Also? The current system already gives an immense amount of power to media companies; a huge sum of campaign finance contributions wind up in their coffers, and they have tremendous incentives to maximize controversy and conflict, indirectly forcing candidates to spend more and more on advertising. And at the end of the day, they still have a strong voice in creating self-fulfilling prophecies over who is "electable".

[1] http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-december-13-2011/exclu...

Also, all of the plan you propose is already happening. It's called the creative process. I bet a large portion, if not the majority, of your entertainment is now facilitated by self published content given away for free on the internet. Youtube videos, remixes, wikipedia, flickr, twitter, facebook updates. All of this stuff is 'High Quality' culture that is available to you for free.

Copyright is great. It's necessary. It facilitates things like Creative Commons and the GPL. Abusive copyright holding organizations on the other hand are not so great. They exist only to exert control over their holdings and have recently risen to unprecedented levels of power because of the money we directly give them.

To call a boycott against these organizations futile is to miss the point of the boycott. It's not about putting them out of business. It's about awareness and slowly changing the overall public perception of an issue so fundamental and important as copyright reform and voting with your dollars.

So try not to get so discouraged and remember you give them the power. Seriously. Vote with you dollars (and with a ballot).

Here in the UK we actually have rules that say that TV news shows must remain non partisan. Of course people still accuse them of bias, but they are nothing like Fox news.

I imagine the 1st amendment would prevent a similar thing happening in the US.

Our newspapers however are often extremely partisan however and Murdoch still has much influence here through "The Sun" paper.

I guess with more content online , people could do something similar. "I have 100,000 followers, don't pass SOPA or I'll make a mean youtube video about you".

In short corruption is a symptom, trying to stop the least objectionable types of it will merely drive it underground and more direct. The problem we need to solve is the ability of corruption to be successful.

A company should not be concerned with whether or not it has enough influence in Washington relative to its competitors.

I'd speculate that for most industries the latter tends to be a higher level of concern than the former, and that is not in any way ok.

You're confusing "MUST" (actually SHOULD) with "CAN".

Look into regulatory capture. You can't ignore it or legislate it away any more than you can ignore or legislate away gravity.

Representatives without sufficient capital to finance their own campaigns rely on being in their financiers' (corporations) good graces. That means strategically putting their fingers in every industry.

There's no solution to the government industrial complex without campaign finance reform.

That changed immensely as we entered the radio age, where extremely expensive equipment was required to broadcast and there was some competition for a limited spectrum of airwaves. No longer could one semi-wealthy backer get a viewpoint published; it now took some very serious capital and/or investment only available by forming large amalgamations of wealthy people (or having a SERIOUSLY large backer on par with Rockefeller or other barons), and even if you got that together, you had to file requests for airspace which the government does exactly distribute loosely or quickly. The problem was exacerbated even further as television took over and expensive cameras, lights, and other equipment became necessary to produce a piece with equivalent credibility.

The internet has restored the equivalence and access of publication that existed in the days of paper and taken it further than it ever existed before; now there is almost no barrier to entry whatsoever to publish something across the whole world. Naturally, the corporations and interests that thrived with an exclusive voice among the people are beginning to wane and they are going down kicking and screaming. We will see what is ultimately required to root them out entirely.

Just think what would have become of the revolution if Thomas Paine's Common Sense went unread because everyone was too busy watching TV broadcasted by what were indeed 4 separate entities, but entities all friendly to the Crown which had already allotted them privileges and protection, and entities which were in identical businesses and therefore shared the same legal interests.

I think we have been thoroughly manipulated the last 70-100 years or so and I believe that we are continually reaping the consequences of that manipulation. Thank God for the internet and the freedom to publish which it restored, and which makes it among the most important structures in the world today.

I highly recommend this excerpt as food for thought, bottom of page 4 - page 5:

"Political candidates' campaign discourse provides more information about issues than print or electronic news media. There are several explanation for this finding. First, news reporting tends to concentrate on the 'horse race' aspects of the campaign: Who is ahead in the polls? Who is running the campaign? Which states are being contested by the campaigns? Will the candidates attack one another? Who will be included in the presidential debates? The answers to these questions may be news, but they simply do not help voters decide which candidate should be elected president...

From January through October of 1980, CBS and UPI devoted 65 percent of their coverage to the horse race, 26 percent to issues, and 10 percent to candidates...

A second reason why voters cannot rely on the news media for policy information is that campaign news is only one story among many. The network news, for example, is a half hour long, but subtracting commercials, stories on non-campaign topics, and horse-race coverage leaves little time to explain the candidates' opposing views on policy questions. Particularly in the latter phases of a campaign, political ads, presidential debates, and other message forms provide more issue information to viewers than the news media...

To make matters worse, there may be a trend toward less and less coverage. The length of a typical political news story decreased by about 20 percent and the number of political news stories dropped by 20 percent from 1968 to 1988...average nightly news coverage of the campaign in 1996 was 12.3 minutes, down from 24.6 minutes in 1992...Furthermore, the news media have a tendency to offer short sound bites from candidates instead of thoughtful and extended consideration of issues...in 1968, the average quotation from candidates in the news was 43 seconds long. After 20 years, candidate quotations had shrunk to a mere 9 seconds...this figure had dropped to 8.2 seconds in 1996."

There's some level of value in having some barrier to competition, it discourages the apathetic and very casual participant and encourages a higher signal:noise ratio in the discussion discussion.

Well, at least in my opinion. :)

Ie, it's legal in practice for government officials to leak to Punch Sulzberger, but not to Julian Assange. This makes it very hard for the latter to start his own competing "WP: Reliable Source." (Just how do I become WP:Reliable anyway? Or how do I lose the privilege, if I abuse it?)

You could fix this hole by enacting a media equivalent of the SEC's Reg FD: the government must release all information to everyone at the same time. Short of this, the mainstream press is best considered as a government organ - almost every story is the product of privileged information which leaves the journalist captive to his "source." If he writes the wrong thing, the source stops sourcing and the journalist's career may well be over.

More broadly, those who attribute SOPA and the like solely to electoral corruption are seeing the moon but not the sun. Corporate bribes are certainly one form of institutional power in the American system, but not the only form or even the strongest. In most areas, in fact, there's a permanent war between unaccountable corporate bribery and unaccountable bureaucratic tyranny.

What makes SOPA and the IPR area so awful is that the lobbyists and bureaucrats are both on the evil side. Certainly no one's bribing the State Department to twist Spain's arm on IPR legislation. State doesn't need or accept Hollywood's campaign contributions - it's a permanent agency.