Gibbs discusses how Big Media’s agenda is, once again, framing laws that are bad in every way.
Let’s begin this week with a tale where logical thinking was noticeably absent. It is a great example of an over-the-top reaction to a perceived but unreal problem.
A young man named Joshua Seater had been out drinking beer by the liter (sounds like the beginning of a limerick, doesn’t it?), in Portland, Ore. On the way home at around 1:30 a.m., it is alleged that Seater, presumably in a “well-oiled” state, felt a pressing need to relieve himself and spying a body of water, decided to contribute to its volume.
Alas for Seater, the body of water turned out to be public water reservoir that was monitored by security cameras and his micturition was recorded for posterity. How Seater was identified has not been explained (“Put out an APB for a man with a … oh, never mind.”) but although neither arrested nor charged, Seater may face a fine.
IN PICTURES: Covert Camera Designed to Spy on You
Now, if you were a raving bureaucrat responsible for said reservoir, what would you do? Exactly! You would drain the reservoir just in case! Yep, and at a cost of $36,000!
Forget the fact that birds swim and poop into that same water all the time, that insects not only die in it but reproduce in it (ewww) all year ’round, and that mountains of leaves and dust fall into it constantly; an administrator at the Portland Water Bureau, one David Shaff, defended the decision by arguing, “Do you want to drink pee? Most people are going to be pretty damn squeamish about that.”
Let’s see, the effective capacity of the average human bladder is between 150 and 300 ml and we’ll assume, for the sake of argument, Seater is on the higher end of that spectrum which makes his bladder capacity about 0.08 gallons. They drained some 8 million gallons from the lake which meant that his contribution was about 1 part in 100 million.
This means that Seater was responsible for a mere 0.000378541178 cubic millimeters of each gallon which equates to just under 4 ten-thousandths of the volume of a pinhead.
Overreaction? I think we can safely say “yes, definitely.”
Now, what else could we parallel in the online world as a similar overreaction to a situation? Ah, yes, how the entertainment industry (a.k.a., the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, a.k.a., “Big Media”) thinks about piracy as well as how the politicians they’ve bought and sold are dealing with their concerns.
Here’s the problem: Big Media has failed (“miserably” would be a kind description) to deal with piracy.
A great example was the RIAA’s pogrom against downloaders. This ridiculous and unethical campaign captured both the guilty and the innocent (the latter who usually caved in to the extortion game played by the RIAA’s lawyers) netting uncollectable judgments of tens of thousands of dollars and, in one celebrated case against a single, unemployed mother, Jammie Thomas Rasset, millions of dollars in penalties.
BIG MEDIA’S REACH: Share Netflix? Share a jail cell
Today, to further promote the craziness, the MPAA’s disinformation campaign continues in high gear. On the MPAA’s official blog, the organization’s senior vice president and chief technology policy officer, Paul Brigner, opined on July 1 that “Internet users who go looking for stolen movies online may end up getting more than they bargained for — a practically ‘indestructible’ form of malicious software designed to give cyber criminals remote control over users’ computers.”
Brigner conflates the rapid expansion of a particularly efficient malware called TDL with pirating and downloading movies and concludes that the problem is “rogue sites … reaching U.S. consumers. Stealing movies isn’t worth the risk to American jobs — or the risk to Internet security.”
What the … ?! So the major driving force behind the spread of this malware is illegal movie downloads and it will be the end of the U.S. economy and the Internet (and, presumably, civilization) as we know them? If that’s all it takes to trash, well, everything, then may the gods help us!
But that’s just a warm up for the main act: Despite the wretched “Protect IP” Bill losing ground, the political stooges of Big Media are hard at work on yet another dollop of misguided legislation, the so-called “Ten Strikes” bill.
The bill, S. 978, is titled, “A bill to amend the criminal penalty provision for criminal infringement of a copyright, and for other purposes.”
According to a Variety article (irritatingly titled, as Variety is wont to do, “Biz pushes pols on illegal streaming”), “Industry lobbyists pressed House members … to pass legislation that would make illegal streaming of movies, TV shows and other types of content a felony, bringing the penalty in line with those for other types of criminal copyright infringement.”
Sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who was, oddly, a big supporter of net neutrality, and who was presumably “pressed” by the aforementioned lobbyists, the bill would, in effect, make singing karaoke illegal because it includes “public performance” as an infringement!
So, video your 6-year-old lip-syncing to some Top 40 song and post it on YouTube and you can collect a million views and go straight to jail. Indeed, in theory, should you have any copyrighted music or, say, NFL highlights or a major motion picture, playing in the background of any online video and you could wind up sharing a cell with Bubba … at least if Big Media gets their way.
The bill specifies, for no apparently good reason, that 10 “public performances” during any 180-day period of any copyrighted works with a total retail value of the performances exceeding $2,500 with a total fair market value of licenses for those performances exceeding $5,000 to be a felony.
That also means that 10 embeddings, 10 streams, or 10 downloads would all count as “public performances” and, depending on the interpretation of the value of those performances, bam! You could be heading toward huge legal bills.
Now, no one wants to see unfairness. The idea of artists and the businesses investing in their works being “ripped off” is not what any reasonable person would want but when laws are being framed such that any federal prosecutor trying to make a name for herself can fire up a case against any perceived violation there’s something terribly wrong.
It’s a lot like draining a lake because one guy took a leak in it on the way home: The response is out of proportion to the “crime,” it makes no financial sense, and everyone winds up losing.
If you want to express your disapproval of this bill, go to the Demand Progress website and send a letter to your representatives demanding that they vote against it.
And while you’re at it, tell them about overreaction and peeing in lakes. Do they want to be the guy that spends thousands of dollars just to, in theory, please a few people and, in reality, annoy many, many more?
Gibbs pleases everyone in Ventura, Calif. Your approval to backspin@gibbs.com.
