Internet legislation is coming closer and will set a dangerous precedent

[jimpeel]

Between SOPA and the Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade Act we are all screwed. There is nothing that will kill a good thing faster than government interference and regulation. It looks like we will get one or the other of these equally bad proposals.

SOURCE

DeMaura and Segal: All Candidates Should Be Concerned About SOPA

By Stephen DeMaura and David Segal
Special to Roll Call
Dec. 14, 2011, Midnight

During the waning days of the 2008 presidential race, there was an important but overlooked occurrence on the John McCain campaign. In mid-October, the McCain campaign awoke to find that its Web videos and online advertisements were disappearing from its YouTube page.

The culprit turned out to be a major television network claiming they owned portions of the videos and that posting the clips was a violation of copyright law. Even though the campaign, and many others in the online community, believed the content to be privileged under the “Fair Use Doctrine,” the videos were pulled down.

Fast-forward more than three years, and a new piece of legislation is making its way through Congress that would make it easier for online campaign content and websites to be taken down. Even more concerning, if passed, this bill would allow opposing campaigns or campaign committees — not just the original content provider — to pull down websites harboring “infringing content.”

The legislation that campaigns across the country should be concerned about is the Stop Online Piracy Act. The overarching goal of SOPA is a good one: Take aggressive steps to curb online copyright infringement. The problem is that the bill would create heavy-handed regulations that would blacklist legitimate websites without adequately addressing online piracy.

Here’s a plausible campaign scenario under SOPA. Imagine you are running for Congress in a competitive House district. You give a strong interview to a local morning news show and your campaign posts the clip on your website. When your opponent’s campaign sees the video, it decides to play hardball and sends a notice to your Internet service provider alerting them to what it deems “infringing content.” It doesn’t matter if the content is actually pirated. The ISP has five days to pull down your website and the offending clip or be sued. If you don’t take the video down, even if you believe that the content is protected under fair use, your website goes dark.

The ability of any entity to file an infringement notice is one of SOPA’s biggest problems. It creates an unprecedented “private right of action” that would allow a private party, without any involvement by a court, to effectively shut down a website. For a campaign, this would mean shouldering legal responsibility for all user-generated posts. As more issue-based and political campaigns utilize social media to spread their message and engage supporters, a site could be targeted not only for the campaign’s own posts but also for well-meaning comments from supporters.

Another damaging aspect of SOPA is the increased liability the bill would place on ISPs and search engines. SOPA effectively guts the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbors — one of the big reasons companies such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter weren’t crushed in their early days by harassing lawsuits. Without these safe harbors, the risk of frivolous lawsuits greatly increases, which makes it more expensive for startups to get off the ground and decreases the chances of investment and future job growth.

The good news is that there is an alternative to SOPA, recently introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), which would effectively stop online piracy without harming legitimate U.S. businesses and campaigns. The Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade Act would create a process for rights holders to protect their property that wouldn’t shut down entire sites over a small amount of copyrighted material. This legislation helps to solve copyright infringement while protecting the vitality of the U.S.-based Internet sector — an industry that has contributed 23 percent of the growth in world gross domestic product and has revolutionized the way we live.

By creating legislation that allows sites to be shut down at will, with limited recourse available to the sites’ owners, SOPA greatly threatens the democratizing tool the Internet has become. With the Internet playing an ever increasing role in the political process, the powers the bill creates could be greatly abused by those wishing to silence their opponents.

Political campaigns and anyone interested in an open political process should be greatly concerned about the regulations SOPA creates and the freedoms it restricts. Online piracy needs to be stopped, but not at the expense of creating a legal wasteland that could restrict the vital flow of candidate and campaign information on the Internet.

Stephen DeMaura is the former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party and the current president of Americans for Job Security. David Segal is executive director of Demand Progress, a former Rhode Island state Representative and an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress in 2010.

 

[jimpeel]

Even the Federal Communications Commissioner has weighed in on this piece of shit.

There is a video at the link.

SOURCE

FCC official: ‘Internet freedom’ threatened

By Tim Devaney - The Washington Times

Monday, December 19, 2011

The United States is unprepared for an international fight that’s brewing over whether the Internet will remain free from government regulations or fall increasingly under the control of emerging global powers, Federal Communications Commissioner Robert McDowell warned Monday

“The proponents of Internet freedom and prosperity have been asleep at the switch,” Mr. McDowell, the lone Republican serving at the FCC, told editors and reporters at The Washington Times. “Or maybe I should say asleep at the router.”

The 193-member International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a U.N. agency, will meet in Dubai next December to renegotiate the 24-year-old treaty that deals with international oversight of the Internet. A growing number of countries are pushing greater governmental control and management of the Web’s availability, financial model and infrastructure.

They believe the current model is “dominated” by the U.S., and want to “take that control and power away,” Mr. McDowell said. China and Russia support the effort, but so do non-Western U.S. allies such as Brazil, South Africa and India.

“Thus far, those who are pushing for new intergovernmental powers over the Internet are far more energized and organized than those who favor the Internet freedom and prosperity,” he said.

While growth of the Internet has exploded under a minimal regulatory model over the past two decades, “significant government and civil society support is developing for a different policy outlook,” according to an analysis by lawyers David Gross and M. Ethan Lucarelli on the legal intelligence website www.lexology.com.

“Driven largely by the global financial troubles of recent years, together with persistent concerns about the implications of the growth of the Internet for national economies, social structures and cultures, some governments and others are now actively reconsidering the continuing viability of liberalization and competition-based policies,” they wrote.

Mr. McDowell is trying to halt that trend. He has met with State Department Ambassador Philip Verveer and Assistant Secretary of Commerce Larry Strickling, two people who will determine the country’s role in this debate.

“They’re very well aware of it,” Mr. McDowell said. “The Obama administration is in the right position. But my concern is that we’re behind the curve.”

A bad treaty - which would need the support of only a bare majority of U.N. members to pass and which the United States could not veto - could bring “a whole parade of problems,” Mr. McDowell said.

The U.S. and other Western democracies would likely “opt out” of the treaty, he predicted, leading to a “Balkanization” of the global information network. Governments under the treaty would have greater authority to regulate rates and local access, and such critical emerging issues as cybersecurity and data privacy standards would be subject to international control.

Mr. McDowell said the treaty could open the door to allowing revenue-hungry national governments to charge Internet giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon for their data traffic on a “per click” basis. The more website visitors those companies get, the more they pay.

The FCC commissioner said he is trying to sound the alarm about the U.N. effort because he believes the Internet has thrived precisely because of the absence of central government control.

In 1988, when the treaty was signed, fewer than 100,000 people used the Internet, Mr. McDowell said. Shortly after it was privatized in 1995, that number jumped to 16 million users. As of this year, it is up to 2 billion users, with another 500,000 joining every day.

“This phenomenal growth was the direct result of governments keeping their hands off the Internet sphere and relying instead on a private-sector, multi-stakeholder Internet governance model to keep it thriving,” he said.

Mr. McDowell attributed the massive growth of the Internet to freedom.

“So the whole point is, the more it migrated away from government control, the more it blossomed,” he said.

The treaty could effectively split the world into two Internets, he said, each with its own regulatory regime. If the ITU agrees to go forward with plans to regulate the Internet, Mr. McDowell expects the U.S. and countries such as Britain and Japan to simply refuse to participate.

“I think you’d see a number of countries - probably Western, capitalist democracies - opting out,” he said.

That still could create problems for e-commerce, making it difficult for U.S. companies to use the Internet to connect to buyers in countries that opt for a regulation-based Internet, Mr. McDowell said. It also would lead to problems from an engineering perspective, as firms and other users try to figure out how to deal with the multiple systems.

Backers of a treaty revision have garnered support from about 90 countries in the ITU, short of the 97 needed for a majority for the treaty to take effect. Each member state still must ratify it.

Despite the potential threat, the issue has been largely ignored in the U.S., Mr. McDowell said.

He said he has been traveling around the world to spread the word. Next year, he is scheduled to be at the World Radio Conference in Geneva.

“I’m going there to talk one-on-one with countries about this issue and give them some data that will hopefully lay out for them why this is bad news for their own countries, for their own prosperity,” Mr. McDowell said.

The renegotiation might not be for another year, but “the critical time is now.”

 

[2minkey]

you lack adaptability.

 

[jimpeel]

There is already talk of a means to bypass the Internet completely. I read something about that; but I can't remember what it was called.

 

[jimpeel]

Support is falling for these pieces of legislation.

SOURCE

Bloggers: SOPA's the end of us
By: Tim Mak
December 27, 2011 12:37 PM EST

The conservative and liberal blogospheres are unifying behind opposition to Congress’s Stop Online Piracy Act, with right-leaning bloggers aruging their very existence could be wiped out if the anti-piracy bill passes.

“If either the U.S. Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA) & the U.S. House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) become law, political blogs such as Red Mass Group [conservative] & Blue Mass Group [liberal] will cease to exist,” wrote a blogger at Red Mass Group.

Some have asserted that the controversial measures would criminalize pages and blogs that link to foreign websites dedicated to online piracy. In particular, this has concerned search engines like Google, which could face massive liability if some form of the bill passes, some say.

“Of course, restrictions of results provided by Internet search engines amount to just that: prior restraint of their free expression of future results. Google and others, under SOPA, are told what they can or can’t publish before they publish it. Kill. The. Bill,” conservative blogger Neil Stevens argued at RedState.

Liberals had their own spin on it, cheering on the fact that corporate support for SOPA was starting to subside.

In particular, GoDaddy, a domain registration firm, suffered a spectacularly bad round of PR when it came out in support of the measures. But after a grass-roots campaign to boycott the firm, driven by Reddit, an online community, and others, GoDaddy reversed course and renounced its support.

“Some good news on the SOPA front: Its corporate base of supporters is starting to crumble,” David Dayden wrote at Firedoglake. “GoDaddy is not alone. Scores of law firms are requesting their names be removed from the Judiciary Committee’s official list of SOPA supporters.”

In the blogosphere, the trajectory of the bill seemed set — that it is destined for failure if the pressure of the online community is kept up.

“The dynamic is clear. Once SOPA — and its Senate counterpart, Protecting IP Act, or PIPA — became high-profile among the Internet community, the lazy endorsements from companies and various hangers-on became toxic. And now, those supporters are scrambling, hollowing out the actual support for the bill. Suddenly, a bill with ‘widespread’ corporate support doesn’t have much support at all,” Dayden said.

Conservatives took a slightly different tact, though with similar disdain for the anti-piracy measures.

Indeed, blogger Erick Erickson said that he would encourage a primary for any Republican who supports the bill.

“I love Marsha Blackburn. She is a delightful lady and a solidly conservative member of Congress. And I am pledging right now that I will do everything in my power to defeat her in her 2012 reelection bid” due to her co-sponsorship for SOPA, Erickson wrote at RedState. “Congress has proven it does not understand the Internet. Perhaps they will understand brute strength against them at the ballot box. If members of Congress do not pull their name from co-sponsorship of SOPA, the left and right should pledge to defeat each and every one of them.”

© 2011 POLITICO LLC

 

[jimpeel]

SOURCE

On Eve of Net Boycott, Dump GoDaddy Exodus Begins

By Perry Chiaramonte

Published December 28, 2011 | FoxNews.com

It’s a boycott of viral proportions.

GoDaddy.com, one of the largest domain registrars on the Internet, stands to potentially lose thousands of customers on Thursday, Dec. 29, after the company gave and then repealed its support for a controversial bill before Congress that many fear could heavily restrict the web.

On the eve of what has been dubbed “Dump Go Daddy Day,” imgur.com -- pronounced "imager," it's one of the largest image hosting sites in the world, responsible for an astonishing 28 terabytes of bandwidth and nearly 200 million page views today alone -- has already changed its registry entries, foreshadowing the potential negative effect of a boycott set to begin Thursday morning.

GoDaddy.com originally supported the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) -- which opponents say will hinder free speech and infringe on first amendment rights -- but quickly recanted its position when the call of a boycott circulated.

“The outcry kind of forced our hand,” imgur founder and owner Alan Schaaf told FoxNews.com. “I’m against the SOPA act and imgur as a company is against it. We just feel it is terrible that GoDaddy.com would support this legislation.”

SOPA would make websites responsible for illegal copyright content uploaded by any user, making it difficult if not impossible for companies like Imgur, YouTube, and Facebook to operate.

“If SOPA were to pass, Imgur would not be able to exist,” Schaaf said, “We survive on user-generated content. It would be impossible for us to police the amount of traffic we get for what is or isn’t copyrighted material. It’s just not possible.”

The photo site is run by a skeleton crew of just three employees, yet the massive site is responsible for putting about 200 million cute cat pictures, skateboarding slip-ups and girls in bikinis on computer monitors every day -- and nearly 11 billion per month.

The call to dump Go Daddy started when one user of popular link-sharing site reddit.com was unhappy with the response he got from the company after writing a letter expressing how uneasy he felt about their support for the legislation.

“My heart was broken. I’ve used them for years,” the reddit poster who would only give his first name "Fred" told FoxNews.com. Fred claimed to have already transferred 51 domains to another registry. “I didn’t like the generic letter they sent back to me so I posted a call to boycott. I didn’t know it would catch on the way it did,” he said.

GoDaddy did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls from FoxNews.com.

Fred, who goes by the handle SelfProdigy, says since posting, he’s received hundreds of emails from people asking for help in transferring domains, which can normally be a tricky process.

“No one is against fighting piracy, but not at the hand of smashing innovation,” he said.

Hopefully the message has already gotten to Washington,” Schaaf said. “I hope people can come up with other ways to fight piracy.”

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011...exodus-begins/?intcmp=obnetwork#ixzz1iEQbL8sV

 

[jimpeel]

People are really pissed off at this legislation.

SOURCE

Morning Bell: The Unintended Consequences of Internet Regulation

Rob Bluey

December 28, 2011 at 9:58 am

Would you be outraged if the Department of Justice shut down The Foundry without any warning and blocked access for more than a year?

That’s exactly what happened to a hip-hop blog called Dajaz1.com, which was falsely accused of criminal copyright infringement. The blog posted music from artists promoting their work. But federal authorities viewed it differently. They seized the domain name, then shared virtually no information with its owner for more than year. Only recently did they quietly drop the case.

The government’s handling of this hip-hop blog is fueling fears about legislation moving quickly through Congress that addresses copyright infringement and online piracy.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA as it’s known in the House, and the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act would give the U.S. attorney general the power and authority to block criminal enterprises from trafficking in illegal products online.

Their cause is a noble one. Business incur significant losses when Americans buy counterfeit items. Consumers must also be increasingly vigilant about purchases they make online. Federal authorities shut down more than 150 websites just last month for pirated goods.

But the two bills making their way through Congress are the wrong solution. They pose serious threats to freedom of speech and expression and raise security concerns. With the Senate possibly voting on the PROTECT IP Act in January and the House moving forward with hearings on SOPA, Americans should understand what’s at stake.

As the case with Dajaz1.com illustrates, the federal government already has the ability to shut down U.S.-based websites. A growing number of so-called “rogue sites” are located outside the United States, however, limiting the government’s ability to block them.

SOPA would give Attorney General Eric Holder and individual intellectual property holders the ability to sue these rogue sites if they were “dedicated to theft of U.S. property.” The government, through a court order, could take these four steps:

1. Require Internet service providers to prevent subscribers from reaching the website in question;
2. Prohibit search engines such as Google from providing direct links to the foreign website in search results;
3. Prohibit payment network providers, such as PayPal or credit card firms, from completing financial transactions affecting the site; and
4. Bar Internet advertising firms from placing online ads from or to the affected website.

“The legislation addresses a legitimate problem,” wrote Heritage’s regulatory policy expert James Gattuso, “but it may have unintended negative consequences for the operation of the Internet and free speech.”

Free speech: The legislation gives the government the authority to tamper with Internet search results by requiring firms like Google to block links to infringing websites. Placing this limit on information providers is troubling and arguably a violation of the First Amendment. Besides, Washington’s appetite for power is uncontrollable, and this would almost certainly lead to a slippery slope of unwanted interference in the future.

Internet security: Criminals would almost certainly discover new ways to circumvent the government’s measures. But the most glaring security problem with SOPA is the damage it would cause to DNSSEC, the new Internet system designed to limit certain crimes. This would jeopardize security across the Internet, potentially creating new challenges.

“The federal government needs to protect intellectual property rights,” Gattuso concluded in his analysis. “But it should do so in a way that does not disrupt the growth of technology, does not weaken Internet security, respects free speech rights, and solves the problem of rogue sites.”

The debate over SOPA is already among the most intense and polarizing taking place in Washington — and rightfully so. With concerns about free speech and Internet security taking center stage, lawmakers would be wise to look at alternatives when they return in January.

 

[jimpeel]

If you do not think this legislation is dangerous, read on.

SOURCE

How SOPA would affect you: FAQ
Declan McCullagh
by Declan McCullagh December 21, 2011 1:07 PM PST

When Rep. Lamar Smith announced the Stop Online Piracy Act in late October, he knew it was going to be controversial.

But the Texas Republican probably never anticipated the broad and fierce outcry from Internet users that SOPA provoked over the last few months. It was a show of public opposition to Internet-related legislation not seen since the 2003 political wrangling over implanting copy-protection technology in PCs, or perhaps even the blue ribbons appearing on Web sites in the mid-1990s in response to the Communications Decency Act.

As CNET reported in December, Smith, a self-described former ranch manager whose congressional district encompasses the cropland and grazing land stretching between Austin and San Antonio, Texas, has become Hollywood's favorite Republican. The TV, movie, and music industries are the top donors to his 2012 campaign committee, and he's been feted by music and movie industry lobbyists at dinners and concerts.

To learn how SOPA, and its Senate cousin known as the Protect IP Act, would affect you, keep reading. CNET has compiled a list of frequently asked questions on the topic:

Q: What's the justification for SOPA and Protect IP?

Two words: rogue sites.

That's Hollywood's term for Web sites that happen to be located in a nation more hospitable to copyright infringement than the United States is (in fact, the U.S. is probably the least hospitable jurisdiction in the world for such an endeavor). Because the target is offshore, a lawsuit against the owners in a U.S. court would be futile.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a letter to the editor of The New York Times, put it this way: "Rogue Web sites that steal America's innovative and creative products attract more than 53 billion visits a year and threaten more than 19 million American jobs." The MPAA has a section of its Web site devoted to rogue Web sites. Jim Hood, the Democratic attorney general of Mississippi, and co-chair of a National Association of Attorneys General committee on the topic, recently likened rogue Web sites to child porn.

Who's opposed to SOPA?

Much of the Internet industry and a large percentage of Internet users. Here's the most current list (PDF) of opponents.

On November 15, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn wrote a letter to key members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, saying SOPA poses "a serious risk to our industry's continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation's cybersecurity." Yahoo has reportedly quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the organization's enthusiastic support for SOPA.

The European Parliament adopted a resolution last week stressing "the need to protect the integrity of the global Internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names." Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, said in a message on Twitter last week that we "need to find a better solution than #SOPA."

A letter signed by Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Anna Eshoo, both California Democrats, and
Rep. Ron Paul, the Republican presidential candidate from Texas, predicts that SOPA will invite "an explosion of innovation-killing lawsuits and litigation." Law professors have also raised concerns. And yes, there is a protest song.

How would SOPA work?

It allows the U.S. attorney general to seek a court order against the targeted offshore Web site that would, in turn, be served on Internet providers in an effort to make the target virtually disappear. It's kind of an Internet death penalty.

More specifically, section 102 of SOPA says that, after being served with a removal order:

A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order...Such actions shall be taken as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within five days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order.

How is SOPA different from the earlier Senate bill called the Protect IP Act?

Protect IP targeted only domain name system providers, financial companies, and ad networks--not companies that provide Internet connectivity.

Because SOPA is broader, even some companies who liked, or at least weren't vocally opposed to, the Senate bill aren't exactly delighted with the House version.

"Verizon continues to look at SOPA, and while it's fair to say that we have concerns about the legislation, we are working with congressional staff to address those concerns," a representative told us.

Tim McKone, AT&T's executive vice president of federal relations, said that "we have been supportive of the general framework" of the Senate bill. But when it comes to SOPA, all AT&T would say is that it is "working constructively with Chairman Smith and others toward a similar end in the House."

What are the security-related implications of SOPA?

One big one is how it interacts with the domain name system and a set of security improvements to it known as DNSSEC.

The idea of DNSSEC is to promote end-to-end encryption of domain names, meaning there's no break in the chain between, say, Wellsfargo.com and its customer. Requiring Internet providers to redirect allegedly piratical domain names to, say, the FBI's servers isn't compatible with DNSSEC.

Rep. Dan Lungren, who heads the Homeland Security subcommittee on cybersecurity, has said that an "unintended consequence" of SOPA would be to "undercut" the effort his panel has been making to promote DNSSEC.

The Sandia National Laboratories, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, has also raised concerns about SOPA, saying it is "unlikely to be effective" and will "negatively impact U.S. and global cybersecurity and Internet functionality." And Stewart Baker, the former policy chief at the Department of Homeland Security who's now in private practice, warned in an op-ed that SOPA "runs directly counter" to the House's own cybersecurity efforts.

An analysis (PDF) of Protect IP prepared by five Internet researchers this spring lists potential security problems. Among them: it's "incompatible" with DNSSEC, innocent Web sites will be swept in as "collateral damage," and the blacklist can be bypassed by using the numeric Internet address of a Web site. The address for CNET.com, for instance, is currently 64.30.224.118.

What will SOPA require Internet providers to do?

A little-noticed portion of the proposed law, which CNET highlighted in an article, goes further than Protect IP and could require Internet providers to monitor customers' traffic and block Web sites suspected of copyright infringement.

"It would cover IP blocking," says Markham Erickson, head of NetCoalition, whose members include Amazon.com, Google, eBay, and Yahoo. "I think it contemplates deep packet inspection" as well, he said.

The exact requirements will depend on what the removal order says. The Recording Industry Association of America says that SOPA could be used to force Internet providers to block by "Internet Protocol address" and deny "access to only the illegal part of the site." It would come as no surprise if copyright holders suggested wording to the Justice Department, which would in turn seek a judge's signature on the removal order.

Deep packet inspection, meaning forcing an Internet provider to intercept and analyze customers' Web traffic, is the only way to block access to specific URLs.

Smith's revised version (PDF) may limit the blocking requirement to DNS blocking. Its "safe harbor" language indicates that not resolving "the domain name of the foreign infringing site" may be sufficient, but some ambiguity remains.

Are there free speech implications to SOPA?

SOPA's opponents say so--a New York Times op-ed called it the "Great Firewall of America--and the language of the bill itself is quite broad. Section 103 says that, to be blacklisted, a Web site must be "directed" at the U.S. and also that the owner "has promoted" acts that can infringe copyright.

Here's how Section 101 of the original version of SOPA defines what a U.S.-directed Web site is:


(A) the Internet site is used to provide goods or services to users located in the United States;
(B) there is evidence that the Internet site or portion thereof is intended to offer or provide such goods and services (or) access to such goods and services (or) delivery of such goods and services to users located in the United States;
(C) the Internet site or portion thereof does not contain reasonable measures to prevent such goods and services from being obtained in or delivered to the United States; and
(D) any prices for goods and services are indicated or billed in the currency of the United States.

Some critics have charged that such language could blacklist the next YouTube, Wikipedia, or WikiLeaks. Especially in the case of WikiLeaks, which has posted internal documents not only from governments but also copyrighted documents from U.S. companies and has threatened to post more, it's hard to see how it would not qualify for blacklisting.

Laurence Tribe, a high-profile Harvard law professor and author of a treatise titled American Constitutional Law, has argued that SOPA is unconstitutional because, if enacted, "an entire Web site containing tens of thousands of pages could be targeted if only a single page were accused of infringement."

What has the response to this language been?

Mozilla, which makes the Firefox Web browser, responded by creating a page saying: "Protect the Internet: Help us stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation." It warns that "your favorite Web sites both inside and outside the US could be blocked based on an infringement claim."

Web sites including Wikimedia (as in, Wikipedia) charged that SOPA is an "Internet blacklist bill" that "would allow corporations, organizations, or the government to order an Internet service provider to block an entire Web site simply due to an allegation that the site posted infringing content." Tumblr "censored" its users' content streams, and reported that its users averaged 3.6 calls per second to Congress through the company's Web site--nearly 90,000 total.

With a bit of HTML from AmericanCensorship.org, a Web site supported by the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge, hundreds of Web sites "censored" themselves to protest SOPA. Even Lofgren, from Silicon Valley, has joined the fight-censorship protest.

For their part, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been highlighting an analysis it commissioned from First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, a former MPAA attorney, who concluded SOPA is perfectly constitutional. Here's another pro-SOPA rebuttal.

Who supports SOPA?

The three organizations that have probably been the most vocal are the MPAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A Politico chart shows that Hollywood has outspent Silicon Valley by about tenfold on lobbyists in the last two years. Here's a CNET article on why the Chamber is so pro-SOPA.

Supporters publicized letters from the National Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Fire Fighters lending their weight to the Web-blocking idea. Here are more statements from supporters at the time of SOPA's introduction. And the AFL-CIO sent a representative to testify in support of SOPA at last week's House hearing.

Over 400 businesses and organizations have sent a letter supporting SOPA.

And in the U.S. Congress?

Support for Protect IP is remarkably broad, and for SOPA a little less so. An analysis by the RIAA says that of some 1,900 bills that have been introduced in the Senate, only 18 other bills enjoy the same number of bipartisan cosponsors as Protect IP does.

That puts it in the top 1 percent of most-popular bills, at least for this measurement of congressional enthusiasm. Of Protect IP's sponsors in the Senate, over 60 percent are Democrats.

Here's the list of Senate sponsors of Protect IP--the total is 40 senators. SOPA has only 24 cosponsors, but it hasn't been around as long. Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, has introduced the so-called OPEN Act that would cut off the flow of funds to alleged pirate Web sites without requiring them to be blocked.

Would SOPA block Tor?

Perhaps. In an echo of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anticircumvention section, SOPA targets anyone who "knowingly and willfully provides or offers to provide a product or service designed or marketed by such entity...for the circumvention or bypassing" of a Justice Department-erected blockade.

Legal scholars contacted by CNET said Tor could qualify as a "circumvention" tool, which would allow it to be targeted.

What happens next?

In terms of Protect IP, the Senate Judiciary committee has approved it and it's waiting for a floor vote that has been scheduled for January 24. One hurdle: Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has placed a hold on the bill.

During a two-day debate in the House Judiciary committee in mid-December, it became clear that SOPA supporters have a commanding majority on the committee. They're expected to approve it when Congress returns in 2012.

Where it goes from there is an open question that depends on where the House Republican leadership stands. Because the House's floor schedule is under the control of the majority party, the decision will largely lie in the hands of House Speaker John Boehner and his lieutenants.

Another possibility is that there could be further House hearings on the security-related implications of SOPA, a move that would delay a final vote. An aide to House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith previously told CNET that there's no indication yet as to any further hearings, but after the committee debate in December, don't be surprised if it happens.

Editors' note: This FAQ was originally published on November 21. It has been updated regularly since then to reflect the latest developments with SOPA.

 

[jimpeel]

So what is in the future? This may be it; and I hope it is. Those who want to mess around with the Internet need to learn what can happen if they continue to piss on the third rail.

SOURCE

SOPA opponents may go nuclear and other 2012 predictions
Declan McCullagh
by Declan McCullagh December 29, 2011 4:00 AM PST

The Internet's most popular destinations, including eBay, Google, Facebook, and Twitter seem to view Hollywood-backed copyright legislation as an existential threat.

It was Google co-founder Sergey Brin who warned that the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act "would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world." Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman argue that the bills give the Feds unacceptable "power to censor the Web."

But these companies have yet to roll out the heavy artillery.

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you'll know they're finally serious.

True, it would be the political equivalent of a nuclear option--possibly drawing retributions from the the influential politicos backing SOPA and Protect IP--but one that could nevertheless be launched in 2012.

"There have been some serious discussions about that," says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. "It has never happened before." (See CNET's SOPA FAQ.)

Web firms may be outspent tenfold on lobbyists, but they enjoy one tremendous advantage over the SOPA-backing Hollywood studios and record labels: direct relationships with users.

How many Americans feel a personal connection with an amalgamation named Viacom -- compared with voters who have found places to live on Craigslist and jobs (or spouses) on Facebook and Twitter? How would, say, Sony Music Entertainment, one of the Recording Industry Association of America's board members, cheaply and easily reach out to hundreds of millions of people?

Protect IP and SOPA, of course, represent the latest effort from the Motion Picture Association of America, the RIAA, and their allies to counter what they view as rampant piracy on the Internet, especially offshore sites such as ThePirateBay.org. It would allow the Justice Department to obtain an order to be served on search engines, Internet providers, and other companies forcing them to make a suspected piratical Web site effectively vanish, a kind of Internet death penalty.

There are early signs that the nuclear option is being contemplated. Wikimedia (as in Wikipedia) called SOPA an "Internet Blacklist Bill." Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has proposed an article page blackout as a way to put "maximum pressure on the U.S. government" in response to SOPA.

The Tumblr microblogging site generated 87,834 calls to Congress over SOPA. Over at GoDaddyBoycott.org, a move-your-domain-name protest is scheduled to begin today over the registrar's previous--and still not repudiated--enthusiasm for SOPA. Popular image hosting site Imgur said yesterday it would join the exodus too.

Technically speaking, it wouldn't be difficult to pull off. Web companies already target advertisements based on city or ZIP code.

And it would be effective. A note popping up on the screens of people living in the mostly rural Texas district of SOPA author Lamar Smith, Hollywood's favorite Republican, asking them to call or write and voice their displeasure, would be noticed. If Tumblr could generate nearly 90,000 calls on its own, think of what companies with hundreds of millions of users could do.

If these Web companies believe what their executives say (PDF) about SOPA and Protect IP, they'll let their users know what their elected representatives are contemplating. A Senate floor debate scheduled for January 24, 2012 would be an obvious starting point.

"The reason it hasn't happened is because of the sensitivity," says Erickson, "even when it's a policy issue that benefits their users." He adds: It may happen."

Or it may not. It would change politics if it did.

 

[jimpeel]

So now there is a religion of "Kopimism" which is now recognized by the Swedish government. The religion is based upon the tenets of file sharing. Honest. You can't make this shit up. Really.

VIDEO SOURCE

 

[2minkey]

SOPA. the last hope of a dying industry. well apparently that dying industry has some PAC money huh?

the sad part is that this is driven by commercial interests. archaic commercial interests that just need to go bye-bye.

oops. so much for ownership.

 

[2minkey]

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscent..._author_to_remove_isp_blocking_provision.html

 

[ResearchMonkey]

 

[Luis G]

SOPA effectively guts the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbors — one of the big reasons companies such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter weren’t crushed in their early days by harassing lawsuits.

[sheep]DMCA gooooood, SOPA baaaaad[/sheep]

 

[2minkey]

RM:

hmmm. less-than-ideal lubricant. there's some fun metonymic possibilities there. i'm sure cato will have something to say on this.

 

[Winky]

 

[catocom]

RM:

hmmm. less-than-ideal lubricant. there's some fun metonymic possibilities there. i'm sure cato will have something to say on this.

hey. don't drag me into to this one. I'm just a fly.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkSBY7O0-mc

 

[Winky]

No, this Vaseline - Elastica

 

[catocom]

Wikipedia to go dark, Google to join protest against anti-piracy bill

The world's biggest websites are calling for a day of dramatic action Wednesday against a piracy-prevention lawsuit that many fear will reshape the Internet as we now know it.

Google is the latest site to throw its weight into Wednesday's battle against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives designed to crack down on sales of pirated U.S. products overseas. Critics say the legislation could hurt the technology industry and infringe on free-speech rights, arguing that it could weaken cyber-security for companies and hinder domain access rights.



Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012...rs-to-protest-anti-piracy-bill/#ixzz1jlXSAYRg

wiki??? really?
I'd have thought the'd go for UTube first.

 

[2minkey]

Wikipedia to go dark, Google to join protest against anti-piracy bill




wiki??? really?
I'd have thought the'd go for UTube first.

who are they and what are they going for?