Adidas Can’t Abide Internet Piracy; Philip Morris Simply Will Not Accept It

With markup on SOPA now delayed until January, here’s a list of 439 organizations SOPA opponents should worry about.

Saturday Night Links

* SOPA update from Cory Doctorow: The Judiciary Committee will have another chance to pass the bill out of committee at a special session on December 21.

* The headline reads, Australia’s most cherished marsupial, the koala, is in danger of becoming extinct in the wild within 30 years after an outbreak of chlamydia.

* The headline reads, Two deaths from brain-eating amoeba linked to sinus remedy for colds. Does the world seem a little strange today to anyone else?

* Only the super-rich can save us now! An anonymous cabal of millionaires and billionaires is looking to do something in the 2012 election by running an independent candidate in all 50 states. Just what is that something? I guess we’ll find out.

* Obama vs. the pipeline? As @thinkprogress notes, that’s the whole point of this payroll tax blackmail in the first place.

* Media Matters celebrates Fox & Friends, 2011.

* I’m with Ta-Nehisi: Occupy Wall Street shouldn’t turn into Occupy Trinity Church. If that puts me at odds with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, well, so be it…

* Today in the permafrost apocalypse: A recent estimate suggests that the perennially frozen ground known as permafrost, which underlies nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, contains twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere.

* Glenn Greenwald: To allow significant political figures to be heralded with purely one-sided requiems — enforced by misguided (even if well-intentioned) notions of private etiquette that bar discussions of their bad acts — is not a matter of politeness; it’s deceitful and propagandistic. More, specifically on Hitchens, from Lenin’s Tomb.

* And your game of the night: Greens Survive Only When Reds Die. Like Lemmings for sociopaths. Enjoy!

The End of SOPA?

I’ve been an exceedingly poor member of HASTAC this semester, but I did managed to put together a brief end-of-term link post on the apparent end of SOPA tonight, if you’re interested in the subject.

Obama Mojo Watch

Nevermind.

That’s Not Good

Every candidate supporting PCCC’s net-neutrality pledge lost last Tuesday. That’s 95 representatives and senators.

Lessig v. ‘The Social Network’

Lawrence Lessig has a good review of The Social Network that makes a point most reviewers have missed:

Two lawsuits provide the frame for The Social Network. One was brought by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twins at Harvard who thought they had hired Zuckerberg to build for them what Facebook would become. The other was brought by Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s “one friend” and partner, and Facebook’s initial CFO, who was eventually pushed out of the company by Silicon Valley venture capitalists. These cases function as a kind of Greek chorus, setting the standards of right, throughout the film. It is against the high ideals they represent that everything else gets judged. And indeed, the lawyers are the only truly respectable or honorable characters in the film. When they’re ridiculed or insulted by Zuckerberg, their responses are more mature, and better, than Zuckerberg’s. (If you remember the scene in “The Wire” where Omar uses his wit to cut the lawyer to bits, that’s not this film.) The lawyers here rise above the pokes, regardless of the brilliance in Zuckerberg’s charge. This is kindergarten. They are the teachers. We’re all meant to share a knowing wink, or smirk, as we watch the silliness of children at play.

In Sorkin’s world—which is to say Hollywood, where lawyers attempt to control every last scrap of culture—this framing makes sense. But as I watched this film, as a law professor, and someone who has tried as best I can to understand the new world now living in Silicon Valley, the only people that I felt embarrassed for were the lawyers. The total and absolute absurdity of the world where the engines of a federal lawsuit get cranked up to adjudicate the hurt feelings (because “our idea was stolen!”) of entitled Harvard undergraduates is completely missed by Sorkin. We can’t know enough from the film to know whether there was actually any substantial legal claim here. Sorkin has been upfront about the fact that there are fabrications aplenty lacing the story. But from the story as told, we certainly know enough to know that any legal system that would allow these kids to extort $65 million from the most successful business this century should be ashamed of itself. Did Zuckerberg breach his contract? Maybe, for which the damages are more like $650, not $65 million. Did he steal a trade secret? Absolutely not. Did he steal any other “property”? Absolutely not—the code for Facebook was his, and the “idea” of a social network is not a patent. It wasn’t justice that gave the twins $65 million; it was the fear of a random and inefficient system of law. That system is a tax on innovation and creativity. That tax is the real villain here, not the innovator it burdened.

The case for Zuckerberg’s former partner is stronger, and more sensible and sad. But here again, the villains are not even named. Sorkin makes the autodidact Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, the evil one. (No copyright-industry bad blood there.) I know Parker. This is not him. The nastiest people in this story (at least if Sorkin tells this part accurately) were the Facebook lawyers who show up in poorly fitting suits and let Saverin believe that they were in this, as in everything else they had done, representing Saverin as well. If that’s what actually happened, it was plainly unethical. No doubt, Saverin was stupid to trust them, but the absurdity here is a world where it is stupid to trust members of an elite and regulated profession. Again, an absurdity one could well miss in this film between all the cocaine and practically naked twentysomethings.

There’s some good stuff, too, on net neutrality:

The tragedy—small in the scale of things, no doubt—of this film is that practically everyone watching it will miss this point. Practically everyone walking out will think they understand genius on the Internet. But almost none will have seen the real genius here. And that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success. As “network neutrality” gets bargained away—to add insult to injury, by an administration that was elected with the promise to defend it—the opportunities for the Zuckerbergs of tomorrow will shrink. And as they do, we will return more to the world where success depends upon permission. And privilege. And insiders. And where fewer turn their souls to inventing the next great idea.

Via @jayrosen_nyu.

Better Known as the Pact to End the Internet as We Know It

Craig Aaron goes inside the Google-Verizon deal. Via Daily Kos.

1. Under their proposal, there would be no Net Neutrality on wireless networks — meaning anything goes, from blocking websites and applications to pay-for-priority treatment. 

2. Their proposed standard for “non-discrimination” on wired networks is so weak that actions like Comcast’s widely denounced blocking of BitTorrent would be allowed.

3. The deal would let ISPs like Verizon — instead of Internet users like you — decide which applications deserve the best quality of service. That’s not the way the Internet has ever worked, and it threatens to close the door on tomorrow’s innovative applications. (If RealPlayer had been favored a few years ago, would we ever have gotten YouTube?)

4. The deal would allow ISPs to effectively split the Internet into “two pipes” — one of which would be reserved for “managed services,” a pay-for-play platform for content and applications. This is the proverbial toll road on the information superhighway, a fast lane reserved for the select few, while the rest of us are stuck on the cyber-equivalent of a winding dirt road.

5. The pact proposes to turn the Federal Communications Commission into a toothless watchdog, left fruitlessly chasing consumer complaints but unable to make rules of its own. Instead, it would leave it up to unaccountable (and almost surely industry-controlled) third parties to decide what the rules should be.

Monday Night Linkdump

* Don’t be evil: It looks as if Google has committed itself to killing Net Neutrality. Discussion at MeFi.

* Terrible flooding in Pakistan.

* Now so-called scientists have ruined the Bermuda Triangle, too. Where’s your sense of wonder, science? Where’s your sense of wonder? (via Alex G.)

* Temp U: Colleges are beginning to move their adjuncts off-payroll.

* Big Think is blogging a “Dangerous Idea” a day all month. The thing is they’re all terrible ideas.

* Lost Star Wars sequel footage found.

* Definition of a masochist: Mets’ fan who watches his team lose a one-run game to the hated Phillies, then hopes the Red Sox will beat the Yankees to make up for it.

* And President Maddow lets loose against Bill O’Reilly.

Just Another Thursday Night Linkdump

* Bad news, grad students: Lack of sleep linked to early death.

* Joe Lieberman thinks he’s found a loophole in that silly Constitution thing: revoking the citizenship of suspected terrorists. It’s a great idea that has no possible downside and could never be abused.

* Oh, and Lieberman’s take on the Gulf of Mexico disaster is “Accidents happen.” What could possibly go wrong, that hasn’t already gone wrong, to convince these people that offshore drilling isn’t worth it?

* Democrats demoralized. I wonder why.

* Supreme Court Upholds Freedom Of Speech In Obscenity-Filled Ruling.

* Facebook doing everything wrong.

* The flooding in Nashville has now been declared a national emergency. The Big Picture has pictures of what’s happening there.

* Genetically engineered crops lead to genetically engineered weeds. Via MetaFilter.

* The FCC will reclassify broadband in order to preserve its ability to protect net neutrality.

* Natural Catalogue (in Alphabetic Order). Photos from Agata Marzecova.

* Eric Cantor booed by Heritage Foundation audience for refusing to name Obama a “domestic enemy.” The lunatics are running the asylum.

* Matt Yglesias covers some important bipartisanship cooperation from the U.S. Senate.

* Oil disaster update: Less than a week after British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and unleashing what could be the worst industrial environmental disaster in U.S. history, the company announced more than $6 billion in profits for the first quarter of 2010, more than doubling profits from the same period the year before. Robert F. Kennedy explores the Cheney connection, while Nicole Allan blames Halliburton.

* Hope: The Tucson and Flagstaff city councils voted Tuesday to sue Arizona over its tough new immigration law, citing concerns about enforcement costs and negative effects on the state’s tourism industry.

* The Darjeeling Limited coming to the Criterion Collection.

* Horse names from The Wire.

* Tough but fair: Goran Tunjic carded for fatal heart attack during soccer game.

* And your feel-good/feel-terrible story of the day: Local boy with cancer turns into a superhero for a day.

Wednesday Night Links

* Net Neutrality hit a wall yesterday with a court decision ruling that the FCC can’t regulate broadband Internet in this way. More on what happens next from Boing Boing, MetaFilter, and Daily Kos.

* Obama has slightly tweaked national nuclear weapons policy. This is, of course, high treason.

* The Mississippi no-lesbians-at-prom debacle gets more atrocious every day.

* U.S. downgraded from “free” to “mostly free.” I’m assuming these categories work the way they do in The Princess Bride.

* Dr. Horrible as 8-bit video game.

* Just when we thought we were out: Another new Harry Potter book in ten years or so?

* Timewaster of the night: Tiny Castle.

* Josh Marshall: I’m curious whether under international law a diplomat can be expelled from a host country simply for being a raging c@#k.

* And your attention please: Slavery officially no longer relevant.

Links!

Links!

* The podcast of my appearance last night on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio is already up.

* Lots of anxiety today over Google’s commitment to Net Neutrality after a report in the Wall Street Journal that they were looking to sell a “fast lane” to their services. Google denounces the report, but questions remain.

* Franken +200? So says the AP. More at First Read and TPM, which reports that optimism in the Franken camp is at very high.

* Does Harry Potter poison young minds? Richard Dawkins hates puppies and sunshine, too.

* The IEA says we’re screwed starting in 2020. That’s actually sort of good news; there’s good reason to think we may already be screwed right now.

* Whose poetry will be read at the inauguration?

There’s buzz about all sorts of names. Among them: Philip Levine, a Midwesterner whose writings are attuned to the working class; Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate who created the Favorite Poem Project; Yusef Komunyakaa, whose work is heavily influenced by jazz; U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan.

* Epic collection of sci-fi ray guns.