SOPA: Stop Online Piracy Act [Infographic] Consent of the Networked. Part Three of the book is titled “Democracy’s Challenges.” At the end of Chapter 7, dealing with copyright enforcement and free speech, I conclude: It is a moral imperative for democracies to find new and innovative ways to protect copyright in the Internet age without stifling the ability of citizens around the world to exercise their right to freedom of speech, access information they need to make intelligent voting decisions, and use the Internet and mobile technologies to organize for political change. Balanced, citizen-centric solutions will require innovation, creativity, and compromise. Sadly, the elected leaders of the world’s oldest democracies are disappointing the people who could most use their help by demonstrating very little enlightened leadership and a great deal of short-term self-interest.
I conclude: The computer coding pros — and the millions who depend on their products — have said “no” to legal code they hate. But killing a bad bill is only the first step. Like this: Don't Break the Internet. Two bills now pending in Congress—the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House—represent the latest legislative attempts to address a serious global problem: large-scale online copyright and trademark infringement. Although the bills differ in certain respects, they share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression.
To begin with, the bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure. Based upon nothing more than an application by a federal prosecutor alleging that a foreign website is “dedicated to infringing activities,” Protect IP authorizes courts to order all U.S. If you critique SOPA, read the text. If you read the text, read it right. Earlier this week Eriq Gardner speculated in a tweet that less than one tenth of one percent of folks have actually read the SOPA legislation. I bet he’s right. It’s good to read the statute. But what might be worse than not reading it is reading it wrongly and thereafter propagating misunderstanding. One of the motifs that has permeated the SOPA discussion is this idea that evil (usually corporate) interests could shut down entire, innocent sites based on one piece of user generated content on that site that is, or links to, infringing material.
Some commentators, such as the usually astute Khan Academy in the video embedded below, have gone so far as to say that one little transgression by one user could bring down all of Facebook, YouTube, or Vimeo. (That discussion begins at about the 5:00 mark where the narrator purports to parse the language of Section 103 of SOPA.) It is silly to think that one person could bring down Facebook and leave its almost a billion users in the dark. Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea)
SOPA explained: What it is and why it matters - Jan. 17. SOPA's backers say the sweeping anti-piracy bill is needed to squash sites like The Pirate Bay (left), but the tech industry says the bill is rife with unintended consequences. NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The tech industry is abuzz about SOPA and PIPA, a pair of anti-piracy bills. Here's why they're controversial, and how they would change the digital landscape if they became law. What is SOPA? SOPA is an acronym for the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA's main targets are "rogue" overseas sites like torrent hub The Pirate Bay, which are a trove for illegal downloads. Content creators have battled against piracy for years -- remember Napster? That means sites like Google wouldn't show flagged sites in their search results, and payment processors like eBay's (EBAY, Fortune 500) PayPal couldn't transmit funds to them. Both sides say they agree that protecting content is a worthy goal.
Isn't copyright infringement already illegal? Let's say a YouTube user uploads a copyrighted song. PIPA/SOPA and Why You Should Care | Mitchell. Congress is considering the most talked-about copyright legislation in a decade, known as Protect IP (PIPA) in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy (SOPA) in the House. Today, Mozilla announced that we’ll join with other sites in a virtual strike to protest PIPA/SOPA. SOPA makes all of us potential criminals if we don’t become the enforcement arm of a new government regulatory and policing structure. SOPA does not target websites serving up unauthorized content. SOPA does not target people accessing those websites. SOPA targets all the rest of us. These costs are significant, wide-ranging and long lasting. Assume there’s a corner store in your neighborhood that rents movies. SOPA/PIPA don’t aim at the people trying to get to the store. The solution under the proposed bills is to make it as difficult as possible to find or interact with the store.
This is what SOPA and PIPA would impose in the online world. Supporters say they are only targeting foreign websites outside US jurisdiction. PIPA, SOPA and OPEN Act Quick Reference Guide. The last month or so has seen a flurry of anti-piracy, online infringing, copyright-related bills. The latest newcomer is the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act or OPEN Act ( S. 2029 ).
Introduced on December 17, 2011 by Sen. Wyden (D-OR), along with Senators Moran (R-KS) and Cantwell (D-WA), the OPEN Act is being heralded as a more palatable alternative to existing anti-piracy bills – The Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 or PIPA ( S. 968 ), and The Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA ( H.R. 3261 ). All three bills take aim at any website beyond U.S. borders that distribute counterfeit or copyright infringing products.
What you’ll see (hopefully at a glance), is unlike PIPA or SOPA, the OPEN Act focuses solely on curbing online infringement by cutting off websites’ payment processing and ad networks. Also, the guide captures the status of the bills as of today, January 10. Revised 'Net censorship bill requires search engines to block sites, too. Surprise! After months in the oven, the soon-to-be-released new version of a major US Internet censorship bill didn't shrink in scope—it got much broader.
Under the new proposal, search engines, Internet providers, credit card companies, and ad networks would all have cut off access to foreign "rogue sites"—and such court orders would not be limited to the government. Private rightsholders could go to court and target foreign domains, too. As for sites which simply change their domain name slightly after being targeted, the new bill will let the government and private parties bring quick action against each new variation. Get ready for the "PROTECT IP Act.
" Targeting Google A source in Washington provided Ars with a detailed summary of the PROTECT IP Act, which takes its acronym from "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property. " The PROTECT IP Act makes a few major changes to last year's COICA legislation. Help us out, please. Sopainternet.png (PNG Image, 972x5500 pixels) - Scaled (11. Explainer: understanding Sopa | World news. Life will suck if they censor the internet. Ask CDT: SOPA and PIPA. An Open Education Resources Battle Won. The War Continues. Image from technutnews.com With two whole weeks left to spare in 2011 (procrastinate much?) , Congress finally finished its deliberations on the FY12 budget. The nearly one trillion dollar appropriations bill is now making its way to the President for his signature.
While the maximum Pell grant was maintained, it’s hard to see the continual whittling away of benefits as a victory for students (see Steve Burd’s take on the “thoughtless” approach here). There was, however, a quiet and significant victory for students in the final bill. As previously noted on the Quick and the Ed and in the National Review, a stealth attack in the appropriations process sought to undermine federal investments in Open Education Resources (OER).
A look at the final language reveals that the counter attack was successful. At first blush, SOPA doesn’t seem to have much to do with education. In the mid and late 90s, technology made it easier to digitize — and illegally share — music. John Palfrey » Blog Archive » SOPA and our 2010 Circumvention Study. Daniel Castro of The Information Technology & Innovation Fund recently published a paper supporting the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) currently being debated in congress. In that report, he claims that research performed by us supports the domain name system (DNS) filtering mechanisms mandated by SOPA. This claim is a distortion of our work. We disagree with the use of our study to make the point that DNS-based Internet filtering works and that we should therefore use it as a means of stopping websites from distributing copyrighted content. The data we collected answer a completely different set of questions in a completely different context.
Among other provisions that seek to control the sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet, SOPA, if enacted, would call upon the U.S. government to require that Internet service providers remove from their DNS servers the names of any sites that either infringe copyright directly or merely “facilitate” copyright infringement. Links: Mr. Alexander Howard - Google+ - A Status Update on SOPA from Washington A colleague just… A Status Update on SOPA from Washington A colleague just asked me for a crash course on the Stop Online Privacy Act. I sent them my feature: The thing is, that post is about 6,000 words long and is now a month out of date. So here's the briefing I sent back. Rep. Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works: *"Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works"*-+Clay Johnson: FOR SOPA: RIAA, MPAA, big Hollywood, labor.
AGAINST SOPA: Reps. Rep. Key counterproposal: An "*OPEN*" bill from Issa and other opponents of SOPA. Prospects: mixed. On the other hand, there have been significant cybersecurity concerns raised about the bills because of what it would do to DNSSEC, including by DHS officials. 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. This always upsets supporters of these bills, because they prefer to focus solely on what's being censored, with the argument being that as long as the target of the censorship is infringement, rather than, say, political speech, it's okay. I've had two different arguments for why that line of thinking is ridiculous. First, while the bill may target infringing works, it will, without doubt, end up censoring tons of non-infringing works, as with the Dajaz1 seizure.
The second point is that countries have a history of censoring political speech under the guise of copyright law. So, even if the intent is not to censor political speech, we have enough examples of it happening that it seems like a perfectly legitimate point to raise. Then there’s the technological architecture. Torrentfreak. Despite not owning a computer or even a router, a retired woman has been ordered by a court to pay compensation to a movie company. The woman had been pursued by a rightsholder who claimed she had illegally shared a violent movie about hooligans on the Internet, but the fact that she didn't even have an email address proved of little interest to the court. Guilty until proven innocent is the formula in Germany.
The just-concluded case in Germany demonstrates perfectly that in some jurisdictions the standard way to deal with a file-sharing claim is guilty until proven innocent. At 09:10 during a cold January morning in 2010, the defendant in the case says she was tucked up in bed. A movie copyright holder, however, insists the retired single woman was illegally sharing files on the Internet. The settlement letter sent to the woman by the copyright holder stated clearly that on January 4th she’d been using the eDonkey network to share a violent film about hooligans.
IP address. SOPA : la loi anti-piratage a du plomb dans l'aile. Dire que le projet de loi anti-piratage SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) est controversé aux États-Unis serait un euphémisme grossier. Le texte, soutenu mordicus par les industries culturelles, est très vivement critiqué par de nombreux observateurs pour les effets considérables qu'il pourrait entraîner sur l'innovation, l'économie numérique et la liberté d'expression sur la toile. L'entrée en vigueur d'un tel texte dans la législation américaine est toutefois encore loin d'être acquise. En effet, l'examen du projet n'a toujours pas encore débuté. Et pour cause, la commission judiciaire de la Chambre des représentants a repoussé ces jours-ci, et à deux reprises, le début des travaux sur la loi SOPA. La semaine dernière, la commission judiciaire avait reporté une première fois l'examen de ce texte pour approfondir sa réflexion.
Après être revenu dans l'agenda des élus américains, le texte vient une nouvelle fois d'être bousculé par les parlementaires. PROTECT IP Renamed E-PARASITES Act; Would Create The Great Firewall Of America. How The Stop Online Piracy Act Could Impact Journalists. Unless you’re wholly entrenched in the daily goings on of Internet and copyright law, SOPA might be one of those things you hadn’t even heard of until this morning, when sites like BoingBoing and Tumblr and GigaOm launched posts explaining and condemning it. SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill introduced into the House that, according to a New York Times OpEd, “would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial.
[SOPA] goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright.” Sounds pretty scary, right? The SOPA hearings started in the House today, and that’s why today has been declared American Censorship Day. SOPA has many implications for casual Internet users, but for journalists the repercussions of SOPA passing could be immense. 1.
The Dumbest Examples Of Online Copyright Law Enforcement. Nobody likes getting sued, least of all a fledgling online startup trying to squeeze its last cent into marketing and product development. This is why, when an online publisher gets a DMCA takedown notice about some of its user-posted content, the offending page gets taken down without much fanfare or even examination from the website — let the parties fight it out amongst themselves. This is because Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides websites with immunity from copyright infringement lawsuits so long as they follow several steps to remove infringing content when a putative copyright owner sends them notice of the infringement.
Past DMCA Bullying In the last several years, the DMCA's notice and takedown provisions have been used by less than scrupulous parties to bully websites into removing competitor content which, more often than not, did not infringe any of the parties' rights. Now enter SOPA, the newest, biggest bully in the yard. Future SOPA Bullying. New 'Firewall' song protests SOPA copyright bill (Q&A) | Privacy Inc. SOPA undermines security while not solving any problems. Legal Analysis of SOPA / PROTECT-IP: No, It's Not Censorship. The end of YouTube. The Twilight of Copyright?