If SOPA passes....

Rainbow Dash wrote:

TheRevTastic wrote:Of course they wouldn't we wouldn't be shut down, BECAUSE THEY WERE SHELVED, pointless thread is pointless.

Topic moved to ACTA. lrn2readthreadb4posting

No you moved your posts to ACTA, as the topic title states this thread is still about SOPA, and seeing as how more then 50% of the people in here are/were discussing SOPA/PIPA it's still about those two.

TheRevTastic wrote:

Rainbow Dash wrote:

TheRevTastic wrote:Of course they wouldn't we wouldn't be shut down, BECAUSE THEY WERE SHELVED, pointless thread is pointless.

Topic moved to ACTA. lrn2readthreadb4posting

No you moved your posts to ACTA, as the topic title states this thread is still about SOPA, and seeing as how more then 50% of the people in here are/were discussing SOPA/PIPA it's still about those two.

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In my opinion, you pulled that response out of your arse for the sake of arguing. We were talking about a more updated ACTA, even though I brought that into the discussion. That being the case, thread is still worthwhile.

What's ACTA exactly? If it's like a global PIPA, then wouldn't it have the exact same effect, just stronger and... worldwide?

Anyways, my parent's have been talking about getting a desktop for quite some time. Maybe there could be some discussion as to creating a string of servers to back up the site, once, and not if, forumotion shuts down.

Rainbow Dash wrote:

TheRevTastic wrote:

Rainbow Dash wrote:

TheRevTastic wrote:Of course they wouldn't we wouldn't be shut down, BECAUSE THEY WERE SHELVED, pointless thread is pointless.

Topic moved to ACTA. lrn2readthreadb4posting

No you moved your posts to ACTA, as the topic title states this thread is still about SOPA, and seeing as how more then 50% of the people in here are/were discussing SOPA/PIPA it's still about those two.

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In my opinion, you pulled that response out of your arse for the sake of arguing. We were talking about a more updated ACTA, even though I brought that into the discussion. That being the case, thread is still worthwhile.

I like how you assumed I just wanted to argue, and still no, you were talking about a "more updated ACTA", the thread title and op was talking about SOPA.

Rainbow Dash wrote:

rabid squirrel wrote:And I'm pretty sure that sites like tumblr, mediafire, youtube, vimeo, etc will go down before forumotion, so we shouldn't worry too much about this site going down anytime soon (but we should worry about youtube, vimeo, mediafire)

Not really. As you can see what is happening to file sites around the world after MegaUpload was shut down, people are disabling features so they can keep business up, and so they won't be shut down. I can see major policy changes on youtube (google), with agreements with the government in charge to stay up. Personally, since google, is a large company, I think they will have more wiggleroom within the law then a smaller company than fourmmotion will have. Considering if Youtube was shut down, it looses a major revenue stream, and cause economic impact. I think forummotion would be shut down first. Just my two cents.

YouTube is actually losing money, even with all the ads on it. They're really just keeping it for the media influence and because of how much the name is worth. Not to mention that if they sold it to some dude in India who turns in into an advertising agency site, people are going to be pretty pissed.
However, if it were brought down because of ACTA, it wouldn't actually be that bad for them. At least, it certainly wouldn't be worth it to funnel more money into employing copyright cops and more programmers so that they can police every video that's uploaded onto their site. After all, that's what ACTA is about: making third parties and middlemen (for internet uses, read: hosting sites and p2p services) responsible for what uses their services, regardless of knowledge or intent.

Here's my prediction of what would happen if ACTA went into effect (keep in mind that these actions would be planned before then) :

First day: Commonly used torrent trackers are either taken down or blocked. There'd be a fight to bring them back, and by the second day, they'd be back up on another site, only to be brought down again shortly after, but they'd fight it for a lot longer than a lot of other sites/services would.
Second day: Commonly used filesharing sites are either taken down or blocked. 2Pac returns from the grave to make a song about it. Video sharing sites get a 2-week-or-so notice.
Third day: No one knows what's going on except the guys laughing maniacally and pressing buttons. These buttons don't seem to do very much, but by the end of the week, half of the websites that no one has ever heard of have disappeared.
It wouldn't be until about the second or third week that forumotion gets seriously affected, besides small prunages of forumotion-hosted forums that link to piracy-related material. However, Line Rider will probably be gone before then, as all these sites being taken down becomes a huge opportunity for corporations to show their advertising muscle. Paid advertising is one thing that would never be touched by ACTA, even if the rest of the internet collapsed completely. Small, generally unambitious companies like InXile wouldn't stand a chance against this wave of newfound large corporate power.

Pretty grim, I know, but then again, I'm generally a pessimist, so it probably wouldn't be that bad. Still, I think it's a grim enough prediction that we should do what we can do avoid it.

Hedgehogs4Me wrote:

Rainbow Dash wrote:

rabid squirrel wrote:And I'm pretty sure that sites like tumblr, mediafire, youtube, vimeo, etc will go down before forumotion, so we shouldn't worry too much about this site going down anytime soon (but we should worry about youtube, vimeo, mediafire)

Not really. As you can see what is happening to file sites around the world after MegaUpload was shut down, people are disabling features so they can keep business up, and so they won't be shut down. I can see major policy changes on youtube (google), with agreements with the government in charge to stay up. Personally, since google, is a large company, I think they will have more wiggleroom within the law then a smaller company than fourmmotion will have. Considering if Youtube was shut down, it looses a major revenue stream, and cause economic impact. I think forummotion would be shut down first. Just my two cents.

YouTube is actually losing money, even with all the ads on it. They're really just keeping it for the media influence and because of how much the name is worth. Not to mention that if they sold it to some dude in India who turns in into an advertising agency site, people are going to be pretty pissed.
However, if it were brought down because of ACTA, it wouldn't actually be that bad for them. At least, it certainly wouldn't be worth it to funnel more money into employing copyright cops and more programmers so that they can police every video that's uploaded onto their site. After all, that's what ACTA is about: making third parties and middlemen (for internet uses, read: hosting sites and p2p services) responsible for what uses their services, regardless of knowledge or intent.

Here's my prediction of what would happen if ACTA went into effect (keep in mind that these actions would be planned before then) :

First day: Commonly used torrent trackers are either taken down or blocked. There'd be a fight to bring them back, and by the second day, they'd be back up on another site, only to be brought down again shortly after, but they'd fight it for a lot longer than a lot of other sites/services would.
Second day: Commonly used filesharing sites are either taken down or blocked. 2Pac returns from the grave to make a song about it. Video sharing sites get a 2-week-or-so notice.
Third day: No one knows what's going on except the guys laughing maniacally and pressing buttons. These buttons don't seem to do very much, but by the end of the week, half of the websites that no one has ever heard of have disappeared.
It wouldn't be until about the second or third week that forumotion gets seriously affected, besides small prunages of forumotion-hosted forums that link to piracy-related material. However, Line Rider will probably be gone before then, as all these sites being taken down becomes a huge opportunity for corporations to show their advertising muscle. Paid advertising is one thing that would never be touched by ACTA, even if the rest of the internet collapsed completely. Small, generally unambitious companies like InXile wouldn't stand a chance against this wave of newfound large corporate power.

Pretty grim, I know, but then again, I'm generally a pessimist, so it probably wouldn't be that bad. Still, I think it's a grim enough prediction that we should do what we can do avoid it.

Actually, that sounds like a good possibility. I just hope it doesn't pass overall in the first place.

^Reframed:
First day: A string of suicides stringing across the nation numbering in the hundreds. Thousands of stati and tweets about either the fatalities or ACTA.
Second day: Politicians use this as a soap box to stand on and appeal to the younger general public, blaming the other party to get reelected to repeal the things they enacted.
Third day: All facebook updates and tweets are deleted, along with the sites. Fatalities related to the internet restrictions rise above ten thousand.
Fourth day: Half of all jobs relating to online trading are immediately lost; China offers call it even if we repeal the law killing their economy seven-fold.
Fifth day: People hate everything.
Sixth day: The game, you lost it.

efrazable wrote:What's ACTA exactly?

I suppose this is as good as any time to answer this one.
ACTA is a "trade agreement", meaning that it has a much wider scope than PIPA or SOPA, which were (are?) internet-specific. It does function as a global version of SOPA (I say this because ACTA holds the provider of the service accountable for the actions of its users, just like SOPA, while PIPA makes it manditory for ISPs to block certain websites, which is a totally different thing), but it also functions to prevent copyright infringement (read: getting stuff done) IRL. Basically, the big IRL one here that people are freaking out about is that, under ACTA, all packages and parcels and other synonyms for stuff will get stopped at the border to be inspected in case copyrighted material is being sent without the copyright holder's approval. This means...
- Underpaid farmers that are being taken advantage of by being sold genetically modified crops that don't produce seeds (so they have to buy new seeds every year) won't be able to receive donated non-GM seeds, because the genes to those seeds are patented.
- Medical companies can stop medicine from reaching poor countries where they (the companies) are profiting off of selling symptom relievers rather than actual cures.
- The name "Smarties" is a trademark in some places to mean the candy the rest of us know as rockets. That's right, you have to live off of M&Ms now.

Smarties...that's our name for them in the UK!

Hmm...the American Govt seems very fond of snazzy acronyms for Acts. It hasn't got the sophistication of...for example our UK law "The Offences Against the Person Act 1861", heehee.

Back to topic...I wonder what the healthy balance is, really...fair use is so important for the common man trying to use copyrighted stuff for pure, innocent entertainment purposes. That must be protected.

^I wouldn't say that, necessarily. With youtube, if you are a partner, you get .3 cents per view on your channel. With pirating movies, nobody makes any profit.

If you think about it, back in ye olden days of records and cassettes, you weren't really paying for the music. You were paying for the service of recording the music. If you wanted to put the music on the background of something that you were making little or no money from (.3 cents multiplied by a million divided by a hundred gives you $3000, which is DIRT compared to real business figures nowadays, and once you start getting into the billions of views, a flat per-view rate just doesn't make sense), I doubt you'd be put up aganist the same resistance that you are now. If this same service-based business model were implimented nowadays, and with the entirety of the entertainment industry, you get exactly what the CEO of Valve has been saying all along: pirating, in general, is a service problem.

The only problem with the industry now is that the service is easy enough that anyone can do it, so the old business model no longer works.
To me, it seems pretty silly to think that the solution to this is making it illegal for anyone except the person that got there first to do that service.

Let's go down the list for solutions to these problems, shall we?

THE MOVIE INDUSTRY:
Your basic service that piracy cannot provide is the act of watching it in a theatre. Even if you have a large-screen TV, you can't possibly match the rush of the theatre. There's even something about the sticky floors, annoying audience, and bad food that you just won't get in your own home, that is still valuable. Therefore, the solution is to downsize (or rather, de-exaggerate) the expenses a bit so that you can still gain millions off of each movie, without having everyone who wants to see it buying their own digital copy. Here are a couple suggestions on my part:
- Actors don't need to be earning hundreds, or even tens, of millions a year. Get real. Their talent cannot possibly be that unique that they're worth that much money.
- Good special effects don't cost millions of dollars. I don't see how you could possibly spend that much money on them. Just think about how much that is, really. You are basically liquidating entire fortunes to make something explode on camera.

THE GAME INDUSTRY:
The basic service that is provided here is connectivity. Since the very beginning of games, they have been something that you do with friends. Easy services that connect you with others, like Steam, seem to be the way to go here. The basic MMORPG format is also a great money-maker, although personally I think that they could concentrate more on things that actually require thought and skill, instead of time.
As for the indie platformer trend that's been completely exploding lately, there are really two options I can see:
- Putting some ads on loading screens, title screens, and that sort of thing seems like a perfectly legit way to make money, and there are some great strategies when programming things that can make it very difficult to remove the ads.
- Buying an account, rather than the actual software, is a great way to do things. Games like Minecraft have taken off using thie strategy, even if it's easily circumvented by turning off your internet.

THE MUSIC INDUSTRY:
This one's a bit tougher, and it shows, as they've been making the most fuss. The music industry made a huge mistake quite a while ago when they jumped headfirst into new technology by making most of their sales come from selling the actual music by itself, rather than the show, and they've been paying for it ever since the tape recorder. Unfortunately, it's quite rare now for new musicians to be able to make substantial amounts of money off of live shows, which is really too bad. We honestly may have to change a little as a society for this to work, so that we accept music the same way we accept shows, as something that must be gone and seen, and experienced for yourself, to really have the full effect, even if it's not even live. We certainly did the same thing for theatre, as the movie industry makes way more money than the threatre industry nowadays.
I mean, hell, why not? I can certainly imagine a bunch of people sitting in a room with colourful lights around them, listening to a recording. That's essentially what we do for movies.


tl;dr: The movie industry and the gaming industry shouldn't even have a hard time at all surviving, even if what we now think of as "pirating" were completely legalized, which obviously won't happen. The music industry is a bit tougher, but it still certainly doesn't need MORE crazy laws.

On a related note,
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2508

What's cispa?

So should I back up all my line rider videos on my computer in case youtube gets killed? From what I understand the whole issue the governments are having is that people are posting stuff online without giving credit to companies that produced part of the video (such as the bgm). Also something about people illegally downloading stuff which is complete [censored] as far as I'm concerned because those guys have no idea how the internet works; you can't possibly keep that sort of thing regulated, no matter how hard you try!

shotoku wrote:So should I back up all my line rider videos on my computer in case youtube gets killed? From what I understand the whole issue the governments are having is that people are posting stuff online without giving credit to companies that produced part of the video (such as the bgm). Also something about people illegally downloading stuff which is complete [censored] as far as I'm concerned because those guys have no idea how the internet works; you can't possibly keep that sort of thing regulated, no matter how hard you try!

That whole bill has died but there is a new one.. I don't think it is much of a problem even if facebook backs it up. It's called CISPA, I haven't read it but I plan to.

And what happened with ACTA? I sort of lost track of that bill recently.

CISPA wrote:IN GENERAL- The Director of National Intelligence shall establish procedures to allow elements of the intelligence community to share cyber threat intelligence with private-sector entities and to encourage the sharing of such intelligence.

CISPA wrote:The term ‘cyber threat intelligence’ means information in the possession of an element of the intelligence community directly pertaining to a vulnerability of, or threat to, a system or network of a government or private entity, including information pertaining to the protection of a system or network from--
‘(A) efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy such system or network; or
‘(B) theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information.

Anyone have any idea what any of this means? http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr3523/text

Aaand... cispa just passed.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120426/14505718671/insanity-cispa-just-got-way-worse-then-passed-rushed-vote.shtml