New Anti-SOPA Song & Crowdsourced Video From Dan Bull

Anti-Statism, Education, IP Law, Police Statism, Pop Culture

By Stephan Kinsella / December 20, 2011 / 4 minutes of reading

I noted previously a brilliant music video, “Death of ACTA,” by Dan Bull. (More on ACTA, which has unfortunately now been signed by several countries.) Now he’s back with a new one, in a very creative attempt to fight the evil Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. As Mike Masnick notes in this Techdirt post (see below),

Perhaps even more interesting, however, is how the song and video came together. After deciding he wanted to write a song about SOPA, he reached out to his followers on Twitter, asking for “help with themes and lyrics.” After getting a bunch of ideas, and realizing he should do something different for the video, he went on Facebook and asked for volunteers to take photos of themselves holding up signs with the various lyrics… and tons and tons of people jumped at the chance. The whole video was put together over the last few hours, and the whole effort is pretty impressive.

Incidentally, Leo Laporte, host of TWiT, and Denise Howell, host of TWiT’s This Week in Law, in recent episodes have been heroic in opposing SOPA. In the most recent TWiT show, Laporte makes a strong argument in favor of Internet freedom and against limiting it in the name of copyright, in contradistinction to Nilay Patel, who takes a more mainstream and confused “balancing” approach. And in a recent episode of TWiL, where most of the commentators and guests tend to be anti-SOPA, lawyer Marty Schwimmer was invited on to defend the need for SOPA or something like it; Howell admirably dissents.

[C4SIF]

Here’s Masnick’s post:

New Anti-SOPA Song & Crowdsourced Video From Dan Bull

from the sopa-can-ban-ya dept

We’ve written about UK singer Dan Bull a bunch of times, highlighting his various songs that often cover copyright issues. His latest is an anti-SOPA song and video, called SOPA Cabana (take a wild guess what that’s a reference to). Check out the video here first, and read on below about the video and why it’s interesting (beyond the music/lyrics):

First of all, what strikes me as most interesting about this is that Dan’s not in the US, but the UK. But he recognizes how this law being debated in the US can have a significant and dangerous impact around the world. In talking about his reasons for doing a song about SOPA, Dan noted that “SOPA is abhorrent on three fronts:”

Firstly, it threatens the future of the internet, which is something far more valuable both commercially and socially than the entertainment industry ever has been, or ever will be.

Secondly, creativity is all about interpreting and re-imagining what you see and hear around you. The idea that creativity exists in some kind of vacuum, and that you’re not a real artist unless you can make something “completely original” is not only stupid, it contradicts the most fundamental axioms of how the universe works. Everything is influenced by something else. If we want a richer cultural landscape, we should embrace remixes, embrace mashups, and embrace sharing, not cling to ideas as pieces of property.

Thirdly, the internet is an amazing new forum for free speech and holding those in power us to account. The idea that governments and even private corporations can police the internet and decide what people on a global scale are allowed to say and hear is tyrannical.

Perhaps even more interesting, however, is how the song and video came together. After deciding he wanted to write a song about SOPA, he reached out to his followers on Twitter, asking for “help with themes and lyrics.” After getting a bunch of ideas, and realizing he should do something different for the video, he went on Facebook and asked for volunteers to take photos of themselves holding up signs with the various lyrics… and tons and tons of people jumped at the chance. The whole video was put together over the last few hours, and the whole effort is pretty impressive.

Dan Bull is a musician. The entertainment industry and the lobbyists supporting SOPA insist that they’re doing this to protect people like Dan Bull — but Dan is quite reasonably scared of what this law will do to his ability to succeed online. Dan Bull is as well known as he is because of the internet, and his ability to share his works wherever and however he likes. SOPA would make that a lot more difficult. It doesn’t “protect” Dan Bull. It helps destroy the careers of folks like Dan Bull by limiting their ability to create, promote, distribute and communicate.

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Book Review: Rehabilitating Lochner

Legal System, Non-Fiction Reviews

By Jacob Huebert / December 19, 2011 / 1 minute of reading

In the Winter 2012 Independent Review, I review David Bernstein’s Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform. Here’s how it starts:

Few Supreme Court cases receive more scorn in U.S. law schools than Lochner v. New York (198 U.S. 45), the 1905 decision that struck down a New York law limiting the number of hours that bakers could work as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. It’s safe to say that most legal academics and judges today believe that the Lochner Court engaged in extraordinarily outrageous “judicial activism” motivated by a devotion to extreme libertarian ideology, big business, or both.

In Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform, George Mason University law professor David Bernstein makes the case that the conventional view is wrong. He provides persuasive evidence that Lochner does not deserve to be singled out as an especially activist or offensive case and that Lochner‘s Progressive critics were the real activists with a much more disturbing agenda.

Read the rest.

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The evil SOPA is dead …. for now…. [Update: or not…]

Anti-Statism, IP Law, Police Statism, Protectionism, Technology

By Stephan Kinsella / December 16, 2011 / 2 minutes of reading

Update, from Masnick’s post below: “Update…. Or not. Despite the fact that Congress was supposed to be out of session until the end of January, the Judiciary Committee has just announced plans to come back to continue the markup this coming Wednesday. This is rather unusual and totally unnecessary. But it shows just how desperate Hollywood is to pass this bill as quickly as possible, before the momentum of opposition builds up even further.”

Great news!! As noted on Techdirt: SOPA Markup Runs Out Of Time; Likely Delayed Until 2012.

Canadian Copyright Horror: Criminalizing Bypassing Digital Locks; Forcing Students to Destroy Notes [C-11]

IP Law

By Stephan Kinsella / December 16, 2011 / 3 Comments / 2 minutes of reading

Skip Oliva sent me the following note about a chilling, censorious new copyright provision being debated in the Canadian parliament:

I’ve been reviewing C-11, a bill before the Canadian parliament to “modernize” the country’s copyright laws. The Conservative government is trying to push the bill through with minimal debate. The attention-grabber is the bill makes it a crime, punishable by five years imprisonment, to bypass a digital lock on content.

But here’s the really bizarre provision. C-11 actually requires students who take online classes to destroy their notes after the course is over. Here’s the actual proposed language:

It is not an infringement of copyright for a student who has received a lesson by means of communication by telecommunication under paragraph (3)(a) to reproduce the lesson in order to be able to listen to or view it at a more convenient time. However, the student shall destroy the reproduction within 30 days after the day on which the students who are enrolled in the course to which the lesson relates have received their final course evaluations.

Since the Conservatives have a majority in the House and are not shy about shutting down opposition, I expect this will pass next year when the House resumes sitting.

These insane attempts to ratchet up copyright law–with provisions like these, the DMCA, SOPA, etc., show that the state consists of completely sociopathic maniacs out to establish a police state and destroy the Internet and freedom in the name of so-called intellectual “property”. There can no longer be any excuse for so-called “libertarians” offering tepid, unprincipled justifications for copyright law. The time has come for all libertarians to call for complete IP abolition. No more excuses.

[C4SIF]

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Newt has raised Cold War-style paranoia to an art form

Uncategorized

By Ryan McMaken / December 15, 2011 / 2 minutes of reading

Here’s a somewhat funny article from Gizmodo that points out Newt’s misplaced fear of a EMP attack from Iran, North Korea or some other member of the Axis of Evil. (Saudi Arabia, the brutal Islamist dictatorship, which recently began talking about getting nukes, doesn’t count since the dictators are BFFs with the Bush family.)

The theoretical possibility of an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) attack will be familiar to people who keep a 1955 Chevy and a Faraday cage in the back yard “just in case”, although few people sit up nights about it since the actual threat is virtually non-existent. Except in the mind of Newt Gingrich.

Newt’s paranoia reminds me of a portion of Errol Flynn’s interview with Robert McNamara in The Fog of War. McNamara points out that the US in the early 1960s began to call for nuclear arms limitation deals. The US had a huge advantage in nuclear arms at the time (and still does), and the US figured it could keep that advantage by putting in place a limit or ban on the testing of nuclear arms. McNamara noted that the hawks in the administration were dead-set against any limitations because the Soviets would cheat by secretly testing nuclear bombs. Hiding nuclear explosions is somewhat difficult to do, so the hawks were asked just exactly HOW the Soviets would cheat.

Their response: “They’ll test nukes behind the moon.”

Even the warmonger McNamara found such a contention to be beyond the pale of Cutis LeMay-style nuclear paranoia. Newt, on the other hand, makes people like McNamara seem reasonable.

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