Zaiatzgeist
I'm Bethany. Twenty-Five. Bisexual. Assistant editor of erotic science fiction and fantasy. Feminist. Bibliophile. TV-addict. Solitary eclectic neo-pagan. Amateur soprano. Cat-lady. Online rp-er. Massachusetts resident. Cool aunt and fairy godmother.
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Photo reblogged from ameliorate or destroy
Arizona Passes Internet Censorship Law
Thursday, the Arizona legislature passed Arizona House Bill 2549, which would update the state’s telephone harassment law to apply to the Internet and other electronic communications. The bill is sweepingly broad, and would make it a crime to communicate via electronic means speech that is intended to “annoy,” “offend,” “harass” or “terrify,” as well as certain sexual speech.
Because the bill is not limited to one-to-one communications, H.B. 2549 would apply to the Internet as a whole, thus criminalizing all manner of writing, cartoons, and other protected material the state finds offensive or annoying.
The Bill is currently on Governor Jan Brewer’s desk awaiting her decision on whether to veto or sign the bill.
Media Coalition, a trade association protecting the First Amendment rights of content industries, whose membership includes CBLDF, has been active in opposing the bill. On March 14, Media Coalition sent a memo to the Senate Rules Committee regarding constitutional infirmities in H.B. 2549. Yesterday they sent a letter to Governor Brewer urging her to veto the bill.
If passed, the law could create vulnerabilities for cartoonists and publishers who publish material online intended to shock, satirize, and criticize.
Beyond the example of the Mohammad cartoons listed in the Media Coalition letter, the taboo-pushing work of cartoonists like R. Crumb, Johnny Ryan, and Ivan Brunetti would potentially be vulnerable to prosecution, as could incendiary works such as Frank Miller’s Holy Terror and Dave Sim’s Cerebus.
Similarly, the culture of message boards, within and beyond comics, would be imperiled. With more titles released digitally each week, and an extremely active online ecosystem of professional and fan exchange, laws like this one are extremely worrisome for the creators, publishers, and readers of comics.
THIS IS URGENT! Tell Governor Jan Brewer to veto the bill and stand against internet censorship.
Phoenix Office: (602) 542-4331
Tucson Office: (520) 628-6580
Fax Number: (602) 542-1381
You can also email the Governor through her website http://www.azgovernor.gov/Contact.asp
Just a reminder, you all.
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Photo reblogged from lick out the marrow
Obama And ISP’s To Launch Largest Digital Spying Scheme In History (Must Read)
If you download potentially copyrighted software, videos or music, your Internet service provider (ISP) has been watching, and they’re coming for you.
Specifically, they’re coming for you on Thursday, July 1.
That’s the date when the nation’s largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users’ bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials.
Word of the start date has been largely kept secret since ISPs announced their plans last June. The deal was brokered by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and coordinated by the Obama Administration. The same groups have weighed in heavily on controversial Internet policies around the world, with similar facilitation by the Obama’s Administration’s State Department.
The July 12 date was revealed by the RIAA’s CEO and top lobbyist, Cary Sherman, during a publishers’ conference on Wednesday in New York, according to technology publication CNet.
The content industries calls this scheme a “graduated response” plan, which will see
-Time Warner Cable
-Cablevision
-Comcast
-Verizon
-AT&T
and others spying on users’ Internet activities and watching for potential copyright infringement. Users who are “caught” infringing on a creator’s protected work can then be interrupted with a notice that piracy is forbidden by law and carries penalties of up to $150,000 per infringement, requiring the user to click through saying they understand the consequences before bandwidth is restored, and they could still be subject to copyright infringement lawsuits.
Response: This is much worse than SOPA/PIPA and ACTA. It doesn’t necessarily censor the internet but it spys on everything you do. Your ENTIRE web history will be watched and recorded and might even assist the government. This was coordinated by Obama and his administration with the help of the MPAA and RIAA.
What is so dangerous about this is that this is not a law it is a policy adopted by several companies. That means this will not be debated in Congress and you will agree to be spied on by signing a contract with the company.
Internet censorship is becoming a reality and now the corporate elite will legally be able to spy on you. If we spread this and cause an uproar like what we did with SOPA, maybe they will back down. Either way people NEED to know about this.
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Link reblogged from Memento Mori
Reblog Reblog Reblog!
Don’t lose hope. If it’s being shelved and edited there’s still time to make Congress do the smart thing and consult people who actually know how the internet works.
They’re probably hoping the hype will die down and they’ll be able to quietly do whatever they want, which will inevitably be a huge problem for all of us. Don’t let it. Keep up with what’s happening and keep pestering your congresspeople.
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Photo reblogged from ameliorate or destroy
The Reason Megaupload was taken down
————————————————————->”In December of 2011, just weeks before the takedown, Digital Music News reported on something new that the creators of #Megaupload were about to unroll. Something that would rock the music industry to its core.”
>”MegaBox. MegaBox was going to be an alternative music store that was entirely cloud-based and offered artists a better money-making opportunity than they would get with any record label.”
>”We have a solution called the Megakey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free,” Dotcom outlined. “Yes that’s right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works.”
https://plus.google.com/u/0/111314089359991626869/posts/HQJxDRiwAWqW E L P
SHITS AND THEN DIES
Not. Surprised. At. Fucking. All.
holy fuck
jesus christ
If this is true…
Then this is what’s going on, the big 6 media holders basically don’t want their monopoly taken down, don’t want competition on the market, don’t want their media legally out there under anyone else but themselves, first it’ll be music, then they’ve got the technology it’ll be movies, tv shows and books, smaller companies can pop up on the internet overnight licensing anything and free views of anything can ping a few bucks for the creators while sales will also be available to them opening the world wide market without borders to every artist out there. Not the CEO’s or the corporate talking heads making cash but the artists themselves raking in more for their own work without worry of losing money to pirates because free downloads earn them money too…
This is what all of this is about, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and the take downs. They’ve got their monopoly and they’re holding on to it till their fingers break.
holy crap…
Now, if this actually works, this is a step in the right direction.
(Source: diarrheaworldstarhiphop)
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Link reblogged from Memento Mori
Anonymous file sharing coming soon
The Internet protest group known as anonymous, or anon has created a file sharing site called Anonyupload,
that will allow for anonymous file upload & sharing. The site is currently still in a development stage, but does allow for users to register.Their landing page does ask for the help of users, by supporting them with servers and to help ensure the quality of their service. They also said “Each user gets a FTPs access, which can be used to safely transfer files.We hope to launch the online version of the site in less than 3 days.”
The site was reserved through Yahoo, but as the 23 (Today) the site will move it infrastructure to a Russian host, so that it will be outside of US jurisdiction.
Never underestimate the wildly pissed off.
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Quote reblogged from that's how you get deathless
When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true.
And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent
I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”
What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.
Neil Gaiman on Copyright, Piracy, and the Commercial Value of the Web (X)(Source: roominthecastle)
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Video reblogged from lick out the marrow
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Link reblogged from ameliorate or destroy
That was fast.
A few days ago the news broke that the pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was put on hold until consensus was reached.
Although the announcement was rather vague, some news sites and blogs declared SOPA dead, or “shelved,” or erased from history.
Wishful thinking, because today SOPA is back in full force.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith just announced that the SOPA markup is expected to continue next month.
“To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America’s intellectual property, we will continue to bring together industry representatives and Members to find ways to combat online piracy,” Chairman Smith said.
“Due to the Republican and Democratic retreats taking place over the next two weeks, markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act is expected to resume in February.
“I am committed to continuing to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to send a bipartisan bill to the White House that saves American jobs and protects intellectual property.”
Fuck you, Lamar Smith.
As much as I enjoy reading dystopian novels and whatnot, I’d rather not live in a world that’s modeled like one.
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Photoset reblogged from Thoughts That Can't Be Contained
