The Obama administration has responded to two petitions regarding SOPA, but in true political fashion, the response is 838 words of absolutely nothing at all. Here’s a link, but don’t complain to me about losing 10 minutes of your life reading this empty drivel. How about taking a stand for once, eh?
They’ll likely support anything that doesn’t appear to be a blatant ignorance of the technological issues.
There is at least some suggestion that “strong due process” will be expected… which is pretty much the opposite of what SOPA was calling for.
<sigh>
This bit is interesting: “The organizer of this petition and a random sample of the signers will be invited to a conference call to discuss this issue further with Administration officials and soon after that, we will host an online event to get more input and answer your questions.”
As one of the signers of the petitions in question, I wonder if I’ll get invited
In the grand scheme of things, I still expect little opposition when this bill hits the POTUS desk.
I seriously do not understand what people have an issue with in SOPA if all the bad stuff is taken out….of course, if you remove the DNS provision, if you require real due process, if you prevent entrenched interests from being able to abuse it to fight start up competition and free speech, then what is left?
The problem with SOPA is the same either with or without the bad stuff included – it does nothing to prevent piracy. If you shut down one site or avenue for piracy, there’ll be three more the next week to take its place.
The linked to post has it part right… piracy is a problem, but it’s a business problem, in the same kind of way that the automobile was to the horse and buggy industry. Meaning, you probably weren’t able to make much money selling horse carriages once the automobile became popular. How stupid would it have been for the horse & buggy industry to try and pass laws that made it illegal for people to drive in order to prop up an industry that would’ve died on its own?
Thus, new technologies have a tendency to make some business models obsolete, and trying to sell something that can be replicated endlessly for $0 is just not a viable business model anymore. Of course, you can scream and shout and cry all you want about those filthy f**king pirates, but it still doesn’t change the inevitable. You see ads at the beginning of DVDs about how ‘you wouldn’t steal a car’, but if people could clone one out of thin air at no cost, you bet your ass they would do it.
Edited 2012-01-16 10:00 UTC
I hope that the SOPA gets passed with its most draconian parts intact.
When this happens, it’ll start a process that ends up with the world using more secure, decentralised technologies (moving away from DNS/CAs/IANA), resulting in a more robust internet.
It may be a bit painful for a few years, but we’ll end up in a better place for it.
The problem is that there will always be physical wires owned by someone with bad intents
Decentralized voluntary wifi networks can be envisioned in big cities, but how well would trans-city and trans-continental connectivity go ?
All I can say is that I hope Ron Paul wins the presidency because all of the other candidates on both sides of the aisle are going to vote yes to crap like this.
actually… Paul would probably support the essence of this because it is trying to tackle a constitutionally federal issue.
He’s actually one of the few against it: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111115/09233216778/ron-paul-come…
I said Essence. He is against it for the reasons all good freedom loving anti-corpratists are against it….the ideas that generated it though are not something he would be against because its aim is to stop foreign pirates.
Lets keep the politics to a minimum could we? Especially the pro/anti candidate stuff. Policies OK, candidates, no.
It is interesting that they didn’t remove the link in the petition (mirrored below). It was obviously included to prove a point – that the administration’s own website would be guilty under the provisions of SOPA.
http://i.imgur.com/TD4Kq.jpg
As my understanding goes, so long as the law was enforced without favoritism, whitehouse.gov would be subject to take down without a court order.
Why on earth would you think that it would?
Soulbender,
“Why on earth would you think that it would?”
+1 Informative
+1 Insightful
+1 Funny
… is this the same petition-response Techdirt is reporting about? I can’t help but think that this short OSnews-entry is kind of unfair, slamming the White House just because.
Techdirt points out that the response is indeed *against* the broad approach of SOPA and such, and I would agree. The thing is that they don’t *need* to mention SOPA specifically but the intent of censoring the Internet or harming new technologies. From the short snippets I read, this is exactly what they’re doing.
In hope that this doesn’t get deleted: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120114/09513217409/white-house-c…
Sorry OSnews, but your approach isn’t what I’d call good journalism.
Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but it does not matter what they write or say in a response to a petition. Word in the wind. What matters, is what’s inside the SOPA (and the others). The rest is just smoke.
Well, no, not really.
As I commented last time this came up: you have to understand the U.S. legislative process. The executive branch – the White House – has no ability directly to control or even really to influence the content of the legislation at this point in the process. It can’t even _stop_ the legislation at this point in the process.
The President gets his chance once a bill has been passed by both legislative houses; he can choose to veto it. (In some cases he has a line-item veto power, which means he can authorize most of the bill but veto specific parts, but I’m not entirely clear on the circumstances which apply surrounding that, so skip it). But he can’t veto a bill _until_ it’s approved by both houses and sent to his office.
At this point in the process, what the President can do in public is effectively to set out his terms for vetoing or not vetoing a bill, which is what this statement does: it’s clearly written to suggest, for e.g., that Obama would veto a bill containing the most controversial bit of SOPA/PIPA, the DNS-blocking provisions.
To be clear – right now, Obama has very little power over the SOPA/PIPA legislation. He could not actually choose, for instance, to kill it tomorrow. That just isn’t how U.S. politics works. He could announce a definite intention to veto it, but that’s about as far as he could go, and it would be a relatively radical stance: the presidential veto power is a somewhat sensitive subject in the U.S., and presidents don’t like to look as if they’re waving it around with the safety catch off, so to speak.
Of course, when the party of which the President is a member is in control of one or other house, the President may have substantial *informal* influence over legislation at the draft, review and voting stages, though he still has no formal, legislated influence. When the other party controls the house, he really can’t do a whole lot besides threaten the veto the bill and ask for concessions to be made in exchange for *not* vetoing it, which is precisely what he’s doing now.
Thom is yet again being dramatic, and he has seemed to miss the bit,
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/obama-administratio…
So it does seem they are actually against it.
Why don’t you read the thing for yourself instead of relying on third parties?
Anybody with even a dime of undersanding about politics (and I have a very deep interest in the politics of my own country as well as that of the US, as I follow US politics closely) knows this is an empty statement. Nwhere does it say they are against anything. No stand is taken. No point is made. It’s just meaningless jibber-jabber to appease everyone.
Incredible how people fall for this. In The Netherlands, you’d lose voters over non-statements like this.
Welcome to U.S. politics – here you just have to associate with one of the two major parties in power and you’re likely to win.
Thom…. it says what they are against in BOLD in the damn statement.
They do not have to say “we are against SOPA” since they are against all that is ACTUALLY BAD about SOPA and PIPA.
You fell for it.
The statement doesn’t define anything. It doesn’t have any ‘hard’ words in it. All it says is: “Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.”
Now go ask a SOPA-supporter if SOPA is about censorship or inhibiting innovation. They’ll all claim it is not. See where this is going? Of course Obama is against censorship, but by not defining a hard line between “this is censorship” and “this is not censorship”, he can sign SOPA into law without ever violating this statement. Obama has very close ties with the entertainment lobby (ask Biden), so he’ll simply agree with Hollywood that SOPA is not about censorship, end of story.
If a political statement is released, look for ‘hard’ words, lines, definitions, etc. This statement has none. As such, it isn’t even worth the bits it uses.
Did you miss the bit where Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, said he would oppose HR 3261 (SOPA) and would stop it from becoming law in its current form? Did you miss the bit where the House shelved HR 3261, meaning it’s no longer in the active pipeline to become a law? I know we still need to stop PIPA, and then move SOPA from “shelved” to outright discarded, but we are in fact making progress on this issue. Get down off your high horse, kthx.
You realise the shelving happened after posting this story and comment, right?
Jst checking.
Do you realise that you stop all sensible debate with you by the fact that you pretend you are right at all times, instead of any actual intellectual integrity?
You are bad as those other bloggers (such as the Chap from the Daring Fireball) that you say are biased.
You know it is alright to be wrong sometimes, and facts change so implying someone is an idiot after he comments on the facts that he knew about is pretty out of order.
BTW BBC NEWS (Which is owned and paid for by UK taxpayers) seem to agree with the fact that the Whitehouse is against it
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16574977
Edited 2012-01-16 20:14 UTC
I did read it myself. However they explained it better than I, thus I quoted and gave the source.
It is normal believe it or not, to quote someone else when you think they can explain something better than yourself. I believe you have done it yourself as well.
I dunno, whenever I wrote a report at University, it wasn’t frowned upon to give a quote with the actual reference material, preferably using Harvard Referencing System.
Given those 838 words were enough to piss off all of Obama’s (now-ex) Hollywood donors, I pretty much think your analysis was absolutely wrong on this, Thom. Those 838 words seem to have said plenty enough.
http://www.deadline.com/2012/01/exclusive-hollywood-moguls-stopping…
mostly irrelevant to the topic, but here’s a fun fact for you guys:
in Greek “SOPA” means “shut up”, while “PIPA” means “blowjob”
…I leave the rest to you
Somewhat complimentary to the Greek meaning, in Bulgarian SOPA (Ñопа) means a ‘heavy wooden stick’ – maybe the tool they’ll use to shut us up.
PIPA (пипа) means ‘to touch’ conjugated in 2nd person, singular. Not a prerequisite for a blow job
In portuguese, SOPA means soup.
This one phrase stood out in my mind when I read it. “… with strong due process and focused on criminal activity.”
Nice how they side step how an affected site/person/group can be afforded that due process when there is none!