SOPA Architect Lamar Smith Can't Hear You. Still Not Clear on SOPA & PIPA? Infographic w/Simple Explanations. SOPA, PIPA and bills like them want to kill this blog. And yours. January 18, 2012 by Olivier Blanchard If you like this blog and others like it, don’t support SOPA or any of its variants. If you hate this blog and others like it, support SOPA and all of its variants. It’s that simple. 1. None of it effectively impacts piracy. 2. It throws the baby out the window but doesn’t do a whole lot to throw out the bathwater. As much as I’ve loved writing here for the last 7 years, if SOPA or any future incarnations of SOPA pass, I will have to shut down this blog. As for the reason why supporters of SOPA are wrong about it, there’s this: SOPA doesn’t just completely miss the mark when it comes to making it harder for digital piracy to take place, it also basically puts the internet under Taliban rule.
PS: This blog post is in violation of SOPA/PIPA. Like this: Like Loading... PROTECT IP Act Breaks the Internet. Clay Shirky: Sopa and Pipa would create a consumption-only internet. There are many reasons to dislike Sopa and Pipa, the pair of internet censorship bills working their way through the US Congress. They are (another) example of the influence of corporate money on American politics: US media firms have cumulatively donated tens of millions of dollars to the bills' authors.
They are (another) example of representatives refusal to represent the public: they tried to rush the bills through at the end of last year, with no public consultation. And the proposed technical solution – censorship enforced through the domain name system – would not have the effect they want it to have, but its technical side-effects would break important parts of the internet.
But maybe you don't care about all of that. Maybe politics bores you, maybe technical details make your eyes glaze over. Here's why you should care anyway: the proposed law that would result from Sopa and Pipa will only work if you are put under 24-hour digital surveillance. Post-SOPA: the path forward for addressing piracy.
The number of high-quality services that "compete with free" is growing—and some of the credit is certainly due to the major content conglomerates, which have made it easier to license and use their digital material. As a recent subscriber to Rdio, it's hard for me to imagine anyone who would even want to go to the hassle of pirating music when 13 million tracks are ready to be dialed up in instant, high-quality streams, complete with album art. For $4.99 a month—the cost of the Web-only unlimited subscription—you would have be one cheap bastard with way too much time on your hands to scour P2P networks instead.
Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Spotify, and iTunes are all terrific services that have been well-used in my household; we've even rented HD movies through the Xbox. All provide a much better experience than the older one of driving to a store and browsing the shelves. When done well, such services are the best way to make piracy irrelevant. Still, pirate sites remain.
Why SOPA Is Dangerous. I'm sure you've heard by now that SOPA is bad and would ruin the Internet, but have you actually read the bill? If not, it's worth reading, for two reasons. First, if you are going to oppose a bill, you should know exactly what you're opposing, not just the vague principle behind it. Second, it'll provide you with a valuable insight: that these bills are written in an attempt to obscure the truth.
First off, I'm going to qualify that I'm not a lawyer. However, I am a programmer, and that's made me pretty good at unraveling spaghetti code. If ever a bill was spaghetti, this is it. Here is the full text of the bill, as of Jan. 15, 2012. The Scalpel Section 102(a)(2) permits the attorney general to take action against foreign sites (i.e., sites that do not fall under U.S. jurisdiction) if "the owner or operator of such Internet site is facilitating the commission of [copyright infringement]. " SEE ALSO: SOPA Will Take Us Back to the Dark Ages, by Mashable's Editor in Chief The Sledgehammer. 5 reasons why SOPA, PROTECT-IP and other legislative idiocy will never die. There has been some small celebration over the last few days about what appears, at first glance, to be a victory of anti-SOPA activists against the legislative disaster that is the Stop Online Piracy Act: White House releases statement against SOPA; asks for refined legislation this year -- The White House stated, "We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet.
"DNS provision pulled from SOPA, victory for opponents -- The bill's provision to muck with the DNS infrastructure will reportedly be removed.Geeks 1, Congress 0: Controversial anti-piracy bill SOPA 'shelved' -- Republican leaders report the bill has been put on hold until certain provisions have been changed. So does this mean our long national nightmare is finally over?
Does this mean the Internet is now safe from lawmakers and lobbyists for now and the future? Oh. Do not let your guard down. Seriously. And yet, the entertainment industry is still trying to strangle us. Industry Suppressed Report Showing Users Of Shuttered 'Pirate' Site Probably Helped Movie Industry... We've seen study after study after study after study after study showing, contrary to the claim of the industry and certain politicians that users of file sharing sites are pure "freeloaders" who are "leeching," that the users tend to be larger spenders on media and ancillary products.
So it's really not a huge surprise that a new study would come out saying the same thing... But, in this case, the history of the report, which has not actually been released, is a lot more interesting. As you may recall, in June, law enforcement across Europe arrested a bunch of people for apparently running Kino.to -- a site that had been listed by US entertainment lobbyists as one of the worst of the worst "pirate sites," out there. So, it sure would be interesting to find out that, before all of this happened, some entertainment industry lobbyists had commissioned research into the type of folks who used Kino.to and their media consumption habits.
Of course, this report never saw the light of day. SOPA Sponsor Lamar Smith’s Campaign Website Violated Copyright Laws. Oh well this is certainly ripe: Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, the Hollywood-campaign-donation-loving sponsor of the decrepit Stop Online Piracy Act, apparently improperly used a copyright-protected photo on his recent campaign’s web page, according to Vice. Reports Vice‘s Jamie Lee Curtis Taete: I decided to check that everything on Lamar’s official campaign website was copyright-cleared and on the level.
Lamar is using several stock images on his site, two of which I tracked back to the same photographic agency. But then Taete tracked down DJ Schulte, the photographer who took the woody landscape shot used as the background shot on Smith’s homepage and SURPRISE! Keep in mind kids, this is the same Lamar Smith who thinks you’re ignorant and not significant if you oppose his legislation. Pics via Vice & DJ Schulte’s Flickr) I want more like this!
Cheezburger Sites To Be Blacked Out January 18 To Protest SOPA and PIPA. Ben Huh, CEO of the popular Cheezburger Network, tweeted Thursday that the network will be blacking itself out January 18 to protest the two bills Congress is working to pass that would, among other things, encourage domain name filtering against web sites deemed to be dedicated to copyright and trademark infringement. "All Cheezburger sites will also be instituting a blackout on January 18 to protest SOPA and PIPA. Now, go ask Wikipedia to do it" Huh said. The Cheezburger network encompasses the infamous I Can Haz Cheezburger? Site, as well as the FAIL Blog, Memebase and others. For those who are thinking "So What? " January 18 is when the House Government and Oversight Reform Committee will hold its hearing on the cybersecurity and job creating implications of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is moving through the House Judiciary Committee.
Huh's network will be joining Reddit in its blackout. Is a pro-PIPA lobbying group guilty of e-mail "content theft?" On January 6th, the copyright-reform organization Public Knowledge sent out an e-mail to supporters urging them to take action to oppose the Protect IP Act. "Find a town hall meeting by joining our Meetup Group," the email said. "Public Knowledge will use this resource to keep you informed about town hall updates.
If you find out about a town hall that is not on our Meetup page, please write pk@publicknowledge.org. " Four days later, Creative America, a group founded by major Hollywood studios to lobby for the Protect IP Act, sent out an e-mail to its own supporters. "Find a town hall meeting near you by joining our meet up group," the email said. "Creative America will use this as a way to keep you informed and up to date about town hall meetings in your area. If you find out about a town hall meeting that is not on our page, please contact us at info@creativeamerica.org and we'll update it. " Both e-mails continued with surprisingly similar language. Silicon Valley Congresswoman: Web seizures trample due process (and break the law) At 9:30pm PST on February 11, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized the domain mooo.com. They ordered the domain name's registrar to redirect all traffic headed for mooo.com to a government IP address, one which displayed a single stark warning that the domain name had been seized for involvement with child pornography.
But the mooo.com domain name was shared between 84,000 sites; every one suddenly displayed the child pornography warning. The mistake was soon corrected, but the free domain name provider running mooo.com warned users that removal of the banner from their sites might "take as long as 3 days. " One outraged user took to his blog to tell ICE to "get out of my Internet. You'd get no argument from me that there are truly distasteful and illegal things on the Internet. That's true of any society. Mooo.com had been seized as part of ICE's Operation Protect Our Children (the better-known Operation: In Our Sites targets piracy and counterfeiting). Rep. Rep. Rep. Now The U.S. Is Trying To Force Dumb Internet Laws On Other Countries Too. The Danger of an Attack on Piracy Online.
The Danger of an Attack on Piracy Online. How SOPA would affect you: FAQ | Privacy Inc. 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. Consider the concerted protest on January 18 by high-profile Web companies and organizations.
Wikipedia's English-language pages, for instance, went completely black, while Google put a big black box over the prominent logo on its home page, with a link to a page from which users could sign a petition entitled "Tell Congress: Don't censor the Web. " To learn how SOPA, and its Senate cousin known as the Protect IP Act , would affect you, keep reading. American Corporate Software Can No Longer Be Trusted For Anything. The discussions around SOPA have shown a very unfortunate side of United States policymaking — that its policymakers are not the slightest afraid of legislatively ordering American-run corporations to sabotage their customers in order to further United States foreign policy. Today, software from two American companies – Microsoft and Apple – run most of the world’s infrastructure, in terms of governments, authorities, social security, et cetera. It has come to be taken for so granted, you can barely buy a piece of hardware for the current ecosystem without code from at least one of these two American corporations.
(UPDATE: I’ve seen quite a few network admins complain about this assertion. Note that I’m not pointing to network infrastructure such as switches, raw iron or web servers, but society’s infrastructure: social security, medical records, police databases. In my experience, almost all of these are consultant-written solutions on top of Windows, or sometimes Apple, platforms.) While Drafting SOPA, the U.S. House Harbors BitTorrent Pirates. In recent weeks we discovered BitTorrent pirates at the RIAA, Sony, Fox, Universal and even law-abiding organizations such as the Department of Homeland Security. By now it should be clear that people are using BitTorrent pretty much everywhere, and not only for lawful downloads. Today we can add the U.S.
House of Representatives to that list, the place where lawmakers are drafting the much discussed "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA). YouHaveDownloaded is a treasure trove full of incriminating data on alleged BitTorrent pirates in organizations all across the world. Unauthorized downloads occur even in the most unexpected of places, from the palace of the French President, via the Church of God, to the RIAA. Although we don’t plan to go on forever trawling the archives, we felt that there was at least one place that warranted further investigation – the U.S.
House of Representatives. The answer is yet again unambiguous – they pirate a lot.
Why SOPA Could Kill the Open Education Resource Movement - Education. Thanks to the Open Education Resource movement, remixing and redistributing educational content has become standard. Efforts like the 10-year-old OpenCourseWare project at MIT, OER libraries stocked with free or low cost electronic books for college classes in Washington and California, and the rise of online learning have all contributed to the democratization of education. But all that global knowledge sharing could come to a grinding halt if the Stop Online Piracy Act goes forward. In a "Concerned Educators Letter to Congress" a grassroots collective of OER and educational technology leaders write that SOPA would "chill the creation of educational content.
" Many OER platforms are nonprofit, operating with Creative Commons licenses and allowing global users to upload content on the honor system. A prime example of SOPA's potential impact on the OER movement comes from the application of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Pioneering OER platforms could face a similar fate.
Paul Graham: SOPA Supporting Companies No Longer Allowed At YC Demo Day. At this point quite a few internet companies have protested H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in creative ways. Held by many to be the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet if it passes, SOPA would makes it really easy for copyright holders to force sites offline that they think are offending, among other things. While the judiciary vote has been delayed until next year, the list revealing the companies who support the act was released yesterday, and many startups, such as Reddit, have begun to drill down into boycotts of individual companies like domain provider GoDaddy. The company boycotts have sparked a thread on Hacker News, where user Solipsist posted a link to the list with the comment, “While I understand your sentiments towards SOPA, are you really going to distance yourself from all of these companies?”
To which YCombinator founder and investor Paul Graham replied, “Actually that’s exactly what I thought when I saw the list yesterday. The rationale? Cheezburger CEO Threatens to Move GoDaddy Domains. How SOPA Creates The Architecture For Much More Widespread Censorship. Paul Graham: SOPA supporters are no longer welcome at Y Combinator events. GoDaddy's SOPA Support Sparks Calls for Boycotts and Domain Transfers. Staff Debate SOPA. Everything that's wrong about politics: latest SOPA and PROTECT-IP outrage.