Alternative to SOPA - Make Piracy your Friend

[nhklein]

Thanks for highlighting this.

It reminds me of the debate in Cambodia, some yeas ago, when the
Cambodian authorities had announced it was illegal to use VoIP services
like Skype or telephone call-back-services, to avoid the very high
charges for international phone calls.

The official argumentation was that this is a big loss to the country,
calculating the estimated phone time on these special services,
multiplied by the very high official charges (higher than in most of our
neighboring countries), and then claiming that the sum found in this way
is the LOSS of income for the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications
(at that time being simultaneously Regulator and Operator).

In actual fact, many people who used VoIP at internet cafes would never
have had the money to make phone calls to their relatives in the USA,
Australia, or France, who had left 20 or 30 years ago as refugees from
the political dangers at home.

There had also been a report in the papers at that time about a poor
woman from the countryside who sold some chicken and traveled to the
capital city to make an (illegal) call to her relatives from an internet
cafe, once or twice a year - she never would have been able to pay
"normal" phone charges. Economic harm to the Ministry? Maybe a bit,
because also people who cold afford to support the "income earning
activities" of the Ministry of Post used these special services.

=

On 01/15/2012 07:36 AM, Joly MacFie wrote:
>
> [Well argued piece by Tim O'Reily on the economic aspects]
>
> https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/BEDukdz2B1r
>
>
> In the entire discussion, I've seen no discussion of credible evidence
> of this economic harm. There's no question in my mind that piracy
> exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content
> without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by
> redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?
>
> In my experience at O'Reilly, the losses due to piracy are far
> outweighed by the benefits of the free flow of information, which
> makes the world richer, and develops new markets for legitimate
> content. Most of the people who are downloading unauthorized copies of
> O'Reilly books would never have paid us for them anyway; meanwhile,
> hundreds of thousands of others are buying content from us, many of
> them in countries that we were never able to do business with when our
> products were not available in digital form.
>
> History shows us, again and again, that frontiers are lawless places,
> but that as they get richer and more settled, they join in the rule of
> law. American publishing, now the largest publishing industry in the
> world, began with piracy. (I have a post coming on that subject on
> Monday.)
>
> --
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
> WWWhatsup NYC - http://wwwhatsup.com
> http://pinstand.com - http://punkcast.com
>  VP (Admin) - ISOC-NY - http://isoc-ny.org
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -


--
In April 2011, I started a new personal blog:

...thinking it over... after 21 years in Cambodia
http://www.thinking21.org/

continuing to share reports and comments from Cambodia.
This is my last posting:

On Law Enforcement (8 January 2012)
http://www.thinking21.org/?p=682


Norbert Klein
nhklein at gmx.net
Phnom Penh / Cambodia


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