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Wednesday, January 18, 2012 8:22 - 3 Comments

Wired Magazine: “Internet Blacklist Bill Is Roadmap to ‘the End’ of the Internet”

Today January 18th the world wide web is staging its most concerted effort to date to bring awareness to the dreaded SOPA or so called Stop Online Piracy Act. In case you are not up to date on the implications of the proposed law I have included some excerpts and links to other articles on the subject. The Government knows well that it can’t control the internet in an obvious and in your face kind of way.

So they will attempt to introduce benign sounding laws that make it seem as if they are looking out for everybody’s interests while they are in fact laying the groundwork for greater control of yet another aspect of our lives—-it’s called incrementalism. Please do your part to bring awareness to a growing menace. Many large internet sites such as reddit and wikipedia will shut down their sites today in protest of proposed SOPA legislation.

From Wired Magazine:  SOPA/PIPA Blackout Explainer

Hundreds, if not thousands, of websites are expected to go dark or alter themselves Wednesday to protest proposed U.S. anti-piracy legislation that many believe goes too far fighting online copyright and trademark infringement.

Josh Levy, campaign manager for Free Press, said in a Tuesday conference call supporting the protest that “This is the biggest revolt we’ve seen online” against U.S. legislation. The websites are expected to participate in the protest against the Senate’s Protect IP Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act. They include brand names like Wikipedia, Wired, BoingBoing and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to little-known sites likes political action committee DemocracyForAmerica.

But what’s all the fuss about? Here’s an explainer of the basics of the bills, the protests and how you make your voice heard.

What prompted the protest?

*The expected protest comes despite the White House announcing Saturday it would not support the bills if they mandate changes to internet infrastructure, which was the most egregious provision in the measures that prompted the protests.

Leaders in the House and Senate also buckled to widespread pressure and announced they would at least temporarily remove those DNS-redirecting requirements. That provision would have required ISPs to prevent Americans from visiting blacklisted sites by altering the system known as DNS that turns site names like Google.com into IP addresses such as 174.35.23.56. Instead, for the blacklisted sites, ISPs would have to lie to their customers and tell their browsers that the site doesn’t exist.

Unfortunately, that has serious security implications and undermines government-led efforts to prevent hackers from hijacking the net’s naming system in order to scam users. Those sites would disappear in a process that security experts said would damage internet security. The SOPA and PIPA measures are now being reworked behind closed doors and are expected to exclude the DNS language.

If DNS blacklisting is off the table, why the protest?

While DNS blacklisting was the most egregious portion of the bill and a clear indicator that Congress didn’t know what it was doing, what’s left in the bills continue to have serious implications on the First Amendment and online freedom. The bills give the Justice Department the power to seek court orders requiring search engines like Google not to render search results for infringing websites. (The proposals are vague and broad when it comes to defining an infringing site.)

The bills also allow the Justice Department to order internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T to block their users from visiting blacklisted sites. That would be unprecedented in the United States, though it’s a common tactic used in countries like Syria, Iran and China to clamp down on political dissent and adult content.

The SOPA proposal bars the distribution of tools and services designed to get around such blacklists. The ban could arguably cover tools such as VPNs and Tor used by human rights groups, government officials and businesses to protect their communications and evade online spying and filtering.

The proposals grant rights holders the ability to demand that judges order ad networks and financial institutions to refrain from doing business with sites right holders say are infringing. The measures also give out legal immunity to ad networks and financial institutions that choose, without a court order, to stop placing ads or processing transactions for websites they deem are dedicated to infringing activity. Copyright holders would face little penalty for filing takedown claims without doing due diligence or considering “fair use,” encouraging even more abuse of copyright takedown lawsuits.

Why are these bills on the table?

They are in response to Big Content’s (.pdf) arguments that hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost every year due to pirate websites. These numbers are largely unsubstantiated and rest on the assumption that if a person had not gotten a copy of a movie online, they would have paid full price for a DVD or CD.

On the other side, much of the tech world maintains that the open nature of the internet has created millions of jobs, that millions of people pay for content online and that copyright and trademark holders already have the legal tools to fight infringement.

Does the government or Big Content have a history of abusing the takedown process?

Unfortunately, copyright holders don’t always play fair. Universal Music already believes it does not have to consider fair use when sending YouTube a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The U.S. government has kept a website for a year before giving it back to a New York music blogger falsely accused of facilitating copyright infringement.

What sites are targeted?
The legislation for the most part is directed at foreign websites dedicated to infringing activities. Think the Pirate Bay, for one, which supports itself with advertising. Sites ending in .com, .org or .net generally are not targeted, but the government says it already has the power to seize and shut down sites on those top-level domains in a program known as “Operation in Our Sites.”

However, the orders to block infringing sites will go to U.S.-based search engines, ad networks, payment processors and ISPs.

What’s the status of the bills?

The House bill is expected to return next month to the Judiciary Committee for a vote or possibly more testimony. The Senate bill could either go back to committee or it could just be replaced and voted on by the full Senate. No announcement has been made.

Who has sponsored these measures and who is against them?

These measures are not a partisan issue. SOPA’s chief sponsor is Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the House Judiciary Committee chairman and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The measure’s biggest critics include Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Reps. Darrell Issa (R-California) and Zoe Lofgren (D-California). [Wired.com]

From Wired Magazine  Internet Blacklist Bill Is Roadmap to ‘the End’ of the Internet

The rhetoric on both sides of the debate concerning the Stop Online Piracy Act almost peaked when Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said the House proposal “would mean the end of the internet as we know it.” Weeks after the Silicon Valley representative’s comments, the vitriol reached a crescendo Wednesday during the measure’s first hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, when Registrar of Copyrights Maria Pallante testified the U.S. copyright system would “fail” if Congress does not take action.

“The rhetoric around this bill is over the top,” said Rep. Howard Berman, the California Democrat whose district includes Hollywood. Lofgren’s statements, however, aren’t that farfetched. Not if you actually read the bill. Lofgren’s words do not mean she favors online piracy or the online distribution of counterfeited drugs.

Lofgren, her Silicon Valley constituents and civil rights groups are concerned about what’s actually contained inside the four corners of the 79-page proposal. It amounts to the holy grail of intellectual-property enforcement that the recording industry, movie studios and their union and guild workforces have been clamoring for since the George W. Bush administration: The bill grants rights holders the unfettered power to effectively kill websites they believe are dedicated to infringing activities — without needing to get a judge’s permission.

The measure would also boost the government’s authority to disrupt and shutter “rogue” websites that hawk or host trademark- and copyright-infringing products, including allowing the government to order sites removed from search engines. The bill allows the Justice Department for the first time to obtain court orders demanding American ISPs to stop rendering the DNS for a particular website, a feature even the bill’s main backer conceded Wednesday was problematic for a host of reasons, including that it’s a threat to a secure and uniform internet.

Most distressing, however, the measure paves the way for private rights holders to easily cut off advertising and banking transactions to what the bill’s backers call “rogue” websites, without court intervention. And therein rests a major problem. The definition of a “rogue site” is so vague that the law is ripe for rights holders to abuse, to cut off the financial pipelines of websites they view as designed to “enable” or “facilitate infringement.” The bill also allows rights holders to target websites that turn a blind eye to avoid knowing their site is used for infringement. File-sharing sites or cyberlockers are also included.

The list of such sites that could be considered “rogue” is legion. They range from the notorious Pirate Bay hub for all things free, to cyberlockers like DropBox or Box.net. Sites filled with user-generated content, such as YouTube, aren’t immune either because they generally don’t actively police their sites for infringement. “We have a lot of concerns that it sweeps in legitimate sites,” Katherine Oyama, Google’s policy council, testified during the House hearing Wednesday. Notwithstanding Google’s vested interests in the debate, we believe the measure simply seeds too much unfettered control to rights holders to decide what web sites can stay, and which ones must be disappeared from the internet.

We don’t dispute that rampant piracy of music, movies, software, and the sale of counterfeited drugs runs rampant on the internet. Clearly, the internet’s openness is often abused by many seeking a free ride. But granting the rights holders the power to break the knees of sites they believe are infringing is equally ripe for abuse. We’ve already seen the abuse by rights holders.

Perhaps the most telling example is Universal Music. The record label claims that it can send a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to YouTube without even analyzing whether a video is making a fair use of Universal’s copyright. If Universal believes it has that right under the current law, what’s there to stop it from demanding credit-card companies and ad networks to block their affiliation with Box.net because it allows users 50 gigs of free storage to share any copyrighted works they want without permission from the rights holder.

Again, SOPA allows for this, without judicial intervention. Credit-card companies and ad networks that continue working with the allegedly rogue website can be held liable for contributing to the infringement. Let’s not forget that Viacom is suing YouTube for $1 billion, saying its business model will “completely destroy the value of many copyrighted creations.”

And if you don’t believe the banks would willfully obey such an order from private rights holders without blinking an eye, consider WikiLeaks, which is nearly defunct because institutions like Bank of America, PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and others stopped processing donation payments to it. They did so because the secret-spilling site began releasing thousands of secret, U.S. diplomatic cables last year. No judge ordered these banks to take such action, and WikiLeaks has never been charged with a crime in the United States. [Wired.com]

From Falkvinge Founder of The Pirate Bay Website

CORRUPTION: A study by MediaMatters confirmed the gut feeling we all had: there is indeed a mainstream media blackout going on over the SOPA law that would censor the Internet in the United States. It’s not just a gut feeling, it’s happening.

The good folks at MediaMatters just list the facts without going into causes: if a news station is owned by a SOPA-supporting company, it does not mention SOPA as a matter of fact. Techdirt points to how badly the SOPA discourse fits media logic. I think it’s easier than that. It’s about the age-old power of information advantage, and it is in their strategic business interest to keep this off the newsradar.

To put this in context, we need to look at the concept of functional literacy and then compare to a recent situation in Italy.

What’s “Functional Literacy”?

There is this concept of functional literacy that goes a little bit above literacy, which is “the ability to read” in all simplicity. Functional literacy, however, is a meter of whether you are able to read well enough to take in the information you need in your daily life and take part in society. [Falvinge]

Do your part to stop SOPA!! 

Sign Google’s petition to tell Congress you oppose SOPA/PIPA:

Call your Senator

Wikipedia SOPA and PIPA Learn more

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