a really big number of worms, and it doesn’t sound like he fully changed his mind. Still, the bills are tabled for now, so it’s all good.
Mr. Patrick Stack
(MY ADDRESS WAS HERE SO I BLOCKED IT OUT)
(TOO BAD, STALKERS)
Dear Mr. Stack:
Thank you for contacting me about the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). I appreciate hearing from you.
The bipartisan PIPA bill (S. 968) was introduced to rein in foreign-based websites that have no purpose other than to sell or distribute pirated or counterfeit goods. U.S. law enforcement agencies already have authority to seize and shut down domestic websites that are dedicated to violating copyright or counterfeiting laws, and hundreds of sites have been shut down in recent years. However, our law enforcement agencies lack effective tools to stop foreign-based websites that are dedicated to the same illegal behavior. These websites deprive American innovators and businesses of revenue and result in the loss of American jobs.
PIPA aims to close the gap in our laws that enables rogue websites to simply locate themselves overseas in order to avoid accountability for stealing American intellectual property and selling pirated and counterfeit goods to Americans. The legislation would authorize the Justice Department to seek a court-ordered injunction against a foreign website if the court found the website to be dedicated to illegal piracy or counterfeiting. If an injunction were issued by the court, it could be served upon third-party payment processors, advertising networks, search engines and other companies who would then be obligated to take reasonable steps to cease doing business with the infringing website.
The drafters of this legislation tried to address the serious problem of foreign rogue websites in a way that respects due process, protects freedom of legislation, and preserves the vitality of the Internet. However, I have heard from many constituents that PIPA and a more expansive bill introduced in the House of Representatives, SOPA, fail to strike the right balance between the goals of combating illegal piracy and protecting the Internet. Both the House and the Senate have postponed consideration of these bills in order to engage in more discussion with stakeholders and achieve more consensus on a legislative approach. I support these efforts and hope that stakeholders can agree on a reasonable solution that addresses these important issues.
I will keep your concerns in mind as the Senate continues to consider these matters. Thank you again for contacting me. Please feel free to keep in touch.
Sincerely,
Richard J. Durbin
United States Senator
I love to see the Internet blackouts going on today in protest of SOPA and PIPA. The public needs to understand that this legislation could put the sites they use every day at risk of private-industry censorship without any due process. I wrote this email to one of my Senators, Dick Durbin, who’s currently still supporting the legistlation:
Dear Senator Durbin:
As an Internet professional and a near-continuous user of all the wonderful benefits brought to us by this amazing technology, I urge you to oppose the SOPA and PIPA acts currently being debated in Congress. As a former employee of several online magazines, I fully recognize the need to fight piracy of intellectual property, but this poorly written legislation will break the fundamental structures of the Internet and will serve as a dangerous permission slip for private-industry censorship of websites without any due process. Please vote to protect America’s most dynamic economic sector, the interactive industry, by opposing this legislation and any attempts to clamp down on the economic freedom of the Internet.
Sincerely,
Patrick Stack
Chicago, IL
So get on Google’s anti-SOPA/PIPA page and register your opposition. Take it from an Internet dude – you don’t want this to pass.
Seeing as how I grab lots of images for my posts, like the photo by my old employer TIME.com in this post, I figured it was fair to elaborate on my own beliefs on borrowing images across the web: everybody wins.
My photo-editor friend Maria, also formerly of TIME.com, said it best when she noted that as long as the website that’s borrowing the image links to the original website that produced the image, then she had no problem with anybody else using that intellectual property.
I heard that. Not only does this allow the blogger or whomever to get some free visual content onto their site, it creates an attractive link promo for users to head back to the image’s original site.
That’s assuming you follow the policy of linking to the image source. If you don’t, then you’re just a jag. I try to be very good about the non-jag policy of image use around here, though I probably have a few jag moments that I’ve missed now and then. (I just went back and linked up an Obama victory image when I noticed it wasn’t linked. Whoops.)
To summarize: image stealing = good when credit is given.
John Yoo got the bulk of the negative publicity for his torture memo, but I’ve read many times that David Addington has been the real advocate for scrapping the rule of law in the Bush Administration. This Bob Herbert column on Addington makes that point better than I can.
Two great moments in quotations today, both from men with the power to influence and shape America’s economic and political situation. The first comes courtesy of Aron Wilder, the CEO of HTFC, a small firm that takes loan applications and sells residential mortgages to larger lenders like GMAC. They’re one of many direct players involved in the subprime mess engulfing the economy. Here’s Mr. Wilder in response to a question from the lawyer representing GMAC, in GMAC’s lawsuit against HTFC for selling improperly underwritten loans [link]:
Q: This is your loan file. What do Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald do for a living?
A: I don’t know. Open it up and find it.
Q: Look at your loan file and tell me.
A: Open it up and find it. I’m not your fucking bitch.
Q: Take a look at your loan application.
A: Do it yourself. Do it yourself. You want to do this in front of a judge. Would you prefer to [do] this in front of a judge? Then, shut the fuck up.
Q: Sir, take a look—
A: I’m taking a break. Fuck him. You open up the document. You want me to look at something, you get the document out. Earn your fucking money, asshole. Better get used to it. You’ll retire when I’m done.
That’s usually not the sort of guy whose ilk you want as a huge force in your national economy.
Second, we have Vice President Dick Cheney, the No. 2 member of the United States executive branch. He is thus responsible for executing the will of the people, as written by the people’s representatives in the legislative branch. Here he is being interviewed by ABC News’ Martha Radditz about the Iraq war [link]:
Raddatz: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.
Cheney: So?
Raddatz: So? You don’t care what the American people think?
Cheney: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. There has, in fact, been fundamental change and transformation and improvement for the better. That’s a huge accomplishment.
That is an awful lot about the Vice President summed up in the one-syllable clause “So?” The man is concise!
Divisive | November 20th, 2007
Last night I was hitting the new gym — this one has TVs on the treadmills, so I rocked the informative running action — when this story came on CNN:
Saudi Court Ups Punishment for Gang-Rape Victim
The gist of the story is that a woman was gang-raped by seven Saudi men, yet the Saudi court’s sense of justice resulted in 10-month to five-year sentences for the attackers, while the victim got 90 lashes with a yard-long bamboo reed for committing the ultimate sin of talking to a dude. (Thankfully, her hair must have stayed covered during the process, as the misogynistic nature of this sentence would seem to indicate that a stray tress would see her locked her up for 25 to life.) But, it gets worse: When her lawyer — seemingly the only sane person affiliated with the Saudi Shari’ah legal system — appealed the lenient sentences for the attackers, the court agreed with him and gave the attackers two to nine years, but it also decreed that the lawyer be disbarred and the rape victim now get six months in jail and 110 more lashes. This is all for taking the incredibly selfish action of being raped and then following proper legal channels to complain about the lack of justice.
I knew the U.S. government would be leery of angering King Abdullah because of both oil and any Saudi anti-terror efforts, but not to the level of calling the punishment only “astonishing” and going no further:
QUESTION: Just to be clear, you’re in no way condemning the sentence at all?
SEAN MCCORMACK, STATE DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN: I’ve said what I’m going to say about it.
We all know that governments say things in public that are not followed up in action, but here the U.S. government isn’t even making the public statement. I can think of many better words than “astonishing”; “savage miscarriage of human decency” comes to mind.
Suffice it to say that this is exactly the sort of thing that al-Qaeda and its sympathizers believe in, and exactly the reason I believe that such fundamentalists need to get utterly wrecked. Tuesday the Saudi government released a statement “clarifying” things by saying the victim received the extra punishment because she illegally talked to the media. I can’t say that 110 extra lashes for contempt of court makes any sense to me as a rational human, but this statement doesn’t even address the gross miscarriage of justice that is the original 90-lash sentence except for a weak non-explanation.
Today I was looking for more on this story and on Iraq when I came across this blog post — on a side note, Reuters, you’re really sending mixed messages by saying you don’t approve of any third-party BlogBurst opinion items but then wrapping them in your own site branding — echoing the usual “The Democrats want America to lose in Iraq” sentiment. Sure, a detached analysis of the situation would find that yes, the more anti-war party will do better if the war is going badly, and therefore would potentially lose ground should the war effort improve. But, we aren’t operating in a vacuum; Democrats are paying the same costs in blood and treasure as Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, Lyndon LaRouchers and any other party that lives under the American government, and therefore Democrats too ultimately rise and fall from the war’s effects just the same as Republican war supporters. Do they want to lose? No, they want to see success for all the sacrifice, and perhaps demand it even more having opposed the invasion in the first place.
It’s ill to see someone make that kind of circa-2004 divisive statement because this Saudi thing is a clear example that the real fight is much broader than what’s happening in Iraq — remember that Saudi Arabia is an American ally, yet does these things and produced the 9/11 hijackers — and that wasting energy condemning an anti-stable-Iraq sentiment that doesn’t even exist outside of the fringes displays a failure to grasp that global reality. I agree with this piece by Anne Applebaum that explains how invading Iraq did more damage than good to the anti-fundamentalist fight by shoving away our potential allies and hurting long-term American strategic goals. There’s never a need for “We told you so” here — lots of us opposed the Iraq war for realist strategic reasons instead of childish fringe anti-Americanism, and an improved Iraq would help those interests that have been so heavily damaged by the invasion in the first place. The Saudi verdict shows that the bigger fight is both larger than Iraq and more complicated than supporting one thing or another.
In regards to the Saudi non-condemnation, perhaps the government wrongly skipped the public shaming part but is somehow working on the private part I’d love to see: massive scientific alternative-fuel projects to get us out of the Saudi stranglehold. It’s doubtful. If not that, then the government needs to offer amnesty to this woman and allow her to live in the U.S. At least we’d be showing the sense of justice that’s so sorely lacking in our ally.
