The SOPA/'PROTECT-IP/Great Firewall of America Thread

[Drew Wilson]

Long Reach of SOPA, PIPA Legislation Worried International Observers

I learned about the depths of these concerns during a series of appearances on foreign talk shows. In conversations with journalists involved with Al Jazeera's "Inside Story" show there were questions about why the entire U.S. legal system was catering to a relatively small set of interests. On Russia Today's "Crosstalk" program, there were similar questions. But while preparing for the show, I heard many concerns about why the United States thought it should be able to impose its laws on foreign countries.

Part of the reason for concern is that the United States and other countries already have treaties in place regarding copyrights, and those treaties work, as was clearly shown in the takedown of the Megaupload site on Jan. 19. In that massive bust, the FBI along with authorities from a number of other countries detained the principals of the site and took the site and all of its related domains offline.

So the obvious question arises. If this capability already exists, why do we need SOPA and PIPA? The reason that was given publicly is that sometimes it's hard to actually find the people responsible for rogue sites. But it seems that after some investigation, law enforcement was able to coordinate the action over several countries on multiple continents. Perhaps this would have been able to take place more easily with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or Protect IP Act (PIPA) in place, but clearly it's possible without them.

This isn't the first time such a coordinated arrest has taken place, although the Megaupload bust was by far the biggest. But what else were the backers of SOPA and PIPA looking for? For one thing, they don't want to have to wait for a year while the whole thing is investigated and coordinated. They want a site that they think is handling pirated material taken down in days.

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[Drew Wilson]

FCC chairman Julius Genachowski calls for SOPA compromise

When asked about SOPA, Genachowski narrowly avoided disclosing whether he was pro or anti SOPA, but said that the vital importance of preserving a free and open Internet does not have to be at the odds with legislation that ensures effective mechanisms are in place to enforce intellectual property.

This wishful-thinking viewpoint is in direct contrast to Y Combinator creator Paul Graham’s recent call for the death of Hollywood.

“Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline,” Graham said. “But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.”

Genachowski, however, hopes that engineers and Internet entrepreneurs can work together with IP rights holders to figure out a way to preserve the open architecture of the web and give content creators the projection they’re entitled to. He did not elaborate on how a compromise between the two dissenting parties could be achieved.

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I don't think partial censorship would work.

[quaquaxx]

Sorry if this offends anyone, but I just cannot think of a better word - this may sound harsh to you but to me SOPA is a ...bitch.

[quaquaxx]

I dont even know why ths is being discussed. You know it and I know it - There shouldn't be a law on this subject, but there SHOULD be some moving on from the past...?

[Drew Wilson]

"I haven't read the bill" but he is all for it anyway. Way to really channel the American sentiment over this, idiot.

[Drew Wilson]

Sen. Ron Wyden: PIPA/SOPA Is a Congressional Wake-Up Call

WASHINGTON — Most folks who run businesses know that if they ignore the internet, they do so at their own peril.

If you run a business — whether it’s a restaurant or a cable company — what people on the internet say about your product and customer service has an impact on your bottom line. And if you’re running a technology company, you won’t succeed unless you understand that the online world doesn’t always function like the tangible one.

Some businesses lament this fact when bad reviews start costing them business. But smart businesses recognize that even the bad reviews are an opportunity to understand their audience and improve their products and those that have gone the extra mile to understand the internet have, in many cases, found success.

But up until last week, Washington hadn’t learned these lessons.

Sure, politicians have long seen the internet as a useful tool for raising money and receiving e-mail from constituents. There have been many online campaigns and more than a few lobbyists and special interest groups have invested a good sum of money into efforts to mobilize folks online. Success has frequently been measured by the number of e-mail addresses collected, while the efforts to rally people fizzle when recognized as little more than online astroturfing — fake grass without the roots.

But last week, when more than 10 million Americans spoke up together to express concern about the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — and brought a halt to what had been a legislative juggernaut — Capitol Hill and K Street got a taste of what the internet can really do and why it’s more than just another interest group.

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[Drew Wilson]

SOPA and PIPA, What’s Next? No Legislation, More Innovation

Last week’s historic protests made clear just what the tech community and Internet users are capable of accomplishing when they act together – not only have the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and its House counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), been tabled for now, but in a welcome change, the public debate has increasingly considered the interests of Internet users and the opinions of those who actually understand how the technology works. Despite this, we keep hearing people ask: what’s next? And where do we go from here? Our answers: We don’t need legislation. And let’s keep moving innovation forward.

The answer to maintaining an open, thriving Internet does not lay in legislation, but rather in fostering innovative (and oftentimes disruptive) business models that allow content creators to get paid and consumers to have easy and efficient access to content. We’ve seen time and again that consumers are willing to pay at a price point that makes sense for them – this is Economics 101. When new business models emerge, artists and fans win. It’s only the traditional distributers and gatekeepers (we’re looking at you, MPAA and RIAA) who lose, so it’s no wonder that those parties desperately tried to ram through dangerous legislation to stop disruptive new business models, with no regard for the attendant serious potential collateral damage. Remember, these are the lobbies that have a history of attacking nascent technologies as far back as the player piano.

A modern day case in point: last week’s public takedown of MegaUpload. We’ve only heard one side of the story so far, so let’s set aside the many outstanding legal questions. But it’s clear that many artists were using the site to connect with their fans. Given the legacy media companies’ reluctance to innovate internally, it’s especially unfortunate that the dramatic takedown of MegaUpload could chill future innovators who would otherwise experiment with new business models.

To be sure, there are plenty of exciting new content services emerging. For example, take the Humble Indie Bundle, video game developers who have realized substantial success devising a pay-what-you-want scheme for distributing video games. Or artists like Jonathan Coulton, who has, with much success, produced and distributed his own music (and who recently provided this pithy advice to creators who reject new business models but complain about piracy: "Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan.").

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[Drew Wilson]

The SOPA War: A Frantic Call, an Aborted Summit, and Dramatic New Details on How Hollywood Lost

In the desperate hours of early January, with chatter spreading that the White House was poised to make a devastating statement opposing parts of proposed anti-piracy legislation that Hollywood studios considered key to the industry's very survival, MPAA president Christopher Dodd made a phone call to DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Katzenberg's company is not an MPAA member, but a list of the top 10 fund-raisers bundling money for President Obama would include not only Katzenberg but also his political adviser, Andy Spahn. It would not include any of the chiefs whose studios belong to the MPAA. So the former U.S. senator reached out, he says, to find out about the thinking inside the White House.

"The rumors were running rampant," says Dodd. "I was trying to use all the information points I could to find out what was going on."

Dodd says that at the time of his call, he had been assured no major actions were imminent. Then, on Jan. 14, the administration said it would not support legislation "that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."

"They just made up their mind to do it," says Dodd. "I raised issues about it, but they were going to march ahead."

So it was that Silicon Valley trampled Hollywood with a simple -- and, to the studios, absurd -- argument: that the anti-piracy bills would somehow "break the Internet." Seemingly overnight, the country had made up its mind -- the mere mention of "Hollywood" elicited boos from the audience during a debate among GOP candidates. MPAA members, who believed they had carefully laid the groundwork with the White House and Congress and that they had already made major concessions to placate their adversaries in the tech community, felt bitterly betrayed.

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Haw-Haw!

[Drew Wilson]

Reddit makes gross mistakes trying to write bill to replace abusive SOPA, PIPA

Social networking site Reddit.com is going against the most successful habits of successful politicians by actually proposing solutions to proposals Reddit was instrumental in defeating.

Rather than simply continue to crow about the success of a coalition of civil- and digital-rights groups in opposing the Internet-censoring SOPA and PIPA bills, Reddit is now proposing alternative legislation (Reddit video announcement) to address copyright infringement on the web without (the proposers hope) the same dismissal of individual rights that were integral to both the original bills.

[...]

Reddit's legislation has absolutely no chance of being taken seriously by more than a few gadflies in Congress.

Congress doesn't listen to amateur legislatures except in specifically non-threatening circumstances. In Congress, Reddit, Google, Wikipedia, the millions who use them and millions more influenced by them are all just numbers in an opinion survey – not one of the polls campaigners use like compasses to steer their ships by, either.

To Congress and other SOPA supporters – such as Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom – Redditors, EFFers and others opposing SOPA are "a mob" that killed the bill with outrage and a sense of violation, not whatever Dauman uses in place of real emotion.

“It was almost religious dogma. People were saying [the bills] would have broken the Internet, that it would have created censorship around the world,” Dauman said.

Clearly the opposition was wrong; SOPA wouldn’t have created censorship all over the world; it would have allowed Viacom to censor things all over the world. Much different (in that the guy criticizing the "mob" would have been one of those making censoring decisions; censors never think they're the ones doing the censoring.)

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Um... censorship is censorship.

[Drew Wilson]

White House: No comment on call to investigate MPAA for SOPA bribery

The U.S. White House has declined to respond to a petition calling for authorities to investigate the head of the Motion Picture Association of America for bribery related to comments he made following successful online protests against two controversial copyright enforcement bills.

A day after the massive online protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), MPAA Chairman and CEO Chris Dodd seemed to threaten the dozens of lawmakers voicing opposition to the bills. "This industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake," Dodd told Fox News on Jan. 19. "Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake."

Those comments prompted a petition at WhiteHouse.gov asking President Barack Obama's administration to investigate Dodd "after he publicly admitted to bribing politicians to pass legislation." The White House has encouraged U.S. residents to start petitions on the site and has promised to respond to any petition that gets more than 25,000 signatures within a month.

More than 31,000 people have signed the bribery petition since it launched on Jan. 21. However, the White House said it will not comment on a petition that requests a legal investigation.

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Someone's mouth at least got someone in trouble somewhere along the line.

[Drew Wilson]

What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You (Op-ed by Cary Sherman of the RIAA)

[...]

Misinformation may be a dirty trick, but it works. Consider, for example, the claim that SOPA and PIPA were “censorship,” a loaded and inflammatory term designed to evoke images of crackdowns on pro-democracy Web sites by China or Iran. Since when is it censorship to shut down an operation that an American court, upon a thorough review of evidence, has determined to be illegal? When the police close down a store fencing stolen goods, it isn’t censorship, but when those stolen goods are fenced online, it is? Wikipedia, Google and others manufactured controversy by unfairly equating SOPA with censorship. They also argued misleadingly that the bills would have required Web sites to “monitor” what their users upload, conveniently ignoring provisions like the “No Duty to Monitor” section.

The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power. When Wikipedia and Google purport to be neutral sources of information, but then exploit their stature to present information that is not only not neutral but affirmatively incomplete and misleading, they are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations.

As it happens, the television networks that actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn’t take advantage of their broadcast credibility to press their case. That’s partly because “old media” draws a line between “news” and “editorial.” Apparently, Wikipedia and Google don’t recognize the ethical boundary between the neutral reporting of information and the presentation of editorial opinion as fact.

The violation of neutrality is a patent hypocrisy: these companies have long argued that Internet service providers (telecommunications and cable companies) had to be regulated under the doctrine of “net neutrality” because of their power as owners of the Internet pipes. But what the Google and Wikipedia blackout showed is that it’s the platforms that exercise the real power. Get enough of them to espouse Silicon Valley’s perspective, and tens of millions of Americans will get a one-sided view of whatever the issue may be, drowning out the other side.

The conventional wisdom is that the defeat of these bills shows the power of the digital commons. Sure, anybody could click on a link or tweet in outrage — but how many knew what they were supporting or opposing? Would they have cast their clicks if they knew they were supporting foreign criminals selling counterfeit pharmaceuticals to Americans? Was it SOPA they were opposed to, or censorship?

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Get over yourself, SOPA/PIPA is censorship!

[Drew Wilson]

Senate sneaks in SOPA under a new name

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) launches a second round of attacks in an attempt to censor the Internet.

After trying to adopt Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), both pieces of legislation turned out to be a disaster, causing outrage among Internet giants and ordinary users alike. Congress had to retreat. However it's determined to get what it wants this time.

After the shelving of SOPA and PIPA back in January Reid stated,“There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved.”


As RT reported last month, Senator Reid added that lawmakers will“continue engaging with all stakeholders to forge a balance between protecting Americans’ intellectual property, and maintaining openness and innovation on the Internet.”


The vote on the anti-piracy legislation was postponed from its January 24date after Wikipedia and other popular websites went dark to protest the draft law.

Now the battle for online freedom continues.

The rebuttal to push Internet-regulating legislation has transformed into a new cybersecurity bill. The particulars of the latest attempt by senators to censor the Internet have not been disclosed to the public.

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Please tell me this isn't true.

[Drew Wilson]

Rogers’ “Cybersecurity” Bill Is Broad Enough to Use Against WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay

Congress is doing it again: they’re proposing overbroad regulations that could have dire consequences for our Internet ecology. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (H.R. 3523), introduced by Rep. Mike Rogers and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, allows companies or the government1 free rein to bypass existing laws in order to monitor communications, filter content, or potentially even shut down access to online services for “cybersecurity purposes.” Companies are encouraged to share data with the government and with one another, and the government can share data in return. The idea is to facilitate detection of and defense against a serious cyber threat, but the definitions in the bill go well beyond that. The language is so broad it could be used as a blunt instrument to attack websites like The Pirate Bay or WikiLeaks. Join EFF in calling on Congress to stop the Rogers’ cybersecurity bill.

Under the proposed legislation, a company that protects itself or other companies against “cybersecurity threats” can “use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information to protect the rights and property” of the company under threat. But because “us[ing] cybersecurity systems” is incredibly vague, it could be interpreted to mean monitoring email, filtering content, or even blocking access to sites. A company acting on a “cybersecurity threat” would be able to bypass all existing laws, including laws prohibiting telcos from routinely monitoring communications, so long as it acted in “good faith.”

The broad language around what constitutes a cybersecurity threat leaves the door wide open for abuse. For example, the bill defines “cyber threat intelligence” and “cybersecurity purpose” to include “theft or misappropriation of private or government information, intellectual property, or personally identifiable information.”

Yes, intellectual property. It’s a little piece of SOPA wrapped up in a bill that’s supposedly designed to facilitate detection of and defense against cybersecurity threats. The language is so vague that an ISP could use it to monitor communications of subscribers for potential infringement of intellectual property. An ISP could even interpret this bill as allowing them to block accounts believed to be infringing, block access to websites like The Pirate Bay believed to carry infringing content, or take other measures provided they claimed it was motivated by cybersecurity concerns.

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Oh no.