I just recently began looking into this, and I am interested in what you fine people think of this bill.

From what little I have gleaned, I understand that it basically gives ISPs the right to close down any internet site they want at any time and for just about any reason, not to mention infringing on the privacy of users and putting people in jail for downloading pirated content.

Aside from the obvious infringements on privacy and the right against unlawful searches, I am really disturbed by the wording around putting people in jail for downloading illegal content.

I mean, seriously. Aren't jails supposed to be for those violent few who shouldn't be out amongst the public for fear they may harm someone? Why the hell are we so prone to put people in jail for non-violent crimes?

And what else in this bill should I know and fear? Anyone manage to get through the entire bill without their eyes bleeding?

~spidey

One member of the US Copyright Office's staff has apparently said that US Copyright law is lacking because it doesn't provide the USA with jurisdiction over websites hosted in forign territories.

This is about all you need to know about the US Government's understanding of internets.

I read some stuff about that Arq. Several sites are saying that if this goes into effect they are simply going to set up dummy corporations out of the country and continue with business as usual. Yet another job destroyer we can blame on the Republicans.

~spidey

It's more about giving the RIAA more authority using the courts as a proxy. As the bill originally intended, a copyright holder would go to the court claiming that a site was distributing copyrighted content or linking-to a website hosting copyrighted content. The court would then send the ISP a court order demanding the site be blocked/taken down, in entirely. The ISP would get no choice but to follow the court order.

So let's say the courts decide that a website like °°°°°share is hosting content under copyright illegally. A court order would go to:

Either:

A- The American ISP hosting the content if it is hosted domestically to order them to take the site down.

If the site is hosted abroad:

B- All the ISPs under American jurisdiction telling them to block their users from accessing it. But it doesn't just stop there: The courts would also be able to send out an order to similarly blacklist every site that has ever linked to a °°°°°share url: meaning there goes all the search engines, any university that has used °°°°°share to distribute LEGAL content [not all p2p is used for piracy, and the same can be said for file hosts of course]. Thousands upon thousands of websites would be potentially "guilty by association" and blacklisted along with whatever the website that started the whole thing.

The logistics in changing our ISP infrastructure to allow this level of government censorship sounded daunting even to our politicians; to which Sen Dodd [of the RIAA] said [I-wish-I-was-joking-here] that "if China could do this, so can we!" [not an exact quote, I couldn't find the ACLU email I got that had the real quote reprinted verbatim].

But why then does the RIAA want our authority to extend to sites hosted in places like Nigeria, if Americans will no longer be able to visit the website in question? Because people in other countries like in Japan would still be able to visit the Nigerian version of ThePirateBay; and [supposedly] these Japanese web surfers would be able to download American movies illegally. Or American music. And that would cut into the RIAA's profits.

We're talking authority to blacklist "whole" sites here, not just the offending content in question as per the DMCA. One infringing video = Youtube is gone. One blogger who failed to site a news article properly [thus accidentally plagiarizing] and all of livejournal is gone.



Considering that we've brought back debtor's prisons during this depression [let's call it what it is], I don't see it as much of a shock.



That's not what Benjamin Franklin thought when he invented the modern prison system [Eastern State Penn].

Google could pretty much just close their US offices and keep on ticking right now. Google maps runs out of a business park near my house, for example. There are huge amounts of this thing distributed all over the world and the USA would be even worse off than China if this goes into effect.

I've been groaning to myself about this for awhile now.

In my mind, when digital downloads started to replace physical product as the main method of delivery for movies and music (books and newspapers are just now catching up), the end result has been headache. Lots and lots of headache. We seem to have built a culture that expects to "get" every kind of media free. This happened to software in the early 1990s, and (I think) lessened somewhat with the ridiculous size of applications and the arcane thing know as "the registry."

There are other gangs aside from the RIAA in support of this: the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for one, who loses some crazy amount of money due to movie downloads. To them, though, internet freedom might not be the most important thing as they're trying to keep an industry alive. Maybe they, unlike the music industry who knew CDs were over priced and failed to act, don't want to tank like a record label.

This SOPA thing seems like it supposed to make so-called "rogue sites" disappear in an attempt to prevent copyright infringement. But there's something bad about the way the government seems to be considering an act that disregards due process as well as any intelligent solution to this issue, which a place like Google (just to give an example) might be much more apt to handle given the fact that they employ some of the smartest and most unconventional thinkers in the internet business, which our government clearly does not.

I'm sure there are lots of details to be fine tuned as it would stand now to the enforceability of the issue. This is one of the largest problems right now with online piracy. It scope and frequency is just out of control. I, personally, am looking forward to the near future when artificial intelligence will allow us to enforce this matter much, much better. It boggles my mind at how many otherwise honest people practice theft online.

If they were serious about stopping online piracy, without trying to extort wealthy web service companies like youtube [before it was bought out] or google to make up for their lost [whether real or imagined] profits what they need to do is find a way to hold the end users who distribute commercial content in an infringing manner accountable while leaving the rest of the internet alone.

By "commercial content in an infringing manner" I mean the types of people like John Doe who go uploading entire unabridged albums to places like °°°°°share & then post the share url's on blogs or forums. This should not be used to go after little 12 year old sally who was singing copyrighten songs during a tween sleep over party & had a friend upload a video of her being silly to embarrass her. This would require reforming our intellectual property law in such a way that it can distinguish between these two very different types of scenarios. It's cases like John Doe that cut into industry profits, not people like little 12 year old sally. It's the actions of John Doe who allow thousands of people to download an album instead of buying it. Little 12 year old sally singing [badly] some pop song at a tween sleep over is not going to discourage people from buying the actual commercial product in question [unless it's so bad that it actually ruins the song for people but that's another subject altogether: enter commentary about songs that are ruined by being played to death by clear channel]. The "happy birthday"song people in English speaking countries reguarly sing is technically under copyright and it would be completely fucking insane to send everyone who had ever song it at a birthday party to prison for copyright infringement [as this bill would like to do], or expect them to pony up $750 per infringing distribution [the typical judgement for distributing 1 mp3 illegally one time].

As to how we could hold individual end users accountable for piracy online; I know England has considered a three strikes policy where someone caught infringing online three times gets cut off from the internet. After your third strike ISPs can't sell you an account. This would not stop people from using public access points, but if combined with a DMCA style streamlined process for getting hosts to pull infringing content this should altogether cut things down considerably. This can only happen after the aforementioned reforms to our copyright laws or else many honest people, who are not contributing to the piracy problem, will be erroneously blacklisted from a service that our society should [perhaps needs] to allow easy access to in most cases.

To drive the point home: It's the uploaders who distribute the content that are the "problem." If Steve Doe takes a news article from a paid site under copyright and posted the entire unabridged work in a forum post, no one is going to know that they were "downloading" illegally distributed content until it was too late! Likewise I am sure I can't be the only person here who has gone to a website and had it start playing an mp3 of a song still under copyright automatically, without me knowing to expect it. If I were surfing youtube in my spare time, as many people do, I may click on the "related" videos that pop up on the right side and eventually unknowingly start watching, thereby downloading, a commercial video still under copyright that had been uploaded without the copyright holder's permission [such as a short cartoon, a music video, a news segment from a tv broadcast, ETC!]. Somehow cut off the infringing uploads and the piracy stops. You can't download what isn't uploaded to begin with.

This was the French President's idea, and the majority of Europe responded with "we know you like Hitler but.... fuck off". Ireland responded by literally egging him.

You get a party foul for partisanship, Spidey. According to this handy-dandy Huffington Post article, both parties are equally to blame for this one.

Do keep in mind, all: these legislators are old. Most of them still think the Internet is a "series of tubes". Of course they have no clue how to curtail piracy without trying to become lords of the Interwebs.

The internet is a series of tubes. That metaphor is sound on any number of levels.

I don't think the politician in question was thinking of it as a metaphor at the time.

No, but whoever explained it to him was. Either way, it's unfair to mock someone who is not at least somewhat familiar with networking beyond "plug it in" for not understanding how the internet actually works.

Pshah, I worked in tech support. If I didn't mock people for refusing to learn how the tech they use every day actually functions, I'd lose half my comedy material.

One thing I haven't noticed many people talking about with this bill, is the subject of pharmaceuticals. Considering that's been thrown in there, under the radar, in a bill talking about blacklisting access to sites that sell [or advertise for sites that sell] counterfeit retail goods I have to question whether it is intended to use SOPA to prevent people from buying cheaper medications abroad.

I don't see the masses winning much congressional sympathy when the side in favor of the proposal includes all that big-RIAA, big-movies, and big-pharm soft money.