Posted on 01/09/2012 12:13:27 PM PST by SeekAndFind
At a campaign stop this weekend, in-the-spotlight GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum said he supports increased Internet regulation. According to Santorum, our rights aren’t “absolute” and stop at whatever point their exercise begins to infringe on the rights of others. Piracy represents an abuse of intellectual property rights — and that abuse should have consequences, Santorum says.
So far, so good. Everybody agrees that piracy is a problem.
But Santorum seems too ready to look to regulation for the solution to the piracy problem, suggesting that government interference might be an effective way to thwart piraters. That, to me, seems short-sighted, given that rampant piracy is at its core an indication of inferior service from legal sellers. Let actors, musicians and others whose intellectual property is routinely ripped off come up with a more effective way to serve customers and, suddenly, piracy won’t be such a problem. Take a look at the example of comedian Louis C.K. whose faith in his fan base and willingness to offer his product in an innovative manner has been richly rewarded.
Thankfully, Santorum stopped short of a full-throated endorsement of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act. (He isn’t familiar enough with provisions of that bill to have an opinion about it one way or the other, he said.) But that the first solution to piracy he can fathom involves more regulation is still troubling.
View video of Santorum’s comments here.
Thanks Livius.
Now I’ll be pulling for Gingrich - for what that is worth at this point.
There's another factor too. I bought a collection of Clint Eastwood movies and found that several of the DVDs got stuck - rendering them unwatchable - on the first play. That's not the only story I have. I still have VHSs that have been played as much as vinyls and still work.
I've never used Torrent, and actually have went out of my way to pay for digital content - e.g., by deleting a music file I sent to someone else and paying up again to get a new copy. But I can see why someone would be ticked off enough to pirate DVDs. Had DVDs lasted as long as video tapes, I think piracy would have been contained. Getting a DVD that siezes up after three, two or even one play(s) says the seller don't really care about the customer. As a result, enough customers get irked into not caring about the sellers.
“It’s weird, some seem to think music and movies are a human right, the same as the air we breath.”
Yes, and it’s weird that many so-called Conservatives have adopted the Liberal, Leftist and populist new-age philosophy that the intellectual property of this age (music, movies, TV, books, art) “belong” to “the world” and “property rights” to any of it are simply roadblocks to human progress - when history shows the opposite to be true.
SOPA would deal with the problem ultimately by shutting down whole sectors of industry [the pirates] , regulating others to a stand-still> [them out of existence], would spill over into paralyzing even [while protecting] simple information exchange.
Very naive position. At minimum, SOPA is redundant since there are already enforceable copyright laws on the books. We don’t need another layer of it, and it needs to remain beholden to copyright holders to enforce their claimsthis is not a duty that the taxpayer should be footing the bill for, which is what SOPA does.
SOPA will more than likely establish an abusive precedent for expansion of government powers to simply regulate content they dislike out of the internet.
Yeah, you go ahead.
I saw the clip, and he never said that they had to be *governmental* regulations.
Try doing some research next time.
I’ve just drawn a line through his name. I could easily imagine Newt supporting this as well, and I wonder where he actually stands on the issue. Now this would be a question worth asking at one of these mostly worthless debates.
I think could trust either Paul or Perry to leave the internet alone.
Gingrich and Paul were both opposed to SOPA at one of the debates (I don’t know about Perry).
No, not at all. There are already laws to deal with piracy and adding more wouldn’t help, particularly since in some cases this will amount to government pre-restraint on free expression.
I stand corrected on Gingrich re. SOPA. I’m happy to have the facts, thanks.
B.S. No it is not. It is no different than “capital” property, such as an Ipad, with Apples right to determine the sale and licensing of the use of that device.
Intellectual property is not the idea, but the medium into which it is announced - the book or medium of artistic presentation such as a record, a movie, a TV production. etc.
The dissemination of the “ideas” represented therein are not PREVENTED by the ownership rights thereto; it is only standards of either attribution (recognition of ownership) and or just compensation, in lieu of their use, that must be applied, and only for a limited time. In the "marketplace" those costs are minimal and not destructive of "the sharing of ideas" = witness the explosion of knowledge, technology and innovation that has accompanied the human era when the recognition of intellectual property rights has been more the norm than ever before.
“If SOPA passes, Obama could shut down Freerepublic.com the next day,”
Nonsense. Ain’t gonna happen.
If it’s possible to fine those guilty of stealing intellectual property without monitoring speech, I have no problem. I don’t know if you can limit government regulation of it. Bob
How to shutdown freerepublic under sopa
Post a link to a site that has a link to another site that has “pirated stuff” is enough to shutdown a site down a site under sopa,
Just going trough the vast amount of messages that are in free republic archive it would be no problem finding something.
Go Newt!
If that is really truly in SOPA, such chain-of-dependence, and the citing of such a chain-of-evidence would, in my view be easily challenged in the courts, including, in my view, easily obtained stay-of-enforcements granted by the courts while the decision was appealed, and I would anticipate even the current SCOTUS would not support such a chain-of-evidence as a definition of “guilt”.
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