Vault Citizen said:
Did King George really have much say over how the colonies were run? I thought that all came under the part of British history were the monarchy had already lost a lot of the power it once had and a lot of the day to day governing was done by what would become known as the Prime Minister (for those unfamiliar with British history we didn't just decide to have a a Prime Minister one day, the role sort of developed over time and the early prime ministers are described as such retroactively rather than through some announcement at the time)
Things were changing in The British Empire at the time, an unwise power shift at the the same time Britan was involved on a massive scale militarily on a large number of fronts. The funny thing about Bob's example is that in the conflict between the colonies and King George, objectively viewed King George is exactly who you'd want to be, and would expect to be likely to win. The colonies won largely because The Empire was under too much pressure domestically and internationally to focus on properly putting down a revolution. The ironic thing though is that the corporations holding onto the copyright laws right now really don't have the same kind of divided interests, stretched resources, and politico-bureaucratic messes preventing clear leadership in regards to all of those things going down.
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On the matter of copyright laws themselves (in response to the video in general) this is a bigger deal that what we're seeing on Youtube and the like. It's a good example of a case where the typical person is too set in their own beliefs, immediate need, and point of view to see a big picture they are blinding themselves to.
Above and beyond the issue of reviewers, yotube videos and the such, one has to understand that the USA and a number of other nations, especially in the western world, have moved away from actually producing anything and more towards providing services and innovations. The most valuable things in the USA are pretty much the ideas we've come up with for products, characters, entertainment, etc... the physical manifestations of which we build elsewhere. Patents, copyrights, and IPs are our big source of power and prosperity nowadays.
One of the big problems facing the USA and other nations, and decimating our economy, is countries like China who innovate very little (though this is not to say that they innovate nothing at all) simply taking our ideas, manufacturing the products, intellectual or not, and then selling them for their own profit and betterment while cutting out the innovators entirely, all the while claiming that this is fine because "we don't recognize international IP laws". Creating an ironic situation where the western world is largely being weakened and outright destroyed by eastern "robber economies" that pretty much steal from us and then wind up lending money back to us... a whole situation which gets complicated beyond my ability to easily summarize here.
One of the big issues in this is that it's very difficult to take action, or get much organized, militarily or otherwise, when a nation like China can turn around and point to things like Youtube and ask why it's okay for some dude there to make money off of violating IP laws, but not okay for them to do it. Leading to accusations of hypocricy and of course conflicts even between western powers over who is stealing what and what's being enforced... etc... the bottom line is that it's a huge mess which needs to be sorted out for economic reasons and which becomes a bigger crisis every day.
The whole battle between free speech and IP protection is very much an interesting one, but something that needs to be viewed in terms in the sense of a big picture, after all laws have to be universal and can't be subjective in order to work, you cannot say it's okay for some Youtube reviewer to make money off of copying someone else's IP or parts of it, but not okay for someone with a factory to do the same thing, when in a legal sense it's pretty much the same thing, the only difference is scale and the kind of business being run.
The problem is of course further complicated by the use that corporations will put these kinds of protections to, silencing critics and the like.
Overall I do not like sleazeball corporations silencing reviewers and such. Emotionally I'm pretty much on the side of the guys getting hit on Youtube. Rationally though I have to admit that in the big picture the protection of IPs is a much more important thing given that they are largely the basis of American, and arguably western, power.
When it comes to the Youtube assault in particular I think half the problem is in the specifics of the enforcement, rather than the principle. As many people have pointed out video game companies and the like release tons of promotional material that they actually encourage people to use towards these purposes. A lot of the videos being hammered are being nailed unfairly when they were not doing anything that was wrong to begin with. The problem here is that the guys bringing the accusations have been able to get results while being vague, simply pointing fingers at something and saying "these guys are using copyrighted material without permission" without having to specify what they are using, and action is being taken before any kind of rebuttal can take place.
To be fair what we need to see happen is for those making complaints about violations to be very specific about what and where in a video is being questioned, with each violation being addressed by an actual person rather than a machine. The cost and trouble of doing to properly, especially given the likely results, will mean that your not going to see corporations spending tons of time and money chasing kids around something like Youtube, while they can go after more worthwhile and eggregeous offenders.
What I propose is akin to how porn is handled. By definition all pornography in the US is illegal, being defined as something which is offensive and without any redeeming value. The thing is that one cannot simply take a "shotgun" approach and define anything someone finds offensive as porn. Each specific item needs to be addressed individually, and needs to be reviewed, and actually found to be without any kind of redeeming value, with the group producing the work being given time to defend it if they so choose. This is incidently why a lot of "porno" has laughable plots, and it's also why the adult movie/porn/shock smut industry thrives, since so much of it is produced it's simply impossible to ban it all, so it takes something really special to get enough attention to start the process.
At the end of the day the entire point being that your not supposed to see action like this taken just on someone else's say so, and really when done correctly the system tends to be it's own defense mechanism as frivolously chasing down every petty violator for lulz winds up doing more damage than it prevents.
I'll also end this with something else fairly controversial and say that I think half the problem is that a lot of reviewers have gotten arrogant and stupid. When the whole "nasty reviewer riding the edge" thing got started it was cool because it was kind of underground, standing out because of a few people saying the kinds of things a lot of people thought but wouldn't come out on a mainstream source. Them getting away with it, because nobody knew who they were for sure, except MAYBE an editor if they were in print. The whole thing had a degree of class though because it was kept within limits simply by being on the edge. Today it seems half the problem is reviewers want to basically come out as public people, badmouth everyone, get away with it "because free speech b@tches!", and make serious bucks doing it. There is a point at which it becomes sort of absurd when you see an industry basically being forced to invite people to events who make a public living taking a verbal whizz all over them. In short nobody should have been expecting this status quo to continue endlessly. All of the good reviewers out there seem to have gotten caught in a kind of expected blowback that should have been expected long before now. It's simply surprising that a bunch of people standing in a legal gray area seem to think they were going to be able to mouth off to those with actual money and power endlessly while in public view, and never have anything happen in response. Right or wrong, it should have been expected, and honestly I imagine 90% or more of those hit by this have no real idea what to do now as a result other than cry.
