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

[Drew Wilson]

SOPA foes warn: Not much time left to act

Congressional foes of Hollywood-backed copyright legislation came to the Consumer Electronics Show today to warn technology companies that there's not much time left to derail the controversial proposals.

The remarks from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) were meant to deliver a blunt warning: if you were intending to do anything about proposals to levy the equivalent of a death penalty on allegedly piratical Web sites, now's the time.

"This is a crucial window here for those who want to see the Net come out of this debate without this enormous collateral damage" caused by the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, Wyden said this afternoon. "We are not prepared to say that this juggernaut for innovation and freedom and citizen empowerment, the Internet, ought to be dealt such a serious body blow in the name of copyright."

As CNET was the first to report last month, major Web companies have mulled blackouts--a kind of nuclear option--in advance of a Senate floor debate beginning January 24 on its Protect IP bill. A House Judiciary debate on SOPA is expected to resume soon as well.

A few Web sites have set the blackout date as January 18, when Issa, who has championed an alternative called the OPEN Act, will be holding a hearing where some of SOPA's critics are scheduled to testify.

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[Drew Wilson]

Comcast -- Owner Of NBC Universal -- Admits That DNS Redirects Are Incompatible With DNSSEC

Well, well, well. Here's something interesting. Comcast, who owns NBC Universal (one of the main forces behind SOPA/PIPA), is officially a SOPA/PIPA supporter. However, yesterday, Comcast put up a post congratulating itself (deservedly so!) for completing its DNSSEC deployment, making it "the first large ISP in the North America to have fully implemented" DNSSEC across the board. That's huge, and a clear vote of confidence for DNSSEC, obviously. They also urge others to use DNSSEC:

Now that nearly 20 million households in the U.S. are able to use DNSSEC, we feel it is an important time to urge major domain owners, especially commerce and banking-related sites, to begin signing their domain names. While in the past those domains may have wanted to do so but felt it would have limited effect, they now can work on signing their domains knowing that the largest ISP in the U.S. can validate those signatures on behalf of our customers.

All of this is good... but what may be much more interesting is that, along with this announcement, Comcast has also mentioned that it is shutting down its Domain Helper service. Domain Helper was a somewhat controversial DNS-redirect system, so that when you mistyped something, it would suggest the proper page or alternatives. Many in the internet community complained that these types of redirects mess with the underlying DNS system (which they do). But, as the DNS experts have been saying all along (and NBC Universal has been trying to play down), DNSSEC is incompatible with such DNS redirects. So... that makes this next part a little awkward. Comcast is now admitting, indeed, that DNS redirects, such as Domain Helper, are incompatible with DNSSEC:

When we launched the Domain Helper service, we also set in motion its eventual shutdown due to our plans to launch DNSSEC. Domain Helper has been turned off since DNS response modification tactics, including DNS redirect services, are technically incompatible with DNSSEC and/or create conditions that can be indistinguishable from malicious modifications of DNS traffic (including DNS cache poisoning attacks). Since we want to ensure our customers have the most secure Internet experience, and that if they detect any DNSSEC breakage or error messages that they know to be concerned (rather than not knowing if the breakage/error was "official" and caused by our redirect service or "unofficial" and caused by an attacker), our priority has been placed on DNSSEC deployment -- now automatically protecting our customers...

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[Drew Wilson]

If SOPA's Main Target Is The Pirate Bay, It's Worth Pointing Out That ThePirateBay.org Is Immune From SOPA

In looking over Eric Goldman's excellent "linkwrap" of a bunch of recent SOPA/PIPA stories, it pointed me to a News.com article from last month, about how SOPA was really about going after one single site: The Pirate Bay. I've actually heard this repeatedly -- and from folks heavily involved with the bill itself. The whole point of the bill is to try to take down The Pirate Bay. Now, we can argue back and forth about how pointless that is... but there's something else that seems important:

As written, nothing in SOPA can touch ThePirateBay's main website, ThePirateBay.org

That's because the current version of the bill excludes any .com or .org. from being a target (though, they can be required to take action against other sites). This has caused some confusion, mainly because of the changes between the original version of SOPA and the "manager's amendment," which is the current version of the bill. The manager's amendment makes you jump through some hoops to understand this, but the key point is that a "U.S.-directed site" is defined to be a "foreign internet site" in the bill (in the original SOPA, a U.S.-directed site could be any site). Then, a foreign domain name is listed as not a "domestic domain" (keep hopping!), which itself is defined as "a domain name that is registered or assigned by a domain name registrar, domain name registry or other domain name registration authority that is located within a judicial district of the United States."

This means that all .com or .org domains are domestic, since they're assigned by a registry that is located within the US (for those confused, a domain registry is a company like VeriSign that runs the master database of all domains under a single top level domain). The thinking here is that (as ICE and the Justice Department have claimed) any website that has a TLD that is controlled by an American company can be dealt with via existing laws, such as the one that ICE uses to seize websites. .com is run by VeriSign, which is based in the US. And .org is run by the Public Interest Registry, which is also based in the US (Virginia, specifically).

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This particular point is interesting, but since .com and .org domain names have already been stolen by authorities, that just means that it can already happen anyway, just that SOPA doesn't affect these domains specifically.

[Drew Wilson]

Soapy: Can This Plug-In Kill SOPA?

“Like crispy bacon, I crave censorship circumvention,” reads the website for Soapy, a Firefox plug-in that will allow users to visit websites blocked by the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) if it is passed.

SOPA, intended to punish copyright infringement on the web, has caused quite a stir in the Internet community. Thousands of people, including tech giants such as Facebook and Google , have opposed the bill, saying it would effectively censor the web and place unfair demands on content providers — who would be responsible for all copyright infringements on their site, even if those infringements were user-submitted.

This would be a nightmare for sites like YouTube or Reddit, which could be shut down if SOPA passes.

Not so, says Soapy. The plug-in claims it will allow users to get to these sites even if the government drops the hammer. The process is relatively fool proof, according to Soapy’s creator Griffin Boyce:

Soapy works by automatically redirecting users to the website’s server directly. It replaces the DNS system entirely for these blocked websites.

Domain Name Servers match domains like Google.com to their server’s IP address (in this case http://74.125.224.72/ ). This process is usually invisible to the user, but you can access Google’s site by using their IP address as well.

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Ahh, effectively the HOSTS file solution I proposed last year.

[Drew Wilson]

Wikipedia’s Wales wants to join Reddit’s SOPA blackout

Wikipedia founder James Wales has floated the idea of a Wikipedia blackout to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act in the past, but has had a renewed burst of interest following the announcement that Reddit — the Web news and aggregation site — will black out its services in protest of online piracy bills Jan. 18.

The protest coincides with a House Oversight Committee hearing called by Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to take a close look at the impact that domain name service and search engine blocking will have on national security and the American Internet community.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is among the witnesses listed to testify at the hearing, along with the Rackspace Chief Executive Lanham Napier and several security, technology policy and civil liberties experts.

On his user talk page, Wales revisited the idea of taking Wikipedia offline in protest, a tactic that the online encyclopedia has used in the past against an Italian privacy law. Wales has put the decision to the Wikipedia community.

“I’m all in favor of it,” he wrote on his personal talk page on the site. “[And] I think it would be great if we could act quickly to coordinate with Reddit. I’d like to talk to our government affairs advisor to see if they agree on this as useful timing, but assuming that’s a greenlight, I think that matching what Reddit does (but in our own way of course) per the emerging consensus on how to do it, is a good idea.” He asked that the community take a vote on whether to protest or not, and soon.

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Edit: Replaced with a better article on this.

[Drew Wilson]

The Author of SOPA Is a Copyright Violator

US Congressman and poor-toupee-color-chooser Lamar Smith is the guy who authored the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as I'm sure you know, is the shady bill that will introduce way harsher penalties for companies and individuals caught violating copyright laws online (including making the unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime which you could actually go to jail for). If the bill passes, it will destroy the internet and, ultimately, turn the world into Mad Max (for more info, go here).

I decided to check that everything on Lamar's official campaign website was copyright-cleared and on the level. Lamar is using several stock images on his site, two of which I tracked back to the same photographic agency. I contacted the agency to make sure he was paying to use them, but was told that it's very difficult for them to actually check to see if someone has permission to use their images. (Great news, copyright violators!) However, seeing as they're both from the same agency and are unwatermarked, it seems fairly likely that he is the only person on the entire internet who is actually paying to use a stock image (and he'd be an idiot not to).

So I took a look back at an archived, pre-SOPA version of his site.

[...]

I contacted DJ, to find out if Lamar had asked permission to use the image and he told me that he had no record of Lamar, or anyone from his organization, requesting permission to use it: "I switched my images from traditional copyright protection to be protected under the Creative Commons license a few years ago, which simply states that they can use my images as long as they attribute the image to me and do not use it for commercial purposes.

"I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith's organization did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com."

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[Drew Wilson]

MPAA attacks Ars for "challenging efforts to curb content theft"

The Motion Picture Association of America doesn't like us. According to the MPAA blog on Tuesday, "Arts Technica" is a "tech blog with a long history of challenging efforts to curb content theft." (If so, we're the only such tech blog that actually encouraged a now-current MPAA lawyer to do copyright coverage for our site and that recommended the pro-rightsholder book Free Ride in this year's holiday guide.)

One can see why MPAA staffers might think this way. "Ars Technica opposes our attempt to gain 'broadcast flag' control over people's digital devices," they might say. "And it doesn't appreciate our plan to censor the Internet. And for some reason they'd like to rip copies of their DVDs to watch on the airplane, even though we managed to write anti-DRM cracking provisions into law. Man, these guys really love piracy!"

Put this way, the problem becomes clear: it's a simple conflation of our opposition to absolutely freaking insane (you'll forgive the slight hyperbole) approaches to copyright enforcement with opposition to enforcement of any kind.

It's a lot like saying, thirty years ago, that anyone who supported the VCR and its nefarious, time-shifting ways was to copyright holders what the Boston Strangler was to women home alone. (Not that any MPAA official would say anything so ridiculous.)

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[Drew Wilson]

SOPA: The gloves come off

Hollywood makes an economic case for the antipiracy measures under debate in Congress. Silicon Valley makes an economic case against them. Neither is pulling any punches.

FORTUNE -- The media industry's claims about how much digital piracy costs both itself and the economy as a whole are hilariously outsized: billions and billions in lost revenues; millions and millions of jobs at risk.

The industry's proposed solution to this is contained in a pair of laws under consideration in Congress (SOPA in the House, PIPA in the Senate). The laws would allow courts to order U.S. Internet companies, advertising networks and payment facilitators to block access to foreign sites that are merely suspected of enabling trade in pirated goods such as movies, music, and knockoff clothing.

Beyond the enormous legal and technological problems with the proposals, the economic drawbacks could be severe.

The tech industry, which opposes the measures, has put out some data of its own showing how much it, and the economy, would be hurt by such a law. All such numbers are squishy by their nature, but in this case, the tech industry (mainly meaning Internet companies) at least bases its estimates on facts and logical assumptions, while the media industry pretty much concocts whatever stories and numbers it thinks will sound the scariest.

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Posted for the notability that this story was posted on CNN.

[Drew Wilson]

SOPA author won’t back down

The lawmaker behind a bill to combat online piracy vowed on Thursday to press ahead in the face of fierce criticism from Internet giants such as Google and Facebook.

“It is amazing to me that the opponents apparently don’t want to protect American consumers and businesses,” Republican Representative Lamar Smith told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“Are they somehow benefitting by directing customers to these foreign websites? Do they profit from selling advertising to these foreign websites? And if they do, they need to be stopped. And I don’t mind taking that on.”

The Stop Online Piracy Act, which is before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee chaired by Smith, aims to fight online piracy of pharmaceuticals, music and other consumer products by allowing the Department of Justice to seek federal court injunctions against foreign-based websites.

Smith said Internet counterfeiters cost American consumers, businesses, inventors and workers some $100 billion a year, though critics accuse him of exaggerating.

Under the bill, if a judge agrees that websites offer material that violates U.S. copyright laws, Internet service providers could be required to block access to foreign sites and U.S. online ad networks could be required to stop ads and search engines barred from directly linking to them.

Heavyweights such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit oppose the bill, which came under fire at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Reddit chief executive Alexis Ohanian has said it would “cripple the Internet” and pledged to take his social media site dark for one day next week to protest the bill.

“This (SOPA) could potentially obliterate the entire tech industry – a job-creating industry,” Ohanian wrote on his blog.

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[Drew Wilson]

If SOPA passes, we’re as much to blame as Congress and Hollywood

There’s been a lot of huffing and puffing in the tech community over the past few months about SOPA, the proposed legislation that many believe would cripple the Internet and thwart innovation. People have started online petitions, written countless blog posts, started boycotts against companies that support SOPA and campaigns to change Twitter avatars. (Check out the rest of VentureBeat’s SOPA coverage here.)

Mike_FTW made this great observation: “If SOPA passes after we all added those ribbons to our avatars it certainly won’t be our fault.”

I changed my own avatar, but almost in an ironic way. I know full well that nearly everyone who follows me already agrees with me.

Blogging amongst ourselves won’t change things. We need to do a much better job of educating Congress, the media and the people.

Part of the problem is that Silicon Valley has a belief in meritocracy. We believe that if we are right, we will win. It’s a nice thought, but that’s not how Washington works.

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I'm not sure if I believe in such absolutes. If this passes, is everyone to blame? What if you tried or something? I don't like the idea of undercutting the effort already done, but that doesn't mean more can't be done to fight something like this.

[Drew Wilson]

NVIDIA Does Not Support SOPA, But Is That Enough?

While the video game industry sorts its position out concerning SOPA/PIPA — The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and most of its members are onboard with the anti-piracy acts — some prominent members are going against the SOPA grain.

One company in particular, NVIDIA, is considered something of a giant in the video game industry, and thanks to a recent blog post, they have let their position, even as members of the ESA, be known. The question is, is lack of support good enough or do potential NVIDIA consumers need a declaration of outright opposition before they trust the company again?

In some cases, yes. Before that, however, here’s NVIDIA’s statement, in full:

NVIDIA wasn’t consulted by ESA in formulating their position on SOPA. Our position is this: we oppose piracy, as it hurts our game-developer partners. However, we do not support SOPA. We don’t believe it is the right solution to the problem. We remain committed to working to address this problem in a constructive and fair manner.

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[Drew Wilson]

Firefall devs plan protest of SOPA, cancel E3 2012 plans

More and more game developers are speaking out about SOPA, an act that would dangerously expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. While the concept of stopping piracy and protecting intellectual property is good, the problem with SOPA is that the terminology is so loose that it threatens many gaming websites and developers.

Firefall developer Red 5 Studios CEO Mark Kern has been the latest to speak out against the bill, notifiying Shacknews that they will be protesting SOPA. Kern confirmed that beginning January 18, Red 5 Studios will shut down Firefall's beta and website for 24 hours.

Kern said the proposed bill would hurt smaller game companies, "who will not have the legal resources or lobbying presence to protect themselves from unwarranted shutdown."

"We are extremely disappointed in this misguided legislation. We are also ashamed of the ESA for supporting a bill which is clearly not in the best interests of gamers or the game industry," Kern added.

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[Drew Wilson]

Minecraft developer planning SOPA blackout, says “No sane person can be for SOPA”

Markus Persson, creator of the breakout hit indie game Minecraft, has announced that minecraft.net and mojang.com will be taken down on Jan 18th, in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act. Speaking on Twitter, Persson said “Decided. We’ll silently take down minecraft.net and mojang.com on the 18th in protest of SOPA.”

Persson acknowledges that a lot of Minecraft’s success has been due to players posting screenshots and making videos of their Minecraft creations. The SOPA bill is seen by many as a direct threat to such activities. SOPA is intended to help curb internet piracy and protect copyright holders, but critics have said that the bill is over-reaching, and will be largely ineffective in the areas it is looking to target. Net Coalition, a trade association that includes Google, Amazon.com, eBay and Wikipedia, warns that SOPA will dramatically change the internet as we know it.

Speaking to PC Gamer yesterday, on behalf of Mojhang, Persson said, “No sane person can be for SOPA. I don’t know if we’re sane, but we are strongly, uncompromisingly against SOPA, and any similar laws. Sacrificing freedom of speech for the benefit of corporate profit is abominable and disgusting.”

Despite selling over 4M copies of Minecraft, Persson is no stranger to the issue of internet piracy, that SOPA is partly intended to combat. He re-iterated his thoughts on piracy yesterday via Twitter, sparked by a request for a free copy of Minecraft. The initial tweet read “Hi notch, look, I really like the game but lack the money to buy it. I thought I might at least ask for a free account before piracy”. Persson, aka @Notch, replied, “Just pirate it. If you still like it when you can afford it in the future, buy it then. Also don’t forget to feel bad.”

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[Drew Wilson]

Faced with SOPA Protest, One Senator Just Blinked

The latest grumblings (or lack thereof) from the lawmakers on Capitol Hill suggest that they're coming around to the idea that the latest anti-piracy efforts in the House and the Senate might've been a little hasty. Patrick Leahy, a senator from Vermont who co-authored the PROTECT IP anti-piracy bill, posted a press release on Thursday, confessing that his legislation needed "more study" before implementation. It's a sure sign that's he's starting to cave to political pressure -- much of which is coming from the unexpectedly increasingly politically powerful Reddit -- and other lawmakers could follow suit.

Then again, they could not. Take Lamar Smith, the Texas congressman who authored the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which is the House's more incendiary and more draconian version of the Senate's PROTECT IP. News broke on Thursday that Smith himself engaged in some questionable copyright practices in building his personal website. The Texas congressman had used a photo that he didn't necessarily have the right permissions for, and in an unapologetic report, Vice's Jamie Lee Curtis Taete put him on the spot with a report unapologetically titled "The Author of SOPA Is a Copyright Violator." The photo thing was a small thing by any measure and probably not something that would get the man thrown in jail. But nobody likes a hypocrite.

Smith isn't sorry about what he did. In a Reuters interview published a few hours after Vice's somewhat sensational scoop, Smith vowed not to back down and even questioned how or why his colleagues would listen to what can only be described as a deafening protest against Congress's anti-piracy legislation. "It is amazing to me that the opponents apparently don't want to protect American consumers and businesses," Smith said. "Are they somehow benefitting by directing customers to these foreign websites? Do they profit from selling advertising to these foreign websites? And if they do, they need to be stopped. And I don't mind taking that on."

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[Drew Wilson]

SOPA Author to Remove ISP Blocking Provision

The lead sponsor of the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, a controversial copyright enforcement bill, will remove a much-debated provision that would require Internet service providers to block their subscribers from accessing foreign websites accused of infringing the copyrights of U.S. companies.

Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, said he will remove the ISP provision from the bill, called SOPA, so that lawmakers can "further examine the issues surrounding this provision."

Smith's decision was prompted by discussions with industry groups "across the country," he said in a statement. "We will continue to look for ways to ensure that foreign websites cannot sell and distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers."

The ISP provision in SOPA allows the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders requiring service providers to block subscriber access to foreign sites accused by the DOJ of copyright infringement. That provision would be removed, but remaining in the bill would be provisions allowing the DOJ to seek court orders requiring search engines to remove links to sites accused of infringement and requiring online advertising networks and payment processors to stop doing business with the accused sites.

The bill would also allow domain-name registrars to block the foreign websites' IP addresses on U.S. servers, and it would allow copyright holders to seek court orders against ad networks and payment processors.

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So, the bill would go from a complete apocalyptic piece of legislation to an apocalyptic piece of legislation. Not entirely sure I feel better knowing this.