The Circuit: SOPA and PIPA, Sprint and LightSquared, Apple’s media event - Post Tech. Posted at 08:43 AM ET, 01/03/2012 Jan 03, 2012 01:43 PM EST TheWashingtonPost Online piracy: Online piracy will continue to lead the technology policy agenda in 2012, with more parties chiming in with their opinions on the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act. The Washington Post’s editorial board expressed its measured support for PIPA while saying criticism of SOPA is “warranted” because it has language that is “dangerously overbroad.” Editorial boards at the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have written strong criticisms of both bills, saying they have gone too far to address the issue of online piracy.
Sprint, LightSquared: Sprint has given LightSquared a 30-day extension to get Federal Communications Commission approval of its network, the company said Sunday. On Tuesday, LightSquared announced that it has named former SkyTerra executive Marc Montagner as its chief financial officer. What happens to your data? Edward J. Black: Thanks, Take Aways From Internet Revolution Over SOPA, PIPA. The hundreds of thousand of calls to Congress and millions of petition signatures opposing two controversial bills, SOPA and PIPA, have been characterized as a revolution. Former Senator Dodd, who heads the MPAA, the trade group leading the SOPA and PIPA effort, likened Internet user protests to an Arab Spring in the United States.
On this alone he was right! This tsunami of unprecedented U.S. political action online was focused on maintaining Internet openness and freedom, and swamped entertainment industry lobbyists, whose overreaching legislation had been rushing through Congress ignoring both process and consequence. Millions of Internet users joined forces in a unique Internet way to protest legislation that would have compelled online censorship by US companies seeking to avoid an unjustified legal lawsuit tsunami from the entertainment industry. They stood up for Internet freedom and insisted their lawmakers do so too. Sen. Amidst SOPA and DMCA, Comedian Louis C.K. Speaks to Artists’ Relationship with Pirates. Popular comedian Louis C.K. (of FX’s “Louie “) just released his fourth full-length comedy special, “ Live at the Beacon Theater, “ and chose to make it available for download or streaming and completely free of digital rights management (DRM) for a grand total of $5.
In a personal letter on the download page, C.K. wrote, “I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without ‘corporate’ restrictions.” Artists have taken a similar stance on IP distribution before, but Louis C.K. has curiously done so amidst the current copyright backdrop of SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and the start of the fifth Digital Millennium Copyright Act rulemaking proceeding, both of which have the potential to drastically change the law regarding DRM and online piracy. One Per Cent: What was the impact of internet's blackout SOPA protest? Jim Giles, consultant Wikipedia went down, denying access to the 85 million people who visit the site every day.
Flickr users chose to black out over 200,000 photos. Reddit, a news aggregator that is an important source of traffic for many media sites, was out of action. Wired censored its own headlines and BoingBoing, a popular tech culture blog, censored its entire site. So, did yesterday's black-out have any effect? For the benefit of those who missed the furore, which at one point was the subject of 4,500 tweets per minute, the black-outs were protests against two copyright bills - dubbed SOPA and PIPA - that are making their way through Congress. The bills would give copyright holders greater power to take down content deemed to be infringing, and so are liked by Hollywood and big music companies. The protests seem to have been effective. But support for the black-out tactics was not unanimous. Other site owners backed away from plans of a black out.
Why I pirate. Why is the United States Congress trying to enact SOPA and PIPA? Because I am a pirate. That’s the simple fact of the matter: If piracy wasn’t such an issue for American rights holders (publishers, broadcasters, content creators), lobbies such as the RIAA and MPAA wouldn’t have donated millions of dollars to morally bankrupt Representatives and Senators and the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act would still be swimming in the ether. Despite the terrifyingly hyperbolic tone that some anti-piracy literature takes — that piracy is akin to drug dealing, child slave labor, or crap like that — piracy obviously is an issue, even if we don’t agree on how big or pressing an issue it is.
But why is piracy an issue in the first place? Copyright is broken In its current form, copyright laws are broken. Let me give you an example of how copyright is meant to work. It is thanks to broken copyright law that almost every form of digital content is now locked down with DRM. SOPA and PIPA-Do you care? | Daily Host News. DAILYHOSTNEWS, January 11, 2012- The much hyped and talked about bills namely SOPA and PIPA have already stirred the internet with various online campaigns and discussions against them. Everyone’s eyes are set on D-day when the USA Congress will be voting on the internet censorship bill SOPA. The discussion has attracted even those who have a laid back attitude towards the happenings in political circles.
Many social networking sites and microblogging platforms are getting engaged in gathering votes opposing the proposed bill. Viewing the situation as a bystander gives a feeling that both the sides have valid points to state themselves correct. Whereas the U.S government’s concern surrounding the safeguard and copywriting issue of intellectual property cannot be rejected at once, the apprehension about probable outcomes of SOPA of those who earn their living solely through the medium of internet is also not something that can be disregarded.
If the Act becomes the law, the U.S. SOPA, PIPA Blackouts Dominate Headlines, But What's the Impact? The Internet blackouts to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) were big news yesterday, but what type of impact did they have? Google on Wednesday blacked out the logo on its homepage, and linked to an anti-SOPA/PIPA petition that called on Americans to oppose the bills because they'd "censor the Internet and slow economic growth. " Google said today that 7 million people signed its petition, which the search giant will submit to Congress. Over on Twitter, the site recorded more than 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets between midnight and 4pm Eastern yesterday. The top five terms were SOPA, Stop SOPA, PIPA, and Tell Congress, the micro-blogging site said.
Wikipedia, meanwhile, was one of the sites that participated in Wednesday's blackout (much to some peoples' chagrin). "Your voice was loud and strong. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet," Wikipedia said. Though House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told Rep. Zynga doesn't like SOPA, and says so through its With Friends games. But really, who does? SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act snaking its way through Congress, stands to transform the Internet in the worst way. Zynga joined a number of traditional game companies like Epic Games, Red 5 Studios, Minecraft creator Mojang and more today in stating that it is against SOPA and its terribly similar counterpart, PIPA, or the Protect IP Act. "While we support the goal of stopping foreign web sites from engaging in copyright infringement, we believe there are more effective and targeted ways to deal with these problems without censoring the Internet," the FarmVille creator wrote in a blog post.
"The overly broad provisions we've seen in the pending SOPA and PIPA bills could be used to target legitimate US sites and freeze innovation at a time when it is needed most. " For the uninformed, SOPA is a bill that was presented to Congress back on Oct. 26 2011 by House Judiciary Committee Chair and Texas Republican Lamar Smith and 12 co-sponsors. [Image Credit: Zynga] Stop SOPA & PIPA. Santa, all I want is for SOPA & the Protect-IP Act to die and the Internet as I know it to survive. | Christmas Season Ecard.
Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing. This article is based on a keynote speech to the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, Dec. 2011. General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright. But bear with me, because this is about something more important. In the beginning, we had packaged software and we had sneakernet. Enter Digital Rights Management in its most primitive forms: let's call it DRM 0.96. These failed for two reasons. Typically, the way this happened is a programmer, with possession of technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself, would reverse-engineer the software and circulate cracked versions.
This gave us DRM 1.0. But, as they say on the Internet, now you have two problems. That's a lot of problems. Reality asserts itself. Consider radio. How SOPA Affects Students, Educators, and Libraries. Big media groups like the MPAA and the RIAA have historically targeted college campuses with “anti-piracy” measures, and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — the blacklist bill they’re trying to push through Congress — is no exception. The bill’s supporters insist that it targets only “rogue” foreign sites dedicated to piracy, but its vague language and overbroad enforcement methods all but ensure it could be used to stifle student and educator speech. Open educational resources Some sites with reason to be particularly concerned are international communities dedicated to “open educational resources” (OERs), which are created to be shared, built upon, and used in education. Sites like the Japan Opencourseware Consortium or Universia, which offer resources from more than 1,000 universities and represents over 10 million students, could fall into this category.
Libraries and librarians They’re not alone. Libraries represent another educational group that could face fallout from SOPA. PIPA is the new SOPA. The Pirate Bay is often cited as one of the original 'rogue sites' It looks like the hashtags are paying off. As the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in December, the powers of the internet—the web companies who innovate, the users who populate it—joined together to defend the idea of a free and open ’net. Now, because of the controversy and noise (more than 700,000 tweets and a million emails), there may no longer be the legislative will in the House to pass it, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, one of the bill’s most vocal opponents. But bills often come in pairs, and SOPA’s twin in the U.S. Understandably, the entertainment industry is sick of watching its films, records and software stolen by large-scale online file-sharing operations based overseas, also known as “rogue sites.”
The measures won’t stop copyright infringement. “It took piracy to force the iTunes model to exist,” Randazza says. What do you think? Stop Online Piracy Act. Failed United States bill Proponents of the legislation said it would protect the intellectual-property market and corresponding industry, jobs and revenue, and was necessary to bolster enforcement of copyright laws, especially against foreign-owned and operated websites. Claiming flaws in existing laws that do not cover foreign-owned and operated websites, and citing examples of active promotion of rogue websites by U.S. search engines, proponents asserted that stronger enforcement tools were needed. The bill received strong, bipartisan support in the House of Representatives and the Senate. It also received support from the Fraternal Order of Police, the National Governors Association, The National Conference of Legislatures, the U.S.
Conference of Mayors, the National Association of Attorneys General, the Chamber of Commerce, the Better Business Bureau, the AFL–CIO and 22 trade unions, and the National Consumers League.[2] History[edit] Goals[edit] According to Rep. Sponsor Rep. Internet Censorship: What if SOPA / PIPA Become Law? Potential side effects of SOPA. Potential side effects of SOPA. Note: Updated January 4 2012 in response to a comment by Jamie Zawinski, proprietor of the DNA Lounge. I haven't been writing about SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) or PIPA (the PROTECT IP Act) because, frankly, I've been too busy trying to fight them. To keep abreast of them following the #SOPA hashtag on Twitter is really the best way to go about it because things are changing so rapidly. Between the people watching the live stream of the markup hearings and people who are actually attending the hearings and livetweeting (I'm looking at you, @EFFlive) things are changing too rapidly to do much more than write about point-in-time snapshots.
Suffice it to say that when Congress dismisses the words of the people who built the Internet with contempt and ignorance, something's dangerously wrong. These two bills pose a serious threat to the Internet as we know it. For a clearer picture of how DNS resolution works, I recommend that you check out this article. The Internet erases borders, SOPA puts them back. The House today is conducting a hearing in order to mark up the Stop Online Piracy Act — a proposed law that has mobilized Silicon Valley in a way that goes far beyond issues such as privacy or even network neutrality.
As technology creeps into the mainstream and habits like broadcasting your location, sharing or watching TV online or even taking videos of your child dancing to Prince become commonplace, the old-media machine has realized it has to act soon to maintain its ever-weakening hold on the days when content was not digital and people weren’t sharing every waking moment of their lives. Mainstream technology adoption equals mainstream political attention, and entrenched industries seem to have figured out that they have to act before too many citizens (and too many legislators) start using these new devices and come to understand the limitations that laws such as SOPA could impose on them.
So maybe it’s a grandma in St. Look at the history of TiVo. SOPA America's Internet Iron Curtain. It would also criminalize any firm or person assisting those individuals. With Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and thousands of other corporations about to become felons, the bill is suddenly facing stiff opposition. Here’s how America’s internet would look if SOPA passes: There would be an invisible iron curtain around America.Internet service providers, phone companies, cable companies and web hosting companies would all be pressed into serving the US Federal government as America’s internet police.The Federal government would create an entire agency that does nothing but filter the world’s internet so that Americans can only have access to government-approved web content.Any website, foreign or domestic, that is found to contain illegal copywrited content would be immediately blacklisted from America’s world wide web.
The web hosting company that lists the site in question would be required to immediately pull the web site. If SOPA passes, Whiteout Press would still be online. White House Will Not Support SOPA, PIPA. League of Legends developer takes anti-SOPA stance, urges players to write to Congress. When Even The Librarians Are Against SOPA... Kaspersky Lab is against SOPA: quits Business Software Alliance for supporting it. MythBuster Adam Savage: SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It. SOPA Meets Massive Resistance. Ron Paul Comes Out Against SOPA; Joins Other Elected Officials Saying No To The Great Firewall Of America. #3038363. No SOPA Chrome Extension Notifies You When You Visit Sites That Hate The Internet. Android Barcode Scanner App Detects If A Product's Maker Supports SOPA. Dan Gillmor - Google+ - A Stop SOPA Phone App I've been planning to do an app like…
Firefox add-on DeSopa circumvents internet blacklisting if SOPA becomes law. Reddit will enact 'nuclear option' to protest SOPA, PIPA. ‘Anonymous’ Blacks Out the Internet in Response to SOPA Debate. Wikipedia Blackout Over SOPA? Founder Weighs Protesting Anti-Piracy Bill. January 18: Internet-Wide Protests Against the Blacklist Legislation.
Internet Censorship? SOPA and PIPA Bills in Congress; Would Websites Go Dark to Protest? Progress against SOPA. PIPALetterInternetProfessionals.pdf (application/pdf Object) SOPAletterFinal.pdf (application/pdf Object) Bill Macfadyen: Why Noozhawk Opposes SOPA, and Why You Should Care. Stop SOPA & PIPA. Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation - Electronic Frontier Foundation. All About SOPA, the Bill That Wants to Cripple Your Internet Very Soon.