Author Archives: thepete

The screencap in this post is of an opinion piece from earlier this month on NYTimes.com (here: www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/opinion/what-wikipedia-wont-te... ) and provides another wonderful example of what's wrong with Capitalism. One of the things Capitalism is supposed to do is inspire innovation. But really what it does is encourage complacency. Rich folks whine about how welfare supposedly encourages poor people to be lazy, but what do you call the mainstream media's attitude toward the Internet? Rather than come up with new ways to make money from content or new ways to make content worth paying for, they whine and moan about how they need to be protected against "theft".

So here comes the NYT, with (I assume) the interest in presenting "both sides" of the IP protection argument. Of course, in the capped op-ed there is only the opinion of the paid industry rep, Cary H. Sherman. Sherman is an idiot who penned the piece in the hopes (?) of swaying people to come over to big business's side of the copyright protection argument. He spins tales of how protecting intellectual property protects Americans from fake goods, fraud, theft and the loss of American ingenuity and jobs. Yeah, right. What it really does is continue to allow old media to sit on their asses and not worry about innovation.

When then Internet showed up and started stealing TV-users, did the hardware side of the TV industry sit on their asses and whine? Nope--they got digital TVs and HD out the door and into the mainstream. OK, well, they did whine a little, in the form of lobbying the USG to force us all to switch to digital TVs, but at least that was in the name of innovation. What Old Media does is blatantly against innovation. What else do you call laws meant to block websites?

Ironically, I was with Sherman at the headline "What Wikipedia Won't Tell You" but his arguments were based on utter fiction. Here's the comment I posted on the NYT website:

You know, Cary, you're right when you say we were misled by companies like Google and Wikipedia, but that's where your "rightness" ends. Since when is it censorship when the courts have determined a site is doing something illegal? When it's legal to censor, that's when. When a pawn shop is shut down completely for selling stolen goods, that is censorship because surely some of what the pawn shop is selling is certainly not stolen. You say that the news orgs that supported PIPA/SOPA didn't do so on the air because they draw a line between "news" and "editorial"? Seriously? You are now blatantly lying to us. Fox News, CNN and MSNBC all broadcast their opinions daily and we all know it. They kept quiet because they didn't want to become a target of Internet outcry.

No, the real shame of it is that we were misled but not the way you mention and you could have made your point and made it well, without doing the very thing you accuse Wikipedia & Google of. The reality is that SOPA/PIPA hadn't passed a single house of Congress, so they were no threat, some sites did resort to absurd claims to worry users (sorry, Tumblr, "SAVE THE INTERNET" is not how you put it) and even if these bills were passed it would be impossible to block every site that violated them. Only big sites would get in trouble, costing them lots of users & lots of money. This is where their concern really was: money. Why else would they ignore the NDAA, a law that legalizes indefinite detention? SryOutOfSpace"

Yeah, NYT only allows 1500 characters in comments. So mean! :) But joking aside, you can see how this guy is full of shit and how him being paid by the industry seems to make it ok for him to sit back and whine, rather than come up with ways to make the same old crap his industry is selling be more worth paying for by consumers. Him getting paid by the industry also seems to make it ok to lie to us about what's really going on.

So, THANKS, NYT for letting this industry shill's voice reach more people (you know, no one is forcing you to post the entertainment industry's opinions). And THANKS Capitalism for being such a "great" economic system! I'm "glad" rich folks like Rick Santorum and others think it should be viewed as more important than the environment, human life and even reality, itself.

Hey, I just said "good" things about Capitalism just like Sherman said "good" things about SOPA/PIPA, where's my check?