SOPA
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Whenever I talk to a company about a social CRM, a lot of managers and supervisors say a variation of the following: “We don’t need that. Our business isn’t technical and no one here really likes or uses that social media stuff.” You know what I hear when someone says that to me? “A Social CRM? Bah, Humbug!”
But My Business Doesn’t Need A Social CRM
Stay with me here. SOPA deals with technical digital issues that may seem to be a sideshow but could become crucial to American media and technology businesses and the people who consume their products. The legislation is the rare broadly bipartisan piece of apple pie. The House Judiciary Committee is expected to resume hearings on it this month and all indications are that it will approve the measure, setting up a vote in the full chamber. The Senate is also expected to vote on its own version of the bill when it returns from the holiday break. Virtually every traditional media company in the United States loudly and enthusiastically supports SOPA, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for the rest of us.
The Danger of an Attack on Piracy Online
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.
Don't Break the Internet - Stanford Law Review
European Parliament joins criticism of SOPA
News By Jennifer Baker November 18, 2011 11:35 AM ET IDG News Service - The European Parliament has added its voice to those criticizing the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States criticizing the use of domain name seizures by U.S. authorities on copyright 'infringing' websites. On Friday the parliament adopted, by a large majority, a resolution that "stresses 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."
On the eve of the House Judiciary Committee's hearing on the Stop Internet Piracy Act—where five witnesses will appear in favor of the bill to just one against—a broad group of tech companies, lawmakers, experts, professors, and rights groups have come out against the bill. The statements, written by people from a variety of backgrounds and political persuasions, incorporate many of the same broad themes: SOPA will threaten perfectly legal websites, stifle innovation, kill jobs, and substantially disrupt the infrastructure of the Internet. Here is a small sample of what they had to say:
An Explosion of Opposition to the Internet Blacklist Bill
Help Protect Internet Innovation
We have previously written about why the Protect IP Act (PIPA) is bad for innovation. The same is true of the House version of this bill which is called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In fact, SOPA goes beyond PIPA in several important ways.
As venture capitalists, we believe deeply in the value of decentralized, emergent, start-up innovation. The Internet has been an unusually fertile ground for this type of innovation largely because, for the first time in history, it has been possible to get directly to consumers without negotiating with entrenched intermediaries. The result has been a spectacular explosion of innovation with tremendous benefits to consumers and to the global economy. McKinsey recently studied thirteen mature national economies and found that over the past five years, 21% of GDP growth can be directly attributed to the Internet. They found that 2.4 jobs were created for every job lost to Internet efficiencies.
The PROTECT IP Act Will Slow Start-up Innovation
STOP SOPA, SAVE THE INTERNET
Tiffiny from Fight for the Future sez, Google knows it. Viacom knows it. The Chamber of Commerce knows it.
San Francisco, California: The US State Department is once again undermining its own Internet Freedom Initiative - this time by giving the green light to a copyright bill that will adversely affect online free speech around the world. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was introduced in the House of Representatives two weeks ago, and while it does very little to stop piracy, it gives corporations unprecedented power to censor almost any site on the internet. And more vitally, it threatens the very sites and human rights activists that the State Department has previously pledged to protect. In a letter to Rep Howard Bernman, a co-sponsor of the bill, Secretary Hillary Clinton tacitly endorsed the proposed legislation, stating, "There is no contradiction between intellectual property rights protection and enforcement and ensuring freedom of expression on the internet". Prominent supporters of the bill are now distributing the letter as a sign the State Department is behind their bill.
US State Department not for internet freedom
How The Stop Online Piracy Act Could Impact Journalists - 10,000 Words
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?Paris, November 17th, 2011 – The European Parliament today massively adopted its resolution on Net neutrality, calling on the EU Commission to protect the open Internet, which is put at risk by an increasing number of restrictions imposed by telecoms operators. This overall positive resolution urges EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes to depart from her failed wait-and-see approach by rapidly assessing the need for further regulation to keep the Internet open and free. This votes represent a political commitment by the European Parliament to protecting the Internet from any form of restriction or censorship. The EU Parliament's adoption of a resolution on Net neutrality by a massive majority comes at a timely moment, as the EU Commissioner for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes keeps denying the illegitimate restrictions to Internet access imposed by operators that are reported all over Europe, as evidenced by the citizen platform RespectMyNet .
EU Parliament Massively Commits to Net Neutrality and Open Internet
Tony Falzone is the Deputy General Counsel at Pinterest, Inc. Prior to joining Pinterest, Tony co-founded CIS’s Fair Use Project, which he led as its Executive Director from 2006 to 2012. In the course of his work at CIS, Tony represented conductor Lawrence Golan in his challenge to Congress's constitutional power to remove works from the public domain, which he argued before the Supreme Court of the United States.