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. 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. 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. 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? SOPA and PIPA-Do you care? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Stop Online Piracy Act. 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 present 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. Opponents claimed that the proposed legislation threatened free speech and innovation, and enabled law enforcement to block access to entire internet domains due to infringing content posted on a single blog or webpage.
Victory for Internet Freedom: Obama Announces Opposition to SOPA, Congress Shelves Bill. Misguided efforts to combat online privacy have been threatening to stifle innovation, suppress free speech, and even, in some cases, undermine national security. As of yesterday, though, there’s a lot less to worry about. At issue are two related bills: the Senate’s Protect IP Act and the even more offensive Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, both of which are generated intense opposition from tech giants and First Amendment advocates. The first sign that the bills’ prospects were dwindling came Friday, when SOPA sponsors agreed to drop a key provision that would have required service providers to block access to international sites accused of piracy.
The legislation ran into an even more significant problem yesterday when the White House announced its opposition to the bills. Until now, the Obama administration had not taken a position on the issue. 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. 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. Why We’re Against SOPA and PIPA. White House Will Not Support SOPA, PIPA. Saturday marked a major victory for opponents of proposed anti-piracy legislation Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), which would target foreign-based websites violating U.S. copyrights. House of Representatives bill SOPA and its Senate counterpart PIPA are designed to punish websites that make available, for example, free movies and music without the permission of the U.S. rights holders. Opponents of the bills, however, worry that the proposed laws would grant the Department of Justice too much regulatory power.
Epic Games stands against SOPA. Earlier this week, the Entertainment Software Association proclaimed its support for the Stop Online Piracy Act, a piece of legislation that has created much controversy as of late. Today, one of the ESA's members--Epic Games--has made it clear it does not endorse the current version of SOPA. League of Legends developer takes anti-SOPA stance, urges players to write to Congress. When Even The Librarians Are Against SOPA... Supporters of SOPA keep trying to pretend that the only people who could possibly be against the bill are those who profit from infringement. That's crazy. Kaspersky Lab is against SOPA: quits Business Software Alliance for supporting it. MythBuster Adam Savage: SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It. Right now Congress is considering two bills—the Protect IP Act, and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—that would be laughable if they weren't in fact real.
Honestly, if a friend wrote these into a piece of fiction about government oversight gone amok, I'd have to tell them that they were too one-dimensional, too obviously anticonstitutional. Make no mistake: These bills aren't simply unconstitutional, they are anticonstitutional. 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.