If you were mad about Obamacare, if you were made about the Patriot Act, the DHS watch lists, the administration’s reach into your diets, then you’re already concerned about SOPA.

SOPA = Stop Online Piracy Act sounds benign, as almost all legislation does. The names of most bills are completely antithetical to what the bill would actually do. SOPA is no exception. You read the name. “Piracy is bad,” you think. “Respect for intellectual property is good,” you think. Both of these things are correct. SOPA survives on the assumption that this is all the bill entails. Piracy is a major problem, but SOPA, and its Senate companion PIPA (Protect IP Act), are the worst ways to go about solving it.

What is SOPA?

The bill would authorize the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders against websites outside U.S. jurisdiction accused of infringing on copyrights, or of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.^[4] After delivering a court order, the U.S. Attorney General could require US-directed Internet service providers, ad networks, and payment processors to suspend doing business with sites found to infringe on federal criminal intellectual property laws. The Attorney General could also bar search engines from displaying links to the sites.^[13]

If the Justice Department or a copyright holder believed a site was directing users to pirated content, they would go to court. Depending on who’s complaining, different remedies would come into play: In some instances a judge could order an Internet service provider like Verizon to cut off access to a site. In others, a search engine like Google could be directed to delete links to an infringing site. The idea is to starve the offending sites of the web traffic that keeps them in business.

Inconclusively, too.

Google and First Amendment scholars like Harvard’s Lawrence Tribe argue that SOPA would squelch free speech by giving private parties power to effectively cripple sites that allegedly — but not conclusively — steal copyrighted content. The simple filing of a complaint, they say, would exert huge pressure on the Internet ecosystem to blacklist an accused site. They also say it would give the feds dangerous new powers to go after sites for political reasons.

Gizmodo:

Perhaps the most galling thing about SOPA in its original construction is that it let IP owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off. All it required was a single letter claiming a “good faith belief” that the target site has infringed on its content. Once Google or PayPal or whoever received the quarantine notice, they would have five days to either abide or to challenge the claim in court. Rights holders still have the power to request that kind of blockade, but in the most recent version of the bill the five day window has softened, and companies now would need the court’s permission.

The language in SOPA implies that it’s aimed squarely at foreign offenders; that’s why it focuses on cutting off sources of funding and traffic (generally US-based) rather than directly attacking a targeted site (which is outside of US legal jurisdiction) directly. But that’s just part of it.

…to the point of potentially creating an “Internet Blacklist”…

Here’s the other thing: Payment processors or content providers like Visa or YouTube don’t even need a letter shut off a site’s resources. The bill’s “vigilante” provision gives broad immunity to any provider who proactively shutters sites it considers to be infringers. Which means the MPAA just needs to publicize one list of infringing sites to get those sites blacklisted from the internet.

Potential for abuse is rampant. As Public Knowledge points out, Google could easily take it upon itself to delist every viral video site on the internet with a “good faith belief” that they’re hosting copyrighted material. Leaving YouTube as the only major video portal. Comcast (an ISP) owns NBC (a content provider). Think they might have an interest in shuttering some rival domains? Under SOPA, they can do it without even asking for permission.

Who is behind it?

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I ask what are we going to do about it? There’s no doubt that the MSM is in the tank for the Dems. That knowledge and a six pack will get me a buzz.

You’re connected and have a platform. Put the question out to all the folks who read your posts, “How do we combat this extreme bias?”

The alternate media does a great job but there are a TON of really intelligent people who are too busy earning a living to research things. How do we reach these people, most of whom are “Your father’s Democrats”?

The answer to this question is simple: Don’t stand for it.

I was a liberal until about 1991, and what a shocker it was to discover that the very same media I had no problems with prior to seeing the light was now filled with lies, propaganda, half-truths, and any number of parlor tricks intentionally set up to destroy our side. Unless you lived through it, you can’t imagine how frustrating it was to sit through the ‘92 election unable to do anything about the corrupt MSM’s partisan crusade to elect Bill Clinton.

Keep in mind that this was before the Internet, before email, before Andrew Breitbart, before Twitter, before Fox News, and before talk radio was the force that it is today. At the time, the only person going on television and aggressively exposing this injustice and saying the things I wanted to say was one of my few living heroes, The Mighty Brent Bozell.

The good news is that it’s not 1992 anymore and you no longer have to sit around frustrated waiting for someone else to speak for you. Best of all, you also aren’t in a position where you have to put all the effort into composing a letter of complaint hoping some newspaper will print it.

If you want to do something about media bias — which is doing something for America — use the Internet. Also…

Use us.

Help us. (more…)

There is a lot of factually inaccurate information out on the Internet and Bill Clinton doesn’t like it. He also has a solution. If you guessed that it would be to encourage more speech out there to counter it then you’re probably not well acquainted with Democrats. Well, obviously, we need a new government agency which would be in charge of make sure everything on the Internet is on the up and up.

It would, of course, have to be totally independent to maintain credibility. It would be taxpayer funded, which throws a bit of a wrench into the works seeing as somebody in government will be signing the checks. Mr. Clinton, who says it’s a legitimate thing to do, suggests that this independent federal agency would be structured as such that the president wouldn’t be able to influence anything it does.  That would be an overt conflict of interest, people wouldn’t trust such a body to not insert their own spin on things.

“That is, it would be like, I don’t know, National Public Radio or BBC or something like that, except it would have to be really independent and they would not express opinions, and their mandate would be narrowly confined to identifying relevant factual errors.”

In other words, absolutely nothing like NPR or BBC, which are absolutely rife with bias, spin and factual errors. Of course, citations would be needed. I’m not sure what they would cite, though. If a New York Times article is written by someone who wasn’t actually there and fabricated the story out of whole cloth would that still work? Maybe Wikipedia?

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Bill Clinton wants the government to “correct” what you say on the Internet, folks. Should the government listen to the former panderer-in-chief, we’ll go from Big Brother to Big Bubba on the ol’ Internet tubes.

Bubba is not happy with what he claims is the “misinformation” on the Internet and he wants the force of government to stop it all. Politico is reporting that Clinton makes the proposal in an upcoming CNBC interview saying, “It would be a legitimate thing to do.”

No, Bubba, it would not.

Clinton says that the idea of having a government agency that “corrects” the “misinformation” on the Internet would be “independent” of government so it isn’t a traditional government agency. This, he feels would make it all A-OK with those fearing Big Brother government ministries of propaganda.

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This seems a bit dramatic.

In hilarious 1994 footage of NBC’s Today Show, the now-famous American television journalist Katie Couric asks her fellow co-hosts how the internet works.

But it seems NBC did not see the funny side, as the employee responsible for making it public has been fired from his job at the television station, according to a Washington Post reporter.

The YouTube video shows Katie Couric, along with fellow anchors Bryant Gumbel and Elizabeth Vargas, talking about the ‘@’ sign and saying how ‘stupid’ it sounded to pronounce it as ‘at’.

[...]

But Washington Post journalist Rob Pegoraro revealed on Twitter that the employee has been fired.

He told followers: ‘The guy who posted the 1994 Today Show “What is internet?” clip on YouTube e-mailed to say he got canned for that. Ugh.’

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Ah, good times. What websites define Couric’s worldview, one wonders?

The slings and arrows of outrageous legislation, proposed and enacted, fly at you in fusillades from every direction. The enemy lurches towards you, massive, determined, unstoppable. The cavalry you expected to throw him back in confusion has decided to sit this one out. Betrayed, you’re on your own.

In this case, it is the National Rifle Association that has literally decided to sit this one out. After swearing that the freedom and right to bear arms is also dependent on the freedom of speech, it has decided to recuse itself from the First Amendment objections in exchange for a protected status. It will not oppose H.R. 1575, the Disclose Act, sponsored by Maryland Democrat Christopher Van Hollen. The purpose of this legislation is to counter the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, which freed corporations and non-profits from many of the restrictive speech provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. It was a qualified victory for the First Amendment.

The NRA’s first obligation must be to its members and to its most ardent defense of firearms freedom for America’s lawful gun owners….The NRA will continue to fight for its right to speak out in defense of the Second Amendment. Any efforts to silence the political speech of NRA members will, as has been the case in the past, be met with strong opposition.

The rest of you can pound sand. (more…)

The President’s recent commencement address to Hampton University students in Virginia counseled the young minds about the dangers of being bombarded by too much information, but who knew that Joe Lieberman was listening when the President said:

Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations; information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment. All of this is not only putting new pressures on you; it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.

The President also schooled the kids on how difficult it is to sift through all of the information on the web.  Perhaps he thinks the government should help us by winnowing out some of the inconsequential information?

All of that mind-boggling information and the new pressures on our country and our democracy must have triggered a response in this “independent senator” from Connecticut (who caucuses with the Democrats of course, just like the other “independent senator,” Bernie Sanders of Vermont), as Joe Lieberman has offered legislation that he claims will “protect” America during an emergency by giving the President power to shut down the Internet. (more…)

Leave it to the Obama administration to come up with yet another bald power grab, in the guise of “helping” us: now the FCC, invoking an ancient  law designed to regulate the telephone industry, wants to lay its heavy hand on broadband:

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to begin the controversial process of reframing broadband service under communications law, a move aimed at clarifying the commission’s regulatory authority over the sector after a major legal setback.

By a three-to-two vote split along partisan lines, the FCC approved a notice of inquiry asking for comments from the public on how the agency should proceed with Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposal to reclassify broadband as a regulated telecommunications service, while enacting checks against the commission’s oversight authority.

Naturally, in the emerging American version of Italian fascism, major cyber-players are on board with this in order to let the government do their dirty work for them, and stamp out potential competition before it can gain a toehold in the marketplace — all, of course, in the guise of “protecting the consumer.” From My Way News: (more…)

How quickly it all happened: five years ago, and certainly ten, the idea that the daily newspaper would no longer be part of our morning routine would have seemed unthinkable to the majority of Americans.  And yet, in retrospect, it was inevitable: the speed and versatility of the internet, plus its inter-activity, made the daily newspaper obsolete, racheted up the speed of news to near the speed of light and put a premium on old-fashioned journalistic virtues that had gotten lost in the “professionalization” of journalism during the latter half of the 20th century.

More about that in a moment, but first this breaking news from the Wall Street Journal:

The Internet is poised to overtake newspapers as the second-largest U.S. advertising medium by revenue behind television, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook for 2010 to 2014.

The online ad business, excluding mobile ads, is set to expand to $34.4 billion in 2014 from $24.2 billion in 2009, according to the report, which PwC plans to release Tuesday.

Newspapers, meanwhile, continue to suffer from a decline in advertising revenue. According to numbers released by the Newspaper Association of America earlier this year, print advertising revenue dropped 28.6% in 2009 to $24.82 billion. The PwC report estimates that print advertising in newspapers will hit $22.3 billion by 2014.

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Much has happened since Rabbi Nesenoff emailed me his video interview of Helen Thomas containing her now-famous declaration that Jews should get the hell out of Palestine and go back to their homes in Germany and Poland.  Upon first watching the interview, I saw it a big story and was determined to make it go viral. The objective was not to go after the 89-year-old newswoman per se, as a teaching opportunity, showing that anti-Semitism still permeated through normal American society. That teaching moment didn’t really happen; instead I was the one who did the learning, and the lesson was all about how the media really worked.

The White House Press corps seemed very reluctant to touch the story. On one hand it was understandable as Thomas was a respected colleague.  Most of them had worked with her for a very long time.  On the other hand it was big news, and if the Rabbi’s interview subject were a senior member of the Administration those same reporters would have been all over the story.

When they got around to covering the story, media got the “facts” of the incident wrong.  I am not talking about Rosie O’Donnell’s idiotic statement dismissing the anti-Semitism displayed by Thomas’s call for Israeli Jews to return to the scene of the concentration camps, or her ignorant belief that no Jews lived in the Holy Land before 1948.  The traditional media’s biggest factual mistake was reporting that the controversy surrounded Thomas making an anti-Israel comment. (more…)

Yesterday I had the displeasure of reading Gregory Ferenstein’s column, “Why the web benefits liberals more than conservatives.” Ferenstein’s thesis is that liberal ideological characteristics facilitate Internet success, while the opposite is true for conservatism. Frankly, his entire piece is based on assumptions without evidence. Ferenstein states:

From…the million-strong Barack Obama Facebook page to the huge audience of the Huffington Post, liberals have been the dominant political force on the internet since the digital revolution began.”

Ferenstein avoids the most important reason for this phenomenon: Age. Younger people dominate the Internet, and younger people are more liberal by significant margins. So, Ferenstein could replace the phrase, “Liberals have been the dominant political force on the Internet since the digital revolution began,” with “Young people have been the dominant demographic on the Internet since the digital revolution began.” They have the same meaning.

He continues:

Research…suggests that the reason behind this imbalance may be the liberal belief system itself.

Liberals, the research finds, are oriented toward community activism…and feature user-generated content. Conservatives…are more comfortable with a commanding leadership and use restrictive policies to combat disorderly speech in online forums.

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Last week, Andrew Breitbart sat down with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network and articulated his position that the media is the primary adversary to those fighting for traditional American values.

Watch the whole thing: you’re sure to enjoy when Andrew discusses that while the New Media may well save the Republic (and perhaps the world), it has already saved him personally.

The Brody File show airs tonight on the CBN Newschannel.

A full profile of Andrew Breitbart will air on The 700 Club show May 13th.

Some highlights/discussion points below:

“By aiming everything at the media, I’ve pretty much done the one thing they ask you not to do: ‘please accept the premise that we’re fair and let’s move on.’ No, I’m not going to accept that premise.” (more…)

Apple has announced its new iPad tablet computer, marking the dawn of a new kind of device that bridges the gap between phone and laptop. Last November I wrote about the possibilities of this device for the print world over at Big Hollywood. In short, the potential is there to revolutionize the way we read print, from newspapers, books, magazines and comics?

The cost of paper, shipping and distribution are a problem for publishers. So is making their products easily available to consumers. Stores only have limited space and money to carry books. The internet has been a great boon in that regard in terms of sales, but reading on a computer screen can be an unappealing prospect to most people. The iPad is designed to change all that: a hand-held, touch-screen device that is high resolution and extremely light (about a pound and 1/2). It’s not only lighter than a book, you can carry hundreds of books and magazines in it and read them anywhere you’d take a book.

The print business is salivating over this device, seeing it as a platform that will do for print that iTunes did for music. Except iTunes has sold a lot of songs, but it has also impacted the music business in ways few could have foreseen. Industry insiders think it destroyed the album as people started buying songs separately.  Moving their content to digital it could have similar effects on publishers and the press, but the fact is, times are changing and print has gotten very expensive. (more…)

Thursday, in his resounding defense of the First Amendment in the Citizens United decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority:

…[w]hen Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.

“Censorship” is a dirty word in America, and that is why the restrictions at issue in our case were cloaked in the guise of “campaign finance reform.”  But the fact remains that any restrictions on political speech, especially those that criminalize such speech, send us down a very slippery and very dangerous slope.

Last March, our government argued in court that it has the Constitutional authority to ban books that mention a candidate for federal office.  The government later retracted that statement, but is there any doubt that such a statement never would have been made if there had not been 100 years of progressively more intrusive restrictions on political speech preceding it?    Had the Court not acted, what was to prevent the government from asserting that authority over the internet, which does not have the benefit of two centuries of tradition and jurisprudence protecting it?

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