" Girl Dishonored," last week's episode of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," came with a disclosure: "The following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event." Which is true to the extent there hasn't been a big rape case at Tompkins Square University, mostly because there's no college with that name. However, nearly every single plot point drew off of real life events from the past couple years at college campuses around the country. (WARNING: SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD) Here's a point-by-point breakdown: - "Law & Order: SVU": The episode begins with girls being hazed at Nu Iota Pie, during which the pledges' body fat is circled with marker.
- In Real Life: A sorority at Young Harris College allegedly drew with permanent marker on the parts of female pledge's bodies that jiggle.
- SVU: The victim at the center of the episode was a college freshman named Lindsay, and she commits suicide at the end.
- IRL: Lizzy Seeberg, also a freshman, committed suicide not long after she reported her campus rape.
- SVU: One of the main allegations against the fictional college is that they tried to keep their sexual assault numbers down as reported in the Clery Act reports, a federally mandated log of crime statistics on campus.
- IRL: Swarthmore College, Occidental College, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have all faced allegations they pressure officials to keep the number of sexual assaults down in Clery Act reports.
- SVU: The investigators discover another girl, Renee Clark, had reported a sexual assault, but after the school didn't believe her, she ended up leaving the school and committing herself to a pysch ward where she began electro shock treatments. The student later comes back out and tells a jury that the school failed to address to her rape, and in the last scene, says she plans to go back to college.
- IRL: Angie Epifano was admitted to a psychiatric ward due to her suicidal threats after failed to address her reported rape. She left school and only later forced her college, Amherst, to address their problem with sexual assaults with a blistering and widely read op-ed. She also hopes to return to school.
- SVU: Renee, one of the students in the episode, was hit with an honor code violation after she spoke out about the school's handling of the assault for "intimidating my rapist."
- IRL: Landen Gambill, who filed a federal complaint against UNC, was hit with an honor code violation for "intimidating her rapist."
- SVU: The fraternity with the rapists on "Law & Order" is nicknamed the "rape factory" by students on the fictitious campus.
- IRL: Wesleyan University has been sued for failing to warn students about an actual frat on campus known as a "rape factory."
- SVU: One student says after she reported her rape, campus security was told "sex is like a football game," when you look back, what would you have done differently?
- IRL: Annie Clark was told by an administrator that "rape is like football" when she tried to report her sexual assault at UNC.
- SVU: The fraternity passed around a misogynistic t-shirt featuring a woman tied up, reading "We don't take no for an answer."
- IRL: Amherst College had their own sexist t-shirt featuring a woman tied up.
- SVU: Students at the frat circulate a list of 10 ways to rape.
- IRL: Miami University came under fire for a flier on campus detailing 10 ways to get away with rape.
- SVU: Students at the fictional college chanted on campus "No means yes, Yes means anal."
- IRL: Members of a fraternity at Yale University chanted that same phrase in 2010.
- SVU: There's the video of the rapists in the show laughing about how a girl was "raped to death."
- IRL: The student who was seen in a video laughing about how a girl is "so raped" in Steubenville, Ohio was a college student, but dropped out after the tape went public.
- SVU: Students at the very end stood on campus holding signs with the absurd comments made to victims by administrators, friends and roommates.
- IRL: Student survivors have used the tactic of showing signs with quotes they were told along with protesting on campus in support of victims.
With the exception of the Dean of Students being charged as an accessory to rape in the episode, the show mostly played off of actual events, but the survivors whose stories they took from say they feel exploited. Epifano wrote a blog post on Feministing revealing that she began sobbing within two minutes of watching the episode because the story made her relive "every second of injustice and pain that I experienced at Amherst." "It's sickening, appalling, and unnerving to realize that the worst experiences of your life have been condensed into 45 minutes of cable TV drama," Epifano said. Epifano did give "SVU" credit for putting sexual assaults in college into the TV spotlight. Alexandra Brodsky, who signed the federal complaint against Yale University over how the school handles sexual assaults, told Jezebel that the episode shows that once a survivor goes public, "your story is no longer your own." "'Law & Order' is brazenly capitalizing on the pain and trauma of young women and not only failing to compensate them for stealing their stories, but actually denying that they exist by claiming that the 'story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event,'" wrote Lisa Wade, a professor of sociology at Occidental College. "Stunning."
In the latest issue of New York magazine, Jonathan Chait puts forward an interesting argument which many casual political observers may not expect: if Barack Obama wins reelection he'll let us go off the "fiscal cliff" and end up raising taxes, fixing the deficit, and passing stimulus to boot. The newly released interview between Obama and the Des Moines Register (originally considered off the record) makes me think Chait is totally right.
First, let's explain the fiscal cliff. (If you know this, skip ahead)
During the 2011 nonsensical fights over the national debt, Congressional leaders and President Obama agreed to an agreement. Instead of actually coming up with a deficit reduction package, they'd kick it over to the Super Committee or Super Congress. This special group of half Democrats-half Republicans would come up with a debt reduction deal, or sequestration would cause massive cuts, split between discretionary spending and defense spending. The idea was neither party would be able to abide by those cuts, so they'd eventually work out a deal to avoid that. In the meantime, it pushed the fight to after the 2012 election. Sequestration taking effect is being called "going off the fiscal cliff." It may or may not be scary, if watch CNBC, you'll hear it's armageddon. Even though CNBC and Wall Street want us to do nothing but reduce the debt.
Now, here's Chait's argument, assuming Obama wins reelection: Because Republicans refused to allow higher revenue to make up any part of those cuts, and insisted all the automatic deficit reduction consist of lower spending, Obama made his own demand: that he have a greater say in what kind of spending would suffer cuts. Social Security and Medicare benefits were exempted, though cuts to Medicare providers were not. Programs that benefit the poor were likewise spared, but defense absorbed a huge proportion of the automatic cuts.
The idea was to turn the Republican coalition against itself. As the clock ticked toward January, doctors, hospitals, and—most especially—defense contractors would be confronted with terrifyingly large reductions in their income stream. Voiding those cuts would require convincing Obama to sign a law undoing them, which he would not do unless the replacement plan met his definition of fairness, which meant including higher tax revenue from the rich. This has had precisely its intended effect. Executives and lobbyists have begun to beseech Republicans to accept a budget deal that includes higher revenue along with lower spending. Republican defense hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham have signed a letter calling for a “balanced bipartisan deficit reduction package,” which is Beltway code for a deal mixing taxes and spending.
OK, so Republicans are just going to agree to jacking up taxes on the rich? Not exactly:
The beginning of 2013, when the automatic spending cuts take effect, coincides with the expiration of every penny of the Bush tax cuts. And so, by postponing the fiscal reckoning, Republicans inadvertently scheduled it for the very moment when Obama (should he win reelection) will hold his maximum leverage. Last summer, Obama was pleading with Boehner to give him $800 billion in additional revenue. Come January, he’ll have $5 trillion in higher revenue without doing anything. Since Obama’s own budget proposes to raise only $1.5 trillion in new revenue and trim entitlement spending, he could then offer Republicans a deal that cuts taxes (by, say, a couple trillion dollars), increases military spending, and reduces entitlement spending. In other words, he could offer a right-wing bill—and the end result would be a mix of policies to the left of his own budget, and to the left of the Simpson-Bowles proposal. So with the Bush tax cuts expiring, thanks to the two-year extension done in the lame duck session just after the 2010 elections, taxes on the rich will raise to the Clinton rates. Obama can turn around, extend an offer to lower tax rates on everyone except the rich, offer other spending cuts, and--who knows--perhaps even boost spending where he might want it in a grand bargain because it'll be a point where everyone is in a rush to fix things after jumping the "fiscal cliff" and he'll have the chance to enact stimulus. Obama will have been reelected, have nothing to lose, and will be able to do what he actually wanted to do while telling reluctant Democrats to put it all on the president. Because when it comes to the voters, will anyone care one year later Obama's plan works, and the deficit begins to shrink along with unemployment? (Not to mention the Republicans' gamble that obstructionism will defeat Obama will have failed and at least temporarily moderate Republicans will just want to get a deal done and move on) To fully understand the whole argument, I'd suggest reading Chait's article. It's lengthy, wonky, but pretty conclusive. Chait is not the first person to bring this up. I first heard this argument to do nothing back in the summer. In June, a lot of progressives like Lawrence O'Donnell began putting forward this calculated argument without much fan fare outside the devoted blogosphere.
Now here's why I'm leaning towards believing this is the game plan; the White House said they'd veto any deficit reduction without increased revenues. And even more, Obama reluctantly allowed the transcript of a phone conversation between him and the editor and publisher of the Des Moines Register be made public which had another clue (emphasis added):
"In the short term, the good news is that there’s going to be a forcing mechanism to deal with what is the central ideological argument in Washington right now, and that is: How much government do we have and how do we pay for it? So when you combine the Bush tax cuts expiring, the sequester in place, the commitment of both myself and my opponent -- at least Governor Romney claims that he wants to reduce the deficit -- but we’re going to be in a position where I believe in the first six months we are going to solve that big piece of business.
It will probably be messy. It won’t be pleasant. But I am absolutely confident that we can get what is the equivalent of the grand bargain that essentially I’ve been offering to the Republicans for a very long time, which is $2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in spending, and work to reduce the costs of our health care programs. And we can easily meet -- “easily” is the wrong word -- we can credibly meet the target that the Bowles-Simpson Commission established of $4 trillion in deficit reduction, and even more in the out-years, and we can stabilize our deficit-to-GDP ratio in a way that is really going to be a good foundation for long-term growth. Now, once we get that done, that takes a huge piece of business off the table."
So there. That's enough clues to me to believe this is a route Obama is ready to go down. It depends on his reelection, the Democrats holding their majority in the Senate, and maybe even some Democrats taking back some seats in the House, although they certainly won't reclaim the majority.
It's an interesting and elaborate plan, but everything that's happened this year in politics has shown President Obama well knows he won't be able to do everything out in the open, he has to have some tricks up his sleeve.
Penn State Scandal: House Panel Won't Act Until Education Department Finishes Inquiry (243) Comments | Posted July 14, 2012 | 2:41 PM Members of Congress who want to hold a hearing to investigate child abuse reporting laws in light of the Penn State University scandal will have to wait. Penn State Facing Civil Lawsuits For Failure To Report Jerry Sandusky's Sexual Crimes (565) Comments | Posted July 13, 2012 | 4:14 PM Penn State University has three civil lawsuits pending against it for the failure to protect children from being sexually assaulted on campus by one-time assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. Freeh Report: Penn State Administration, Joe Paterno Covered Up Jerry Sandusky's Child Abuse (UPDATED) (8271) Comments | Posted July 12, 2012 | 9:21 AM The most powerful officials at Penn State actively worked to cover up Jerry Sandusky's sexual abuse and rape of children, failing to protect them against a sexual predator for more than a decade, according to an internal investigation released Thursday. Jerry Sandusky Scandal: Graham Spanier, Former Penn State President, Claims He Didn't Know Anything (15) Comments | Posted July 10, 2012 | 6:08 PM Graham Spanier, the former president of Pennsylvania State University, claims he was never told anything about Jerry Sandusky sexually abusing children on campus.
Word cloud of the State of the Union address by President Barack Obama on Jan. 24, 2012.
 This chart is in reference to a claim made by the MPAA about money lost to the film industry, cited in a press release, compared against the analysis of Sanchez writing at the Cato Institute. The chart above is based off of Julian Sanchez's analysis of claims at the Cato Institute made by the Motion Picture Association of America to push for the passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act (also known as SOPA and PIPA).
The MPAA insists we're losing $58 billion annually thanks to online piracy, which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says costs the country 19 million jobs. Sanchez found that to have come from the work of the Institute for Policy Innovation. Tim Lee tries to figure out how they got that $58 billion number:
In IPI-land, when a movie studio makes $10 selling a DVD to a Canadian, and then gives $7 to the company that manufactured the DVD and $2 to the guy who shipped it to Canada, society has benefitted by $10+$7+$2=$19. Yet some simple math shows that this is nonsense: the studio is $1 richer, the trucker is $2, and the manufacturer is $7. Shockingly enough, that adds up to $10. What each participant cares about is his profits, not his revenues. Sanchez: "So, to stay focused on movies, Siwek takes an estimate of $6.1 billion in piracy losses to the U.S. movie industry, and through the magic of multipliers gets us to a more impressive sounding $20.5 billion."So now we're down from $58 billion to $6.1 billion, but it turns out, that is a global number. It's not what would be potentially addressed by SOPA and PIPA legislation. "Of the total $6.1 billion in annual losses ... estimated to MPAA studios, the amount attributable to online piracy by users in the United States was $446 million—which, by coincidence, is roughly the amount grossed globally by Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel," Sanchez writes.And thus we can see it illustrated in my chart above, the number the MPAA puts in their press release -- $58 billion -- is more accurately $446 million, according to the analysis by Sanchez writing at the Cato Institute. (Keep in mind, we're talking about online piracy in the film industry, as this is coming from the movie industry talking about their industry.) Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has asserted as recently as 2008 that online piracy costs the U.S. economy as much as $225 billion a year. This turns out to have originated in a 1991 sidebar in Forbes magazine. As Sanchez notes, "it was not a measurement of the cost of "piracy" to the U.S. economy. It was an unsourced estimate of the total size of the global market in counterfeit goods." The Government Accountability Office has no idea where these numbers came from. Their research found them to be at a loss for how they could claim that $225 billion number in the past couple years.
__Democratic mayors in Democratic cities across the country shut down Occupy Wall Street encampments long ago. So long, it seems, you might as well assume most were closed before the Christmas shopping season was underway. You would've most likely been right. Except in Washington, D.C.Instead, there were two operating and continuing with protests and Christmas-themed demonstrations. But now, on the heels of a report of a rodent problem around McPherson Square in Occupy DC's camp, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray wants to evict the protesters after they camped there for more than three months already. The problem is, although it's smack in the middle of downtown D.C., he has the authority to police them but lacks the jurisdiction to evict them. McPherson square actually falls to the National Park Service, and they don't seem too interested at the moment.The Washington Examiner reports Gray noted the D.C. health department determined conditions at McPherson are "particularly a threat to the health and safety of both protesters and District resident." Not missing a beat, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who has spent at least a month targeting Occupy DC, said "The city is trying its best to protect the health, welfare, and safety of people in and around the campsite. In this situation, the National Park Service has so far been more interested in making excuses than protecting the public."It's not the first time Gray signaled his displeasure with Occupy DC. He requested that the City be reimbursed by the federal government for overtime costs to police the protesters. But he has also praised them for their efforts around pushing for D.C. statehood. If the NPS caves to the Gray, the two groups of Occupiers will have to become friends or go home
_In the letter Gray wrote, he says "At a minimum, the Occupy DC sites at McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza must be consolidated at Freedom Plaza to allow for the elimination of the rat infestation, clean up, and restoration of McPherson Square." (His italics and emphasis)The reason there is a second encampment is all because of Stop the Machine -- a protest planned for months for Oct. 6, mostly filled with anti-war activists as well as organized labor from various spots in the country. They did their protest by the book: they filed for permits, set up stages, had a media tent, a schedule, and so on. But seizing on the sudden outburst of Occupy Wall Street protests around the country within the two weeks leading up to their day, they adopted the tag "Occupy Washington DC" and decided to stay put. They got a permit to stay in Freedom Plaza extended through at least February 2012.Kevin Zeese, a Stop the Machine organizer, who remains active with the Freedom Plaza protest now calling itself Occupy Washington DC, rightly points out it's not as easy as Gray thinks for them to merge with Occupy DC."The mayor's suggestion that the two camps be consolidated at Freedom Plaza will present some challenges," Zeese said in a statement. "Feeding more people means a significant increase in cost and great stress on our kitchen team. Our peacekeepers will have more people to monitor and keep at peace with each other. The two camps have different personalities and we do not want to lose the personality of Freedom Plaza."Late last year, I covered a relatively small march with Occupy DCers on from McPherson Square to the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican National Headquarters. They stopped several times as arguments, although not heated, broke out among the protesters. They kept having discussions about whether or not to try to get people from Freedom Plaza to join them since it was along their route. Some felt like it was Occupy DC's action, not Occupy Washington DC's, and there hadn't been proper planning, and worried it would've come off rude to the Freedom Plaza crew because of the way these Occupiers operate through consensus in their General Assemblies. Really, there has been a division here since the beginning of October. Both started the same week. Both had similar points of view. Both have built a community using teach-ins, famous activists coming to visit, linking up with unions and progressive groups for larger demonstrations.
But they haven't meshed well, so don't expect things to easily integrate. At this point they both have their own way of doing things. And for the DC Occupiers, it would probably be for their benefit to see them get evicted. New York didn't have to answer how they would deal with the cold and the snow, or risk getting criticized for dwindling numbers and being "fair weather protesters." Winter in DC has only been mild and only recently has there been snow on the ground for more than a day. So now, if they aren't evicted, they have to decide if they stay there, or go home and
_
Thanks to ProPublica and their solid database journalism on the SOPA/PIPA legislation, and who made the graphic above from their SOPA tracker.
A couple other points about what happened with the "Black Wednesday" protest:
EFF says that 250,000 people sent messages to Congress through their site.
Reddit got their own Political Action Committee.
Fight For the Future: 70,000 websites participated -- 40,000 were completely blacked out, another 30,000 sites altered their homepages in some other way.
Talking Points Memo notes at least 5 million people signed one of the online petitions against the legislation.
Twitter said (via tweet, of course) "2.4+ million SOPA-related Tweets from 12am-4pm ET today. Top 5 terms: SOPA, Stop SOPA, PIPA, Tell Congress."
For Congress, the discussion has now turned to whether they should exempt search engines from the PIPA legislation. The RIAA is staunchly opposed to it, but the move would be an attempt to remove power-players like Google and Yahoo! from the debate.
But it seems that especially on the Republican side, lawmakers are rapidly dropping support. If not opposing the legislation, they're saying they need it to slow down or be tweaked -- such as Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).
BuzzFeed has a round up of 50 lawmakers making a statement about SOPA/PIPA on Twitter.
So, who changed their position as a result of the Wednesday, Jan. 18 massive blackout?
Against
House
- AZ-3 - Ben Quayle (R)
- NE-2 - Lee Terry (R)
- PA-17 - Tim Holden
Senate
- AK - Lisa Murkowski (R)
- FL - Marco Rubio (R)
- MO - Roy Blount (R)
- TX - John Cornyn (R)
- UT - Orin Hatch (R)
Want to Change the Bill
House
Senate
- MD - Ben Cardin (D)
- NM - Jeff Bingamen (D)
- SD - Tim Johnson (D)
- IA - Chuck Grassley (R)
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) introduced the OPEN Act to be the House version of a bill Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced in the Senate.
Here's the total breakdown (House & Senate) of where they stand now:
Support
Jan 18: 80
Jan 19: 65
Oppose
Jan 18: 31
Jan 19: 101
Leaning No
Jan 18: 0
Jan 19: 41
Unknown/Undecided
Jan 18: 429
Jan 19: 332
It's not often you find legislation that puts Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Tea Party-darling Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ken.), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) all on the same side.
That's what has happened with the Stop Online Piracy Act and its companion Protect-IP -- or you may have seen them around the internet referred to as SOPA and PIPA for short.
What the bills do is force websites to become internet police -- if copyrighted or pirated material is on their website, whether they are aware of it or not, they could be shut down by the federal government in what's often described as a "shoot first, ask questions later" strategy. So let's say someone on Tumblr uses a photo they found online, without no knowledge of where it originally came from (think of all those memes that are spread daily). Boom -- Tumblr could be shut down.
Activists have already pranked the White House petition website by placing copyrighted material attached to a petition against SOPA/PIPA. Stock photos being used without permission were also found on the website of SOPA's author, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas).
The legislation is not along party lines at all, but thanks to heavy lobbying by the recording industry and Hollywood, there's been wide bipartisan support for these bills. However, they didn't count on an unprecedented grassroots campaign by the tech industry, bloggers and activists alike online. Social sites like Reddit, Tumblr and TwitPic are shoving messages in their users' faces. Open-source pioneers like Mozilla, prominent news sites such as Wired, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and popular blogs like The Oatmeal and BoingBoing have gone dark or encrypted code on their sites to draw attention.
Perhaps the biggest attention grabbers though are WikiPedia (the 10th highest trafficked website in the U.S.) and Google (the most visited site in the world) participating in blackouts. Now, both the RedState blog and liberal magazines such as Mother Jones have cheered the demise of support for SOPA/PIPA. There was a large lineup of Congressmen who did back the bill, but it seems that the opposition throughout the media has been nearly unanimous by any outlet willing to hint at their opinion.
Thousands of techies planned to gather to protest outside the Manhattan offices of New York Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillebrand, co-sponsors of the bill. And Occupy Wall Streeters have been using the social media they effectively have been running their movement on to spread the word about the Jan. 18 blackout. (In my opinion, the fact that Occupiers are seeing it as a way to "Occupy the internet," is helping this, if only because they see this activism naturally rolling off of what they've been doing for months now. We'll see if they try to take credit for any of this.)
This is having a real effect.
Before lunchtime Wednesday, Reps. Terry Lee (R-Neb.) and Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) had withdrawn their names as co-sponsors. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said on his Facebook page (an appropriate spot to make such a statement) that he was withdrawing his support.
"Earlier this year, this bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously and without controversy," Rubio said. "Since then, we’ve heard legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet and about a potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government’s power to impact the Internet. Congress should listen and avoid rushing through a bill that could have many unintended consequences."
Shortly after, Roy Blunt, and other Congressmen started Tweeting that they didn't support the bills. And Mark Zuckerburg didn't black out Facebook, but did make a statement against SOPA.
BECAUSE SUING GRANDMOTHERS WORKED SO WELL: For some, this reminds them of the effort to intervene with Napster a decade ago, trying to stop music piracy. The music industry has been in shambles ever since. Marred by unpopular efforts to prosecute grandmothers and pre-teens for downloading music, they moved on to targeting college campuses. Until that proved a failure and they quietly, but officially, gave up on targeting co-eds.
And that's likely where this push back comes from. The entertainment industry increasingly needs to rely on the tech industry to come up with a new business model, but they're stuck in their old ways. Meanwhile, the young millennial techies up in arms against SOPA and PIPA have either grown up knowing nothing but the internet -- social media sites from LiveJournal and MySpace to today's Twitter and Tumblr -- in their lifetime, they've always known all of the music you want is available for free. Or, they may be old enough to remember actually using a free Napster, and growing up as the internet grew.
One of the unique developments in the Occupy movement has been the way they have just done things for themselves when it came to media: they livestreamed, uploaded their own photos and videos, created their own newspapers and have largely communicated through social media and internet forums. They sought out support without help from major traditional media forces.
MY BAND: My own band I was in during college was able to gather enough fans on our own using social media sites where we uploaded our own music and published our music on iTunes by ourselves. We made merchandise on our own. When someone made a music video for us, we uploaded it on YouTube. We had enough success that we did get label and management offers and were picked to be on the Warped Tour twice. It was entirely because of our music, photos and videos spreading around the internet (with and without our permission) that clothing stores began to sponsor our tours and we began to sell out shows. Things didn't pan out in the end (I left the band in 2009) but it's my own testament of how bands are coming up now in the post-Napster age. In a way, having our music widely pirated would've been a way to lead to our band becoming a full-time job.
The goal of any band was to be able to distribute the music, attract fans to shows, and if money was to be made, it'd be off of merchandise and admission paid to said shows (or concerts). If enough people were circulating our music and coming to our shows, eventually a label gets interested in investing money in us. We didn't care how the music got distributed, and if we saw our music suddenly linked through a blog, we wouldn't worry -- on the contrary we would've been thrilled that someone went through the effort to do that.
LACK OF EVIDENCE: Now, also consider this: Despite a generation growing up knowing they can get music and movies for free, they still pay for them. A growing number (currently at 30 percent) of young people under 24 would prefer to pay to stream movies and TV shows through Netflix than pay for a cable bill. Why? They want a service and they want it delivered to their preference. That's an example of the market working, of the industry adapting. Plenty of people are willing to watch monetized videos on Hulu or NBC.com to catch up on The Office because it's better quality than the pirated commercial-free copies. Artists are still selling well on iTunes. Monetized versions of Spotify and Pandora are humming along. Movie theaters still exist and successful films rake in big bucks. People have bought tickets to watch the next Batman movie six months out. As Matt Yglesias points out, there's no credible evidence that we have a problem with pirated copies of entertainment. People are still paying to download books and companies are trampling over themselves to get new delivery platforms like the iPad and the Kindle. That's supported by the Cato Institute and the guys behind Freakanomics.
So perhaps it's only fitting that one of the co-sponsors, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), is so well-known for his amusing Twitter feed. One of the people working on this legislation didn't know until recently that Twitter allows 140 characters, not 120 as he thought. Small, but seems to put a clear visual to their understanding of the internet as it is today.
The people on my Facebook and Tumblr feeds posting about SOPA are not the typical political activists or news junkies, and generally I can gauge how well something is received in the public in a more broader sense by what kinds of my friends are posting about it. It's a no-brainer to us -- people like me who got online for the first time with AOL 4.0 and had the original Napster, who have used the internet to further our careers, who rely on it for information daily -- to give the government more ability than it already has (because yes, they can shut down your blog linking to pirated music and movies) is a bad move. And maybe you'll forgive us for siding with the internet companies that we've grown with, rather than the industry that wanted to sue us for getting an MP3 of "All Star" by Smash Mouth when we were kids.
A COUPLE LAST THINGS: Dan Nguyen atProPublica has created a fantastic database around SOPA in which you can sort by party affiliation, contributions, and support for the legislation. It's been updated today, and I can say from monitoring this that on Wednesday alone I saw the "Opponents" section double (at least).
PIPA (Senate version, which may soon be voted on):
SOPA (House version):
On somewhat of a lighter note, here's the Recording Industry Association of America's VP tweeting about the blackouts and 25 people who thought SOPA was about "soap."
Back in December, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, started sending off letters demanding a rigorous amount of information and communication records from the National Parks Service, as well as the Interior Department and the Obama administration. Why? Because Issa believes they've allowed Occupy DC protesters to "damage a park that had recently been rehabilitated with taxpayer funds."Occupy DC set up camp at the beginning of October in McPherson Square, and at this point, is one of the last remaining encampments in a major U.S. city.Conservative news outlets found out that McPherson had gotten stimulus funding and pounced on it without verification or further details.Turns out that, according to the National Parks Service, if protesters have damaged anything, it's nowhere near the $400,000 mark that conservatives claim, it was only $8,000 (Via Roll Call):“The NPS ... takes seriously its responsibility to protect the resources that have been entrusted in its care,” wrote O’Dell. “First Amendment activities, however, often come with a measure of wear and tear on our national parks, not dissimilar to what results from frequent and high-volume use by visitors and tourists to our parks in the National Capital Region and around the country.” O’Dell said that of the $400,000 stimulus grant, only $8,000 was used to re-sod the park with new grass. The rest, she said, was spent on “hardscape improvements that have not, to our knowledge, been damaged over the course of the demonstration.”Issa's letter acknowledged the money was not just for sodding, but also "concrete curbs, refurbished benches, new light poles, water fountains, new paint, new chain fencing, 12 new trash cans and new light meters." (In my recurring visits covering the protest, I haven't noticed anything other than the grass to have been damaged.)O'Dell said they'd be happy to brief them on the issue, but that's not good enough for Issa. On Jan. 10, he essentially said if they didn't answer every one of his questions subpoenas were on their way. He gave them a Jan. 24 deadline to answer his 18 questions.Maryland's Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Dem on the Oversight Committee, thinks Issa is wasting their time with the idea they should investigate protesters."Our committee has the power to achieve great benefits investigating waste, fraud and abuse on behalf of the American people,” Cummings told Roll Call, “but investigating Occupy Wall Street protestors is a poor use of our resources and authority."
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