Support American Censorship Day

Townhall.com ^ | November 14, 2011 | Jeff Carter

[Kaslin]

Brad Feld tweeted this web site, and Fred Wilson blogged about it. After viewing this video, I support it.

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Here is a link to the website if you would like to support American Censorship Day too.

I appreciate the sentiment of Hollywood and the music industry. People download stuff off of the internet without paying for it. Artists should get paid for things they produce-but the two bills pending before both houses of Congress are the wrong way to go about it.

I don’t know the right way to go about it. Even in the porn industry, porn stars have made a video decrying the free porn on the internet. It’s destroying their business.

What I do know is no matter what piece of legislation they pass, people will still find a way to illegally download whatever they want. The detriment will be that honest businesses won’t be able to start up because of the bill.

We need to figure out a market based solution to this problem. Legislation won’t work. I don’t think it is far fetched to say that when it comes to supporting political parties, Brad Feld and Fred Wilson are on the opposite side of the fence from me. This is an issue that we totally agree on.

Censorship infringes on freedom. I understand that there is a lot of bad stuff out there, and bad things you can do. It’s up to the individual to educate people to stay away from it, and ignore it. If they don’t have customers, they won’t survive.

Another important thing to note, once they censor one thing, what’s stopping them from censoring something else? If they can censor the Tea Party, why can’t they censor Occupy Wall Street? Where does it stop? It’s a slippery slope to erosion of all kinds of freedom.

Please join me in support of American Censorship Day on November 16.

Links:

Entrepreneurship is one way out of the economic debacle, and one way to solve the unemployment conundrum. But, if you want a culture of entrepreneurship, you have to get rid of over reaching government. That means programs like Obamacare.

Bank financing for your start up?

Transaction taxes aren’t happening in the US. Even Obama won’t do a transaction tax with as much as he has done to cripple American finance.

This is pretty cool. Real time tweets for World War Two.

University of Chicago has the top Exec MBA program. The full time program is number one as well. I can personally attest to the quality of the EMBA program. It wasn’t a cakewalk.

Berlusconi resigns. Fellini drama continues in Italy.

This is an interesting expose on media bias. I have noticed it for years in the main stream media. They don’t report things. I know a newspaper editor that has a photo of Obama taking the oath of office in their office. Bet they didn’t have a photo of Bush, or even Clinton in there. In this case, the reporter questions whether James O Keefe is using underhanded tactics to get his story.

Question for you to answer in the comments. Now that $CME has pledged 300 million of its own money to help customer in their travails with MF Global, what’s the stock do Monday? It’s off $15 since the MF debacle.

A little analysis of the Chicago politics on display last week in the Obama White House.

Ya know, Solyndra isn’t the only government failure. There is a litany of them. Governments don’t invest. They can’t ever invest. They spend.

There was a Republican debate last night, but there were three good football games on so no one watched it. Kind of like if a tree falls in the woods, does it make any noise?

[UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide]

We don’t need a solution, “free market” or otherwise.

Technology, having made per-copy cost now zero and discovery impossible without recording all of everyone’s activities, has rendered copyright obsolete. This happened before the internet.

Musicians make money from the live show and film exhibitors from the theater experience. The people cut out are producers of the “hardcopy” who think they should “own” a copyright. And that’s fine. We don’t need them anymore.

Artists have the exclusive right to money generated by their art. Free trading generates no money, so there is no money to be had. They or their putative agents have no right to look at everything a person does online or everything on their hard drive in order to extract it.

[Cacique]

This is not about “fixing” a problem, it’s about control. Plain and simple. The republicans and democrats don’t like people to have information. This law is a pretext to shut down websites under any pretext. Net Neutrality goes into effect on the 20th and this is just more ammunition to shut down the internet and have total government control it. THEY WANT TO BE ABLE TO FILTER WHAT INFORMATION YOU HAVE AND CREATE YOUR PERCEPTION OF THE REALITY THEY WILL CREATE FOR YOU..

[abb]

Where “copyright” got its start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662

The Licensing of the Press Act 1662 is an Act of the Parliament of England (14 Car. II. c. 33), long title “An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses.

[af_vet_rr]

And I will not vote for any politician who supports SOPA. Any Republican who supports it is no better than a Democrat.

I can think of half a dozen scenarios under SOPA where access to Free Republic is blocked.