According to this AP report.
Before long we will all be grounded except for privileged members of the Republicrat National Socialist Party, who will also have special Party stores that carry Eastern goods not available to mundanes.
Is this the change we were told we hoped for? Do you really expect the next Republican president to cut back on the warfare-police state?
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I noted previously that Reason author Cathy Young had written in favor of a fifty-year copyright term. Now, in a recent Reason article,”The Trouble with the Copyright Debate” (subtitle: Does every illegal download represent a lost sale?), she joins the anti-SOPA bandwagon, but is still pro-copyright:
A few days ago, I committed an illegal act.
Instead of watching the latest episode of the British fantasy show Merlin on the SyFy channel and suffer through a hundred commercials and pop-up ads that sometimes deface the screen during the show itself, I got online and watched an illicitly streamed video. What’s more, I intend to continue my crime spree and download the three-episode second season of Sherlock, which aired on the BBC earlier this month, rather than wait until May when it finally gets to PBS.
The point of this true confession is that the current debate about copyright enforcement and piracy on the Web largely misses the boat. Yes, creators and copyright holders have important rights and legitimate interests. And yes, some Internet users display an obnoxious sense of entitlement to “free” intellectual content.
So: Young is anti-SOPA. But she is still pro-copyright: “creators and copyright holders have important rights and legitimate interests”. And yet she admits she herself engages in piracy (while bizarrely taking a superior tone in condemning others who pirate). Say what? If she thinks copyright should last 50 years, and that it is legitimate, then … when she pirates she is violating people’s rights, and should be penalized–perhaps even by imprisonment. Right?
Young is confused and hypocritical. She favors copyright, and bashes other people who pirate, all the while engaging in piracy herself and then condemning efforts to enforce copyright. She’s trying to have her copyright and eat it, too.
As I argued earlier this week SOPA is the Symptom, Copyright is the Disease. The only solution is to abolish copyright. Wake up and smell the libertarian principles, Young.
[C4sIF]
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A recent NPR feature, The Secret Document That Transformed China (h/t Vijay Boyapati), tells the fascinating story about one of seminal events at the dawn of the modern Chinese experiment in their version of capitalism.
In 1978, the farmers in a small Chinese village called Xiaogang gathered in a mud hut to sign a secret contract. They thought it might get them executed. Instead, it wound up transforming China’s economy in ways that are still reverberating today.
The contract was so risky — and such a big deal — because it was created at the height of communism in China. Everyone worked on the village’s collective farm; there was no personal property.
“Back then, even one straw belonged to the group,” says Yen Jingchang, who was a farmer in Xiaogang in 1978. “No one owned anything.”
At one meeting with communist party officials, a farmer asked: “What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those?” Answer: No. Your teeth belong to the collective.
Because of communism, “In Xiaogang there was never enough food, and the farmers often had to go to other villages to beg. Their children were going hungry. They were desperate.”
So the farmers agreed to a form of personal property, where each farmer could keep some of his own crop, above a certain threshold. This would give them incentives to work harder and the ability to keep some of the fruits of their labor. However,So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest.
This was done in secret for fear of reprisal by the state. Their agreement “recognized the risks the farmers were taking. If any of the farmers were sent to prison or executed, it said, the others in the group would care for their children until age 18.”
Their new pact was a success: “At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined.”
[Keep reading…]
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