Do you like the ability to post personal videos online that have copyrighted material that you don’t own in the background?
Sure, and a large organization supported. As did Google, since they didn’t want to get sued. And large organizations also were against it, but only kind of, since they can block you if you use copy right material, and you have no recourse except going through Google.
Actually, there were tons of YouTubers complaining about their revenue being stolen because companies claimed they used copyrighted material, even in cases where they didn’t, or it was fair use.
The truth is, companies love the ruling, since everyone but you can make money off of it.
If you try to remove private money from our elections and campaigns, that doesn’t mean we suddenly don’t have laws anymore or lawsuits or court systems or rights to be defended or challenged. Congress isn’t suddenly going to make perfect laws.
Name a country to which I can move the goalposts.
I won’t, thanks.
No, but they will be less dependent on monied interest to fill their coffers every year.
Of you course you won’t, because no such country exists.
Either you prefer to regulate McDonald’s, or you prefer that Amnesty and Planned Parenthood and the SPLC have the strongest possible voice. More broadly, either you want your voice to be heard, or you want your opponents to shut up.
Any attempt to do both has never succeeded and is ultimately unworkable.
But you don’t seem to grasp the fact that it doesn’t actually change anything.
So only “the government” can fund ads? What if i own a newspaper or a TV channel? Like Fox, for instance. Even if they ran no political ads at all, they are still churning out vullshit favorable to the GOP. There’s no way for you to stop it. At the absolute best you could make silly rules which could be trivially sidestepped.
But even ignoring the fact that your plan literally can’t work, there remains the fact that it shouldn’t be allowed to work. It’s a bad idea.
I, as a citizen, have the right to express my political views. You have no right to stop me. Certainly we don’t want the GOVERNMENT to be able to stop me. That’s the entire point of the first amendment.
This statement means literally nothing. It’s total nonsense.
Money is simply how the economy functions. It’s an abstract method of assigning value to things. You can’t get away from it. Time translates into money. Material translates into money.
It costs money, in some form or another, for me to express myself. You can’t limit my expenditure of money used in expressing myself, without fundamentally limiting my freedom of expression.
The copyright holders have a right to the content they created. They should be paid for that. Thanks to Mickey Mouse some of our stuff is completely out of whack now, but some of our stuff is going to decided by the courts. Sometimes you have to broaden or narrow laws based on the changing world we live in.
I think it’s ridiculous that someone tried to sue a parent for baby dancing in a video, but those issues have to be settled. If you were sued right now, who would you turn to after we dismantle all these corporations you hate?
I don’t understand. What does any of that have to do with private donations to get people elected?
Anyway, one of the biggest spendors have been healthcare and insurance groups and getting them out of politics might help reign in spending.
I guess that might be scary if you work in the field.
Patently ridiculous. Show your work man!
When a non-profit says they try to influence or guide government, what do you think they mean when they say that? If they’re going to try and influence law in favor of say consumers, so they can post videos of their kids dancing to music owned by other people without fear of lawsuit… what do you think they’re doing?
You’ve confused different conversations.
I don’t believe that financial contributions to candidates are ‘speech’, so when I say we should regulate the financial contributions of for-profit corporations to candidates, I’m not calling for a prohibition on ‘speech’.
So if I say McDonalds’ contributions should be prohibited, but not Amnesty International’s, I’m not calling for the speech of one to be regulated while not calling for the speech of the other to be regulated, because political contributions are not speech; and questions about what countries so regulate speech are irrelevant, since I’m not distinguishing between the speech of one and the other.
In another conversation - the one that provoked your challenge - I pointed out that some countries regulate the political advertising of everyone during certain periods of time. Since I’m not distinguishing between McDonalds and Amnesty International, because those countries don’t distinguish, your question is meaningless.
I showed my work plenty, certainly more than you showed any kind of counterargument.
Your idea is bad. Fundamentally, you just want to limit the speech of those you disagree with. That is litterally your goal here. It’s a bad goal.
The point is regulating one and not the other is unworkable in practice. Regardless of how you want to conceptualize “speech”, in the end if you succeed in silencing McDonald’s political activity then Amnesty will also be silenced.
I thought you had a practical counterexample we could turn to, but I guess not.
How so? Not even the worst of the recent Supreme Court rulings class campaign contributions as speech, do they? If campaign contributions are not speech, they can be regulated; and, in fact, they are regulated, right now. So there’s no conceptual problem with limiting contributions from one kind of entity differently than from another.
In any event, I’ll go back to my original point: Corporations contribute to candidates and parties as a way to get influence, and this influence is a corruption of Democracy becuase it is unequal. Even if it is legal, the idea that we ought to boycott companies that do it isn’t an unreasonable idea.
No, you made some claims about free speech and how money equals speech. Which is foolish and false, because it means that the end goal of society is that only the wealthy can afford speech. Which is an absurd perversion of our democracy, where all people are created equal and should have an equal voice under our government.
I feel like your fear of a government tyranny makes you blind to the current tyranny that corporations and oligarchs are trying to build and have succeeded in building in Russia and other places.
There is a reason why rich libertarians like the idea of small government, and it’s because government is the only thing that put a check on large corporations. They fear a strong government that is made from the people, for the people and by the people.
No, it doesn’t mean that at all. But it certainly means that they can afford to amplify their speech much more, because that’s how money works. And you haven’t made any kind of coherent argument about how it doesn’t work that way. You just say that money doesn’t equal speech.
It’s just a nonsense throwaway line that disintegrates under the lightest scrutiny.
Every expression of a political viewpoint consumes resources. That means, due to how a modern economy works, that it translates into money.
This isn’t rocket science. This is obvious stuff.
Do we really need to walk through the obvious progression of political expression, and how you can draw a solid line from the simplest to the most complex political ad campaign? I mean, we can, but i don’t see how that is necessary. Isn’t it obvious to you?
Can i make a sign to support a political view? It takes money to do so. If you say i can’t spend money to further a political view, then you are fundamentally limiting my ability to express myself. It is a direct violation of the 1st amendment.
Are you kidding me?
What you see in Russia is the government oppressing the people, who are denied rights by the government, exactly as you would deny them.
Russia is not a good example of “why you shouldn’t be afraid of the government”.
I commend your spirit and wish you were right, but it doesn’t fit the reality which at least I perceive. Money is an instrument which amplifies speech.
Let’s say I want to make a statement to people. How about something controversial, such as “I like pie.”
- I can say it to each person I come across. That’s a decent pool of individuals, and the only expense is my time and their annoyance. Hooray!
- I can buy an ad on a billboard. Depending on location, that can be as little as $50 to as much as $1k per day in addition to the materials and artwork layout. This will almost certainly reach a larger pool of people. That’s still speech, but amplified by money.
- I can buy a 30 second spot on the Super Bowl for $5 million. That’s going to reach waaaaay more people. Still speech, amplified by money.
Yet, as you write this — right now — there are limits on how much you can spend on behalf of the candidate of your choice, and those limits are constitutional and not violations of the first amendment. So, to quote someone, arguing that limits on political spending violate the first amendment is just a nonsense throwaway line that disintegrates under the lightest scrutiny.
No, there are not limits to my expression as you describe.
There are limits to what i can contribute, directly, to a political campaign. There are not, however, limits to my ability to spend money myself and express any political viewpoint.
And the reason for that, is because to suggest otherwise would constitute a limitation of my 1st amendment rights.