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I find the notion that the SOPA protest woke up us previously apathetic Europeans somewhat insultingly US-centric. Prior to SOPA, resistance against increasing
by rickmb 14y ago
I find the notion that the SOPA protest woke up us previously apathetic Europeans somewhat insultingly US-centric.
Prior to SOPA, resistance against increasingly insane copyright legislation was considerably more widespread than it was in the US, partially triggered by events like the trial against the Pirate Bay, Sarkozy's three strikes sell-out etcetera.
There's a reason why we're the ones with the Pirate parties. We didn't need major corporations like Google campaigning to wake us up. Yeah, the defeat of SOPA was a major encouragement and inspiration, but the fight was already on.
- quaunaut 14y agoI think the reason you have pirate parties is because of your governmental systems, not because it's more popular there. First-past-the-post elections essentially force a 2-party system, where the European style has a lot more support for smaller, side parties. This isn't to say it isn't a US centric thought- honestly, I don't know enough about Europe to say definitively. But I do know that it's nigh impossible to meet someone under 30 in the US who doesn't think copyright law is a joke.
- runeks 14y ago> But I do know that it's nigh impossible to meet someone under 30 in the US who doesn't think copyright law is a joke. Are you serious? I'm genuinely interested. I'd claim this is simply not true. But dear lord I hope it is! That would be fantastic.
- chc 14y agoI'd argue it's nigh impossible to meet someone under 30 in the US who understands how copyright law actually works. But if you explained it to them, yeah, they'd probably find a lot of it a bit odd (there is just no way to portray limited terms of 120 years as being reasonable).
- luriel 14y ago> I'd argue it's nigh impossible to meet someone under 30 in the US who understands how copyright law actually works. [...] But if you explained it to them, yeah, they'd probably find a lot of it a bit odd I think this is true of most people under and over 30. > there is just no way to portray limited terms of 120 years as being reasonable Exactly. Most informed people conclude copyright law is a joke because it is a Mikey Mouse joke.
- yuhong 14y agoHopefully the SOPA fiasco has led the general public to pay more attention to copyright, which hopefully will prevent the term from being extended again.
- wisty 14y agoUnless they've studied a little economics. Like, not enough to be a real economist, but enough to have a shot at running for Congress.
- alanh 14y agoOh, I know someone. But they weren’t interested in debate. They basically were convinced that legality == morality and their pastor said piracy is theft, so that’s that.
- joneil 14y agoOuch. It's always sad to see someone forfeit their intellect and take someone else's thoughts as absolute truth. And I say this as a churh-attending Christian. Shame on my religion.
- el_presidente 14y agoHere in Canada most people don't know how copyright law works because they just don't care. Even the RCMP (federal police) has said that they'll only go after people who make a living selling bootleg DVDs/CDs.
- forrestthewoods 14y agoThat's because everyone who is under 30 has grown up with the ability to download things for free. Of course entitled consumers are going to support free things for themselves. I don't expect many to actually know anything about copyright nor would I expect them to have any realistic concept of how to "fix" it.
- macspoofing 14y agoWell ... so far we've let the "copyright experts" write our copyright laws, and they've shown total willingness to burn the internet to the ground to stop any and all infringement. Historically, the content industry has been paranoid of any new technology, and it took legislation to drag them into the new age. Were the consumers of the late 70s and early 80s entitled because they wanted to own VHS players to record their TV show and rent VHS movies?
- adventureful 14y agoMajor corporations like Google? That's laughable. Reddit users did about 100 times more than Google all by themselves.
- btilly 14y agoAre you kidding? People I know who know nothing about copyright and don't know what Reddit is were coming up and asking me to explain what Google was talking about.
- aggie 14y agoReddit's campaign may have produced more activists, but Google likely reached more eyeballs in a matter of hours than Reddit had in the preceding months. In the end, it was the widespread, mildly (somewhat blindly) anti-SOPA sentiment, not the loud minority, that turned the tide.
- cheald 14y agoI think you're overestimating reddit's reach. It's big, but it's still very niche. Google and Wikipedia are sites that Grandma uses on a regular basis, whereas if you asked her about reddit, she'd say "read what?"
- JamesLeonis 14y agoI think the reaction that SOPA was the tipping point of a long building frustration in both Europe and the US. Europe had a head start with governments and activists making more headway in the way of reform with Pirate Parties and a series of crippling strikes against harmful regulations. What SOPA did was drag Google and Wikipedia, two of the most used sites in the world, into the battle. That put more eyeballs onto the problem than a decade of smaller skirmishes. This galvanized a previously uninvolved but large part of the population. The flood of calls and email to our congressmen was far above and beyond anything that happened before. The other reason I believe SOPA was influential is because the US has a disproportional amount of control of the Internet in the form of ICANN, which could do more destruction even if the offending site wasn't in the US jurisdiction.
- einhverfr 14y agoI would agree with this. I remember many fights in the EU parliament over this issue that got a lot of publicity and it looked like ACTA was losing even before SOPA was proposed.