Why I'm suing the US government to protect internet freedom | Birgitta Jónsdóttir. Chris Hedges on His Lawsuit Against the President - Truthdig Radio. News of other forthcoming suits: Regarding Chicago, and (Rahm Emanuel) the new mayor’s new and very alarming attempts to squelch civil literties and protest: (from 1.19.12 London Guardian, Barnard Harcourt, “Outlawing Dissent”): Emanuel could have ordered his police “to issue written citations and move the protesters to the sidewalk. In fact, that’s precisely what the police would do a few weeks later at a more obstreperous protest by senior citizens at Occupy Chicago.
On that occasion, 43 senior citizens who stopped traffic by standing or sitting in the middle of a downtown street were escorted by police officers off the street without being handcuffed, and were merely issued citations to appear in the department of administrative hearings. (Those arrests, however, took place under the watchful eye of Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and Democratic Representatives Danny Davis, Jan Schakowsky and Mike Quigley.) “But not on 15 October or the following Saturday night. SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy. Earlier this month, I detailed at some length why claims about the purported economic harms of piracy, offered by supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), ought to be treated with much more skepticism than they generally get from journalists and policymakers.
My own view is that this ought to be rather secondary to the policy discussion: SOPA and PIPA would be ineffective mechanisms for addressing the problem, and a terrible idea for many other reasons, even if the numbers were exactly right. No matter how bad last season's crops were, witch burnings are a poor policy response. Fortunately, legislators finally seem to be cottoning on to this: SOPA now appears to be on ice for the time being, and PIPA's own sponsors are having second thoughts about mucking with the Internet's Domain Name System.
Decreasing creative output? One reason is that they already are recapturing much of that revenue through "complementary" purchases. PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet. What is SOPA ? SOPA PIPA Internet Censorship. SOPA. The Web to Go Black to Protest Censorship Bills.
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Copyright Notice This site provides political commentary, education and parody protected by the fair use and My Lai/Zapruder exceptions to copyright law. We are not copyright pirates. Internet blockout 18/01. Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation. American Censorship Day. Stop American Censorship. STRIKE AGAINST SOPA. Guest Post: Democrats Are the Ones Pushing Web Censorship. The Definitive Post On Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas. There's been plenty of talk (and a ton of posts here on Techdirt) discussing both SOPA (originally E-PARASITE) and PROTECT IP (aka PIPA), but it seemed like it would be useful to create a single, "definitive" post to highlight why both of these bills are extremely problematic and won't do much (if anything) to deal with the issues they're supposed to deal with, but will have massive unintended consequences.
I also think it's important to highlight how PIPA is almost as bad as SOPA. Tragically, because SOPA was so bad, some in the entertainment industry have seen it as an opportunity to present PIPA as a "compromise. " It is not. Both bills have tremendous problems, and they start with the fact that neither bill will help deal with the actual issues being raised.
That main issue, we're told over and over again, is "piracy" and specifically "rogue" websites. Thus, the real issue is that this is a business model problem. So... Guest Post: The Tide Is Turning Against SOPA … And We Might Actually Succeed In Stopping It. Google Plans Home Page Protest Against U.S. Piracy Legislation Measures. Google Inc. (GOOG) will place a link on its home page tomorrow protesting anti-piracy measures in the U.S. Congress, joining other Internet companies demonstrating against the Hollywood-backed legislation. Google, owner of the world’s most popular search engine, and Facebook Inc. are among companies opposing House and Senate bills they say they will hurt the growth of the U.S. technology industry. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia where users contribute entries, said it will shut the English version of its website for 24 hours tomorrow to protest the measures. “We oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet,” Samantha Smith, a Google spokeswoman, said in an e-mail today.
The Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate are backed by the movie and music industries as a means to crack down on the sale of counterfeit goods by non-U.S. websites. Vote Pending. Net founders fight piracy law with 'censorship' claim. 15 December 2011Last updated at 08:48 ET Film studios are stepping up efforts to combat piracy The founders of Google, Twitter and eBay have signed a strongly worded letter criticising controversial US legislation ahead of a debate in Congress. The Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) aims to slash the amount of pirated content on the internet.
But signatories including Google co-founder Sergey Brin claim it amounts to China-style censorship. The bill has the backing of Hollywood and the music industry. Blocking access Sopa was introduced by Judiciary Committee chairman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, who said the legislation was designed to "stop the flow of revenue to rogue websites... that profit from selling pirated goods without any legal consequences". It would give content owners and the US government the power to request court orders to shut down websites associated with piracy. It could stop search engines from linking to the allegedly infringing sites. 'Due process' UK copyright. VETO the SOPA bill and any other future bills that threaten to diminish the free flow of information. Official White House Response to VETO the SOPA bill and any other future bills that threaten to diminish the free flow of information By Victoria Espinel, Aneesh Chopra, and Howard Schmidt Thanks for taking the time to sign this petition.
Both your words and actions illustrate the importance of maintaining an open and democratic Internet. Right now, Congress is debating a few pieces of legislation concerning the very real issue of online piracy, including the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the PROTECT IP Act and the Online Protection and Digital ENforcement Act (OPEN). We want to take this opportunity to tell you what the Administration will support—and what we will not support. Any effective legislation should reflect a wide range of stakeholders, including everyone from content creators to the engineers that build and maintain the infrastructure of the Internet. We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. Creator. CISPA / TPP / ACTA / SOPA / PIPA / COICA. SOPA / PIPA. SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet. Why Banks Back SOPA, the “Bring the Chinese Internet to America” Bill. Although lots of technology-related sites are correctly up in arms about the Stop Online Piracy Act, the MSM has given it short shrift, and the financial blogosphere has not paid much attention (cross posts of some of George Washington articles being a welcome exception).
SOPA and PIPA (Protect IP Act) use nuclear-weapon-to-kill-a-mouse scale solutions to Internet piracy. David Carr in the New York Times, in an rather anodyne article given what is at stake, gave an overview of what is wrong with the bills, namely, a lot. Even if you accept the proponents’ dubious claims about the losses from “rouge” foreign websites ($58 billion!) , the bills probably won’t fix that problem and will create a host of new ones. Despite assertions that it would create jobs, it would actually deter technology startups, undermine scientific journals, and could fragment the Internet domain name system.
It’s tantamount to making the public wear ankle bracelets to combat shoplifting. 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. They are (another) example of the influence of corporate money on American politics: US media firms have cumulatively donated tens of millions of dollars to the bills' authors. They are (another) example of representatives refusal to represent the public: they tried to rush the bills through at the end of last year, with no public consultation. And the proposed technical solution – censorship enforced through the domain name system – would not have the effect they want it to have, but its technical side-effects would break important parts of the internet.
But maybe you don't care about all of that. Maybe politics bores you, maybe technical details make your eyes glaze over. Here's why you should care anyway: the proposed law that would result from Sopa and Pipa will only work if you are put under 24-hour digital surveillance. US State Department not for internet freedom.
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. Censorship. Online Freedom. The Battle for Net Freedom.