SOPA Rhetoric

It's been interesting to watch the activism around the Stop Online Piracy Act, the entertainment industry lobby's latest ill-conceived attempt at legislating against the inevitable. As many have pointed out, SOPA and it's cousin PIPA threaten the open internet and won't do much to curb piracy anyhow. You should let your gov't representatives know how you feel about it, and also give to the EFF or other organizations doing something about it. You can do both here.


One thing I find interesting is the rhetoric that the entertainment lobby is using is pretty effectively (with ignorant folk like those in government anyway) to turn this into an "America vs THEM" story. The four words being used repeatedly are "foreign criminals" and "american jobs" - namely that the former are stealing the latter.

Now, to be fair, part of what these proposed actions do IS aimed at giving the industry some tools to combat piracy from foreign sites, but they can also be used against Americans. On the other side, the victims they aim to protect aren't all American. They are artists that may be from other countries, and the content owner companies who are multi-national anyway.

Anyhow, it's just remarkable how on-message they are with those four words, and that our government reps haven't seen right through the rhetoric.

Propaganda: The Game

Today I read this post on Seth Godin's blog. It's talking about a PR campaign to discredit PETA, one pillar of which is this site. The PR campaign is being run by something called The Center for Consumer Freedom, a generic lobby group name.

Usually, the a lobby group's level of evil is inversely proportional to that of it's name. i.e. A group called "Cute children for the adding of flowery scents to cuddly puppies" would probably turn out to be pro-consumer-rocket-launchers AND pro-S&M-porn-in-schools).


Digging on the CCF's site digs up this generic and innocent sounding description of it's backers, but wikipedia nets you more detail, and it turns out that the group is funded by a cigarette company, some fast food companies (owners of Burger King, Wendy's, etc), among others.


Seth's points in his post was that as a corporate sponsor, you are very very visible these days, and that people's opinion on the PR changes once they know who's doing the talking (thus the need to hide behind the generic answer to 'who we are?').


I have two points to add:


1) I *CAN* *NOT* *BELEIVE* that consumers would fall for this garbage. I suppose there are some dumb people out there, but hey, the fact that they group "petakillsanimals.com", "trans-fatfacts.com", and "mercuryfacts.org" all on the same site ought to be a HINT that there's something awry here. Fer krissake! MERCURYFACTS.ORG?!? Sheesh! For a look at something really scary, go look at "activistcash.com". Holy cow.


2) Most suprising to me? They have GAMES! Click here to go see fun online games such as "Does the Government Think You're Fat?" (anti-Transfat-ban), "Lawsuit Fabricator" (anti-anti-fastfood-lawsuits), "Obesity News Generator" (anti-anti-fat campaign AND anti-liberal-media - it's two games in one!), and of course "Attack of the Nanny" and "Nanny Bowling" (anti-nagging-nannies-tellin' ya what not to eat!).





OK, I know there are some hungry game developers out there, but man. People critique developers of FPS games? How do you sleep at night having made this Flash propaganda-game garbage.

Ugh. Pass the pepto.