cross posted at:
http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/show....php?p=5504384
Harvard lawyer: SOPA is uncons utional
Harvard Law School cons utional expert Laurence Tribe believes the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is uncons utional.
The legal figure sent a letter to members of Congress this past week, saying that SOPA violates the First Amendment and leads to illegal “prior restraint.”
Tribe also criticized the new provisions in the bill targeting websites’ finances.
“This provision of the bill would give complaining parties the power to stop online advertisers,” he wrote in the letter. “And credit card processors from doing business with a website, merely by filing a unilateral notice accusing the site of being “dedicated to the theft of the U.S. property.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/1...e+Raw+Story%29
Megaupload to Sue Universal, Joins Fight Against SOPA
File-hosting service Megaupload has told TorrentFreak that it will sue Universal for wrongfully taking down its content from YouTube. Universal took action Friday to remove a Megaupload-produced pop video which featured leading artists singing the cyberlocker service’s praises. The move has also prompted the company to enter the SOPA debate, with a call for like-minded people to join forces and fight for an Internet without censorship.
...
http://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-t...medium=twitter
That is a fair point, but casual piracy is already rampant even among older people, who might see it as wrong, but it's more jaywalking wrong, rather than "end of civilization as we know it" wrong. So i think we have an older generation who thinks it's wrong but does it anyway, and a new generation that does it and doesn't even know it might be wrong (i mean if everybody is doing it, it can't be wrong, right?)
Can a Wikipedia blackout save the Internet?
the bill's "vague language would create devastating new tools for silencing legitimate speech all around the Web."
Websites that run afoul could be de-indexed by search engines, blocked by Internet service providers, and blackballed by payment processors such as Visa or PayPal as court-ordered by the U.S. Attorney General.
Here's a worst-case scenario free speech supporters say is entirely possible: Proxy servers such as those that aided the Arab Spring are also used to stream content that qualifies for copyright infringement. Shut down the proxy server for a SOPA violation, and the voices of protest could be muffled as well.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation breaks down more big beefs with SOPA:
SOPA gives individuals and corporations unprecedented power to silence speech online. Under SOPA, individuals and corporations could send a notice to a site’s payment partners, requiring those partners to cut the site off — even if the site could never be held liable for infringement in a U.S. court. Since many sites depend on this revenue to cover operational costs, even one accusation of infringement could be ruinous.
SOPA gives the government even more power to censor. The Attorney General can “disappear” websites by creating a blacklist and requiring service providers (such as search engines and domain services) to block the sites on the list.
SOPA uses vague language that is sure to be abused. The bill targets nearly any site that hosts user-generated content, or even just has a search function, by failing to provide protections for legal speech.
SOPA would not stop online piracy. The powerful tools granted to the Attorney General would present major obstacles to casual users, but would be trivial for dedicated and technically savvy users to cir vent.
http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news...e-the-internet
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Assumption that plays out in practice: Powers granted are ALWAYS powers (ab)used.
Rep. Issa: SOPA won't be approved unless fixed
"I would expect this bill is not going to become law in this Congress unless these problems are resolved," Issa, whose district includes portions of San Diego and Riverside counties, told CNET in a telephone interview.
The problems he's referring to are a long list of criticisms from opponents of SOPA, including Internet engineers, Web companies including Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Zynga, and civil liberties and human rights groups. Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe says SOPA "should not be enacted by Congress" because of censorship concerns, and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has proposed an article page blackout.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57...-unless-fixed/
George Washingston on SOPA: America’s Future: Russia and China Use Copyright Laws to Crush Government Criticism
By George Washington. Cross posted from Washington’s Blog.
Leading American Internet businessmen warn that the draconian copyright bill on the verge of being passed by Congress would let the US government use censorship techniques “similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran.”
If you want to know what the United States would look like after this bill is passed, just look at what’s been happening in Russia: The Russian government has been crushing dissent under the pretext of enforcing copyright law.
As the New York Times noted last year:
Across Russia, the security services have carried out dozens of similar raids against outspoken advocacy groups or opposition newspapers in recent years. Security officials say the inquiries reflect their concern about software piracy, which is rampant in Russia. Yet they rarely if ever carry out raids against advocacy groups or news organizations that back the government.
Since the American copyright bills (SOPA and PIPA) target online activities, the same thing happening to Russian critics’ computers could happen to the websites of any Americans who criticize the government, the too big to fail banks, or any of the other powers-that-be.
Indeed, the American copyright bill is modeled after the Chinese system. As I noted Monday:
Given that Joe Lieberman said that America needs an internet kill switch like China, that the U.S. economy has turned socialist (at least for friends of those with control of the money spigot), and that the U.S. government used communist Chinese torture techniques specifically designed to produce false confessions in order to sell the Iraq war, I guess that the bill’s Chinese-style censorship is not entirely surprising.
Of course, it might seem over-the-top to worry about copyright laws being used to stifle government criticism in America … if it weren’t for the fact that:
Some folks have alleged that copyright infringers are terrorists. See this, this, this and this
The U.S. government has been using anti-terrorism laws to crush dissent
In modern America, questioning war, protesting anything, asking questions about pollution or about Wall Street shenanigans, supporting Ron Paul, being a libertarian, holding gold, stocking up on more than 7 days of food, or liking the Founding Fathers may get you labeled as a suspected terrorist
We’ve gone from a nation of laws to a nation of men making laws in secret
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/...=Google+Reader
Corporate Endorsers Dropping Support of Stop Online Piracy Act
Some good news on the SOPA front: its corporate base of supporters is starting to crumble.
One of the few Internet-based organizations to support SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act (referred to by supporters as the Internet censorship bill), was GoDaddy.com, the domain name registration site that manages over 51 million domain names across the Web. When the coalition opposed to SOPA found out about this, they kicked off a grassroots campaign to pressure GoDaddy, mainly by telling people who have registered domain names with them to find another vendor. This had the intended effect. GoDaddy today renounced its support for SOPA.
Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” currently working its way through U.S. Congress.
“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”
GoDaddy is not alone. Scores of law firms are requesting their names be removed from the Judiciary Committee’s official list of SOPA supporters. This follows on companies listed by the Chamber of Commerce as supporting SOPA asking to be taken off the list.
http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/12/...ne-piracy-act/
It's also hard to judge a bill by it's le. Too many times, it does the opposite of what the mane implies.
US Threatened To Blacklist Spain For Not Implementing Site Blocking Law
In a leaked letter sent to Spain’s outgoing President, the US ambassador to the country warned that as punishment for not passing a SOPA-style file-sharing site blocking law, Spain risked being put on a United States trade blacklist . Inclusion would have left Spain open to a range of “retaliatory options” but already the US was working with the incoming government to reach its goals.
http://torrentfreak.com/us-threatene...ng-law-120105/Leader of "free" world my ass, more like bully of free world.
For enforcing copyright protections as mentioned in our highest law?
You didn't read anything he posted, did you?
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...novate/250967/This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from? From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads.
We are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This video cassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright.
- Jack Valenti (1982, Testimony to the US House of Representatives)
I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.
- Jack Valenti (1982, Testimony to the US House of Representatives)
http://www.webpronews.com/hackers-sa...t-sopa-2012-01If one is to ever exist, the architects of that straight line to Internet freedom will be Hackerspace Global Grid, a cabal of hackers that have taken up the cause of creating a satellite-based communication network that would be capable of establishing an “uncensorable” Internet. It’s just one of the many goals of their ambitious project to pioneer a global grass-roots space program. Think of it as open-source outer space mission.
one day your thoughts will be monitored.
Am I wrong that the intent is to stop curtail infringement? If it goes beyond that, then I disagree.
If I missed something, please point it out. Link and quote please.
Next time you lend your neighbor your lawnmower expect to be sued by Craftsman.
Complete fail.
Now if you replicated that lawn mower and gave him the copy, where you could both be mowing your lawn at the same time, then a suit would be in order.
Nothing is Complete on a topic in a open public forum.
That is just your Lame way to avoid debating me on this subject.
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