The anti-copyright crusaders are going to try to use this latest DMCA horror story as a reason to eliminate DMCA. I disagree. Of all the DMCA uses that go on in this country, most of them fly under the radar. How many are correct? Probably most. Will mistakes happen? Yup. Are copyright holders overzealous? Yup. Is this reason not to strengthen the system? Yup. But it’s not reason to repeal it. It’s a tradeoff and a compromise.
Of course, the real motive of the typical Slashdot left-anarchist DMCA critics is to open the Internet to mass copyright infringement on free services like WordPress.com, Youtube, and others. These are the same people who think abusers should be able to go onto MIT’s network and abuse MIT’s JSTOR access to commit mass, premeditated copyright infringement, and then blame MIT, JSTOR, and the government for the crime.
Details come out about the Federal Reserve/Anonymous story: a Federal Reserve website was hit, but the Anontards want you to think some shadowy, vital Fed server was attacked.
Of course, that said, until the government gets its own house in order, government is not fit to regulate the way Obama wants on Cybersecurity matters. We need to give private industry the tools to work with government though, and that’s why CISPA was a good idea, and is coming back this Congress.
It’s too bad Greg Walden has to propose a bill on Internet freedom, because the administration is such a laggard on the topic. But if he and Republicans don’t step up on the issue, who will?
Should FCC Commissioners be able to meet off the record? I don’t know. I really don’t know.
I have my suspicions about this story screaming about Google racism, and they center on this point: It’s really unlikely that anyone at Google sat down and decided to make ‘racial profiles’ on this stuff. Either individual advertisers chose to buy certain keywords, or automated algorithms chose these names based on data. Either way, blaming people at Google is kind of silly.
But if (and I really mean if, for all I know the above Huffington Post link is all made up) data mining really did, all on its own, come up with trends that make people uncomfortable, screaming racism isn’t the way to fix that. Remember: those are the tools that re-elected the President.