[haloboy100]

Silly americans.

[karajorma]

What I love about this day of protest is how quickly the politicians who backed SOPA and PIPA are realising that it was a ****ing bad idea to back it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16623831

8 down already.

[SypheDMar]

huzzah!

[BloodEagle]

Let us hope that, come election time, everyone remembers this bull****.

[Klaustrophobia]

Let us hope that, come election time, everyone remembers this bull****.

CONSPIRACY THEORY

part of me thinks that could have been the point.  Get a few sacrificial congressmen (not even really sacrificial, the odds of this actually getting someone beat are probably pretty low) to introduce absurd bill with no intention to actually pass it, then all the others can claim taking a stand against it. 

[deathfun]

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.
PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for
the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person
to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures
in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call
Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.
There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like
Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they
circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works,
without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they're all successful and most of the
studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it's all based on being
able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create.
If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing
other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the
rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow
people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take
over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them).
It's all based on the fact that we're competition.
We've proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We're just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech.
We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws
should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we've stayed out of the
USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this:
The word SOPA means "trash" in Swedish. The word PIPA means "a pipe" in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence.
They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the
rest of us obedient consumers.
The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you'll learn that noone wants to be fed with
trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that
you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can't do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we'll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the
hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to
mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.
To fix the "problem of piracy" one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they're
creating "culture" but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls
become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching
movies and tv shows that make them think that they're fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones
is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had
no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he's complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy
in the world - because he's jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you'd get a more
honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can't access this information
when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that.

THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

xD
I thought it was funny
The bold part is what made me fall out of my chair

[S-99]

So support SOPA. Because she looks like she deserves money.

But, i'd still download a car....
So sign this petition that i did.

[WeatherOp]

IMO, this is when we have to watch closely. If rejected, congress will let it die down for a while and then when no body is watching add it to the back of a junk bill.

[Klaustrophobia]

we really need a constitutional amendment that requires seperate bills for seperate issues.  piggybacking scummy and often borderline unconstitutional laws on routine legislation like the budget is a disgusting practice. 

[Crybertrance]

Soooo, has the bill died? 

[Klaustrophobia]

completely, i seriously doubt it.  for the time being, perhaps.

[SpardaSon21]

Bills like these are like Dracula: they need to be decapitated and then staked to the ground through their hearts to prevent them from coming back.

[jg18]

Ok, so I finally got around to calling my representatives in Congress. Well, I got through to two of the three representatives' offices; the third was going to put me on hold, but in that case, the senator had already publicly expressed his opposition to the bills.

* jg18 awards himself one point of productivity for the day.

[MP-Ryan]

we really need a constitutional amendment that requires seperate bills for seperate issues.  piggybacking scummy and often borderline unconstitutional laws on routine legislation like the budget is a disgusting practice.

It astounds me that this has not become an issue previously.  Then again, both your political parties like to pull that trick; it just happens to be the Republicans doing it more often right now.

[JCDNWarrior]

Bills like these are like Dracula: they need to be decapitated and then staked to the ground through their hearts to prevent them from coming back.

And, much like Dracula, when light exposes such bills, they hide into the dark waiting for you to go to sleep before striking. Probably when something else catches collective attention, such as NDAA in New Year's Eve.

[Nuke]

are you kidding, the real dracula would have just impaled all these ****s

[Aardwolf]

we really need a constitutional amendment that requires seperate bills for seperate issues.  piggybacking scummy and often borderline unconstitutional laws on routine legislation like the budget is a disgusting practice.

Except that line-item veto is considered unconstitutional.

[Polpolion]

we really need a constitutional amendment that requires seperate bills for seperate issues.  piggybacking scummy and often borderline unconstitutional laws on routine legislation like the budget is a disgusting practice.

Except that line-item veto is considered unconstitutional.

the line item veto AFAIK was really only meant to cut down on pork barrel spending; things that on their own wouldn't even merit discussion in congress.

[FlamingCobra]

Oh, sorry guys, just did a really quick search on the forums earlier today and found  no matches for "SOPA" and "PIPA" (keywords I used), so I pretty much assumed that you guys were ignorant about this  Anyways, my bad...

Blame FlamingCobra for that.

Herp derp, let's make a thread with a non-descriptive title!

[Klaustrophobia]

we really need a constitutional amendment that requires seperate bills for seperate issues.  piggybacking scummy and often borderline unconstitutional laws on routine legislation like the budget is a disgusting practice.

Except that line-item veto is considered unconstitutional.

that i agree with.  line-item vetoing allows a single person, the president, to effectively pass legislation as he sees fit.  debates and compromises in congress become meaningless if all of the changes made in the process can be selectively discarded when the bill is signed.  the president isn't allowed to create legislation, only approve what congress creates.