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. 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.
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.
Why SOPA Is Dangerous. 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.
" 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.
SOPA Sponsor Lamar Smith’s Campaign Website Violated Copyright Laws.
Cheezburger Sites To Be Blacked Out January 18 To Protest SOPA and PIPA. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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).
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. 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. Cheezburger CEO Threatens to Move GoDaddy Domains. 22 December '11, 11:05pm. How SOPA Creates The Architecture For Much More Widespread Censorship. We've discussed many times how the censorship provisions of SOPA and PIPA require US companies to set up a system that is technically identical to internet censorship systems in countries like China and Iran.
Paul Graham: SOPA supporters are no longer welcome at Y Combinator events. Paul Graham has put the kibosh on SOPA-supporting companies showing up at Y Combinator events, including the popular and investment-driven Demo Days. GoDaddy's SOPA Support Sparks Calls for Boycotts and Domain Transfers. Staff Debate SOPA. The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, is a hotly debated bill in the U.S. Congress. Some say it's a necessary law to ensure protection of America's intellectual property, others claim it will destroy the infrastructure of the Internet as we know it.
Everything that's wrong about politics: latest SOPA and PROTECT-IP outrage.