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Bitching about it accomplishes nothing. I doubt there's anybody here who thinks this is a good thing, and even if there were, that sort of language persuades no
by blintson 17y ago
Bitching about it accomplishes nothing. I doubt there's anybody here who thinks this is a good thing, and even if there were, that sort of language persuades nobody.
The smart thing to do is to write your congressman, and get people together to protest.
Anybody here have any experience with politics and know what we could do to stop this?
- tumult 17y agoProtesting does nothing. edit: I'm specifically talking about in-the-streets-marches kind of thing.
- blintson 17y agoThen what? It's better than complaining on a website where everybody agrees with you. I'm going to do something. We've got to do something. The situation's bad enough as it is.
- tumult 17y agoI don't know. We're probably fucked. If you believe you can stop this by writing to your congressperson or protesting: why do you think this is being done in secrecy? Obviously, they are fully aware nobody is going to like it. It will be enacted regardless. That being said, I would still like to do as much as I can to prevent it, or in the case that it's enacted, circumvent it or corrupt it to the point of uselessness. At this stage, I don't think there's much we can do just yet. We also can't be sure this report is accurate.
- daeken 17y agoWe find a silly case under this law that would've been legal previously, then get a few hundred thousand (or more) people to download it, willingly putting the content up in violation all at once. Civil disobedience isn't the best choice necessarily, but it can work quite well in situations like this.
- pg 17y agoI agree with you. If the entire tech community was up in arms about this (assuming the treaty is really as bad as this article says), I think politicians would notice. They are not all in the pay of the movie business. The more neutral ones might wake up if it appeared the treaty was going to do net damage to the US economy.
- tdonia 17y agoshould this prove to be true, this is an excellent opportunity for [google | yahoo | microsoft | apple | facebook | any other major tech company that relies on people making things with computers] to petition against this with their ad dollars in a very vocal manner. being the first to rally people against this seems like it'd be far more culturally relevant in the long term than spending the money on a superbowl ad and billboard campaign saying "my brand is good".
- guitarjunkie 17y agoBut how do we convince them that is the case? I agree with you wholeheartedly, but we (or someone) needs to convince these companies that this is something they can afford to lose a little ad revenue on in the short term. Whats more, the companies you listed, especially google, are extremely well connected, I doubt this is shock to them.
- hackerblues 17y agoFrom the wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War ) "According to the French academic Dominique Reynié, between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war.[3]" Protests don't seem to have a very good track record.
- pg 17y agoI'm not just (or even) talking about people taking to the streets. If this report is accurate, the treaty would hurt VCs, and VCs aren't powerless.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- InclinedPlane 17y agoDestroy them, fund the competition. Boycott any company that encourages the use of DRM. Pirate their products and distribute them via encrypted, untraceable networks like TOR, or plain old sneaker-net. Support individuals and companies who avoid DRM, who treat their users with respect, and who distribute their works directly, etc.
- Quarrelsome 17y agoYou could always create a worm that installs utorrent and starts downloading any popular file going. Once the worm is in the field then how will they tell who are real pirates or hapless victims?
- roc 17y agoI think the more conscionable peaceful protest would be to wardrive around your town and download various torrents through any and all wifi APs that you can access. This wouldn't require violating anyone else's machines, but would have much the same effect. (presenting the ISP with the prospect of cutting off a huge percentage of their customers, i.e. revenue)
- Quarrelsome 17y agoYes but that requires serious logistics to do on a massive scale, furthermore peaceful was never a caveat. People are saying "what can we do? what power do we have?". As programmers we could do that. I'm not saying that is the right choice.
- roc 17y agoIt only took a handful of lunch counters and a handful of busses. With today's media, it certainly wouldn't take more than a handful of towns. Most of us probably have enough people in our personal social graph to pull it off.
- rms 17y agoMost protests do nothing, but at a certain point protests can bring down governments. That's why the Tienanmen square massacre happened and why the more recent Iranian election protests were violently stopped.
- stse 17y agoProtesting might be a first step, but what really counts is organizing. The Pirate Party started in 2006 and now has a man (and maybe soon a woman) in the European Parliament and active parties in a dozen countries. I know some people are skeptical to the whole phenomenon, but that's mostly because they don't understand where it came from. I'm not saying that starting a political party is the right thing to do in the US, but organizing and getting heard probably is.
- aohtsab 17y agoYou are right: bitching does nothing, yet writing our representatives is almost as bad. I interned for a certain senator a while back—all the letters that people sent in were recorded as tallies in a system, and the responses were typed up by office staff. By the way: most of the letters which were sent in were spam—the same letter with different signatures.
- tumult 17y agoI don't actually see anything wrong with that. The problem is that they don't seem to do anything with the numbers they gather.
- aohtsab 17y agoVery true. From what I understood, the data was nothing more than something for the senator to chew on.
- danek 17y agoso there's no point in ever crafting a nice letter? good to know.
- dkokelley 17y agoI think calling might be considered more effective. It shows that you are willing to invest enough time and actually make your concerns heard. I think they might weight calls like TV networks. Your 1 call counts as 1,000 people who wouldn't care to call. Of course the most effective thing to do would be to befriend your congressman personally. On a larger scale, organizing a sort of free internet seal of approval for all representatives could be even more powerful. If representatives know that voters would be more likely to vote for candidates with the seal of approval, then they might be persuaded to earn that seal.
- JoeAltmaier 17y agoSpam? My signature is valuable, even if attached to a petition. Shame on you.
- ascuttlefish 17y ago