[SOPA] End Piracy, Not Liberty

[accadacca]

Thoughts?

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

[BruteForce]

http://utahbruteforce.com/bruteforce/2012/01/-oppose-the-sopa-bill.html

Call your elected officials.

Tell them you are their constituent, and you oppose SOPA and PIPA.

http://utahbruteforce.com/bruteforce/assets_c/2012/01/stop-thumb-800x796-1346.jpg

Why?

SOPA and PIPA would put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. SOPA and PIPA would build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.

In a world in which politicians regulate the Internet based on the influence of big money, user contributed content sites (like this one) -- and sites like it -- cannot survive.

Congress says it's trying to protect the rights of copyright owners, but the "cure" that SOPA and PIPA represent is worse than the disease. SOPA and PIPA are not the answer: they would fatally damage the free and open Internet.

In South Jordan, my representatives are:

Rep. Jason Chaffetz [R, UT-3]
Phone: 202-225-7751
Twitter: Jasoninthehouse

Sen. Orrin Hatch [R, UT]
Phone: 202-224-5251
Twitter: OrrinHatch

Sen. Mike Lee [R, UT]
Phone: 202-224-5444
Twitter: @SenMikeLee

[double moo]

Rep. Jim Matheson
South Salt Lake Office
240 East Morris Avenue #235
South Salt Lake, UT 84115
Phone - (801) 486-1236
Fax - (801) 486-1417

Rep. Rob Bishop
Salt Lake office (staffed only part-time):
125 South State St, Suite 5420
Salt Lake City, UT 84138-1102
ph: 801-532-3244
fax: 801-532-3583

[Deathcricket]

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/18/0834219/ask-slashdot-what-can-you-do-about-sopa-and-pipa

Wednesday is here, and with it sites around the internet are going under temporary blackout to protest two pieces of legislation currently making their way through the U.S. Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA). Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more), reddit (http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html), the Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org/), Google (https://www.google.com/), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech), imgur (http://imgur.com/blog/2012/01/16/imgur-joins-blackout/), Mozilla (http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2012/01/17/mozilla-to-join-tomorrows-virtual-protests-of-pipasopa/), and many others have all made major changes to their sites or shut down altogether in protest. These sites, as well as technology experts (http://www.circleid.com/pdf/PROTECT-IP-Technical-Whitepaper-Final.pdf) (PDF) around the world and everyone here at Slashdot, think SOPA and PIPA pose unacceptable risks to freedom of speech and the uncensored nature of the internet. The purpose of the protests is to educate people — to let them know this legislation will damage websites you use and enjoy every day, despite being unrelated to the stated purpose of both bills. So, we ask you: what can you do to stop SOPA and PIPA? You may have heard the House has shelved SOPA (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/16/1457237/house-kills-sopa), and that President Obama has pledged not to pass it as-is, but the MPAA and SOPA-sponsor Lamar Smith (R-TX) are trying to brush off the protests as a stunt (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120117/13254717438/lamar-smith-mpaa-brush-off-wikipedia-blackout-as-just-publicity-stunt.shtml), and Smith has announced markup for the bill will resume in February (http://judiciary.house.gov/news/01172012.html). Meanwhile, PIPA is still present in the Senate, and it remains a threat. Read on for more about why these bills are bad news, and how to contact your representative to let them know it.
Why is it bad?

The Stop Online Piracy Act is H.R.3261 (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:h.r.3261:), and the Protect-IP Act is S.968 (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:s.968:).

The intent of both pieces of legislation is to combat online piracy, giving the Attorney General and the Department of Justice power to block domain name services and demand that links be stripped from sites not involved in piracy. The problem is that the legislation, as written, is vague and overly-broad. For one thing, it classifies internet sites as "foreign" or "domestic" based entirely on their domain name. A site hosted abroad like Wikileaks.org could be classified as "domestic" because the .org TLD is registered through a U.S. authority. By defining it as "domestic," Wikileaks would then fall under the jurisdiction of U.S. laws. Other provisions are worded even more poorly: in Section 103, SOPA lays out the definition for a "foreign infringing site" as one where "the owner or operator of such Internet site is committing or facilitating the commission of criminal violations punishable under [provisions relating to counterfeiting and copyright infringement]." The problematic word is facilitating, as it opens the door to condemning sites that simply link to other sites.

The most obvious implication of this is that search engines would suddenly be responsible for monitoring and policing everything they index. Google indexed its trillionth concurrent URL (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html) in 2008. Can you imagine how many people it would take to double check all of them for infringing content? But the job wouldn't end at simply looking at them — Google would have to continually monitor them. Google would also have to somehow keep track of the billions of new sites that spring up daily, many of which would be trying to avoid close scrutiny. Of course, it's an impossible task, so there would need to be automated solutions. Automation being imperfect, it would leave us with false positives. Or perhaps sites would need to be "approved" to be listed. Either way, we'd then be dealing with censorship on a massive scale (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/dont-censor-web.html), and the infringing sites themselves would continue to pop up.

But the problems don't end there; in fact, SOPA defines "Internet search engine" as a service that "searches, crawls, categorizes, or indexes information or Web sites available elsewhere on the Internet" and links to them. That's pretty much what we do here at Slashdot. It's also something the fine folks at Wikipedia and reddit do on a regular basis. The strength of all three sites is that they're heavily dependent on user-generated content. Every day at Slashdot, readers deposit hundreds and hundreds of links into our submissions bin (http://slashdot.org/recent). Thousands of comments are made daily. We have a system to surface the good content, but the chaff still exists. If we suddenly had a mandate to retroactively filter out all the links to potentially copyright-infringing sites in our database, we wouldn't have many options. We're talking about reviewing hundreds of thousands of submissions, and every comment on 117,000+ stories. And we're far from the biggest site around — imagine social networks needing to police their content, and all the privacy issues that would raise.

Small sites and new sites would be hurt, too. A website isn't a single, discrete entity that exists on its own. A new company starting up a site would have to worry about its webhost, registrar, content provider, ISP, etc. The legislation would also raise significant financial obstacles. New companies need investments, and that would be much less likely (http://www.booz.com/media/uploads/BoozCo-Impact-US-Internet-Copyright-Regulations-Early-Stage-Investment.pdf) (PDF) if the company could be held liable for content uploaded by users. On top of that, if the site was unable to live up to the vague standards set by the government and the entertainment industry, they could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit, which would be expensive to fight even if they won (and such laws would never (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/05/11/24/133226/dmca-abuse-widespread), ever (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/05/02/21/2321209/lexmarks-dmca-abuse-case-coming-to-an-end) be abused (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/03/18/2223232/googles-information-on-dmca-takedown-abuse)). It's hard to conceptualize the internet without noting its unrivaled growth, and SOPA/PIPA would surely stifle it.

This legislation hits near and dear to the hearts of many Slashdotters; if SOPA/PIPA pass, IT staff for companies small and large are going to have their hands full making sure they aren't opening themselves to legal action or government intervention. Mailing lists, used commonly and extensively among open source software projects, would be endangered. Code repositories would need be scoured for infringing content; the bill allows for the strangling of revenue sources if its anti-infringement rules aren't being met. VPN and proxy services become only questionably legal. The very nature of the open source community — as the EFF puts it, "decentralized, voluntary, international (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/11/hollywood-new-war-on-software-freedom-and-internet-innovation)" — is not compatible with the burdens placed on internet sites by SOPA and PIPA.

What can we do?

So, what can we do about it? There are two big things: contact your representative, and spread the word. Slashdot readers, on the whole, are more technically-minded than the average internet user, so you're all in a position to share your wisdom with the less internet-savvy people in your life, and get them to contact their representative, too. Here's some useful information for doing so:

Propublica has a list of all SOPA/PIPA supporters and opponents (http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/).
Here is the Senate contact list (http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm) and the House contact list (http://www.house.gov/representatives/).
You can also use the EFF's form-letter (http://blacklist.eff.org/), the Stop American Censorship form-letter (http://americancensorship.org/index2.html), or sign Google's petition (https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/).
If you don't live in the U.S., you can petition the State Department (http://americancensorship.org/#petition-state-department). (And yes, you have a dog in this fight (http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6244/125/).)
SOPAStrike has a list of companies participating in the protest (http://sopastrike.com/), and this crowd-sourced Google Doc (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmGJz_37ojoqdFZhYlBhN2hQOGRoN2R0ZGh3VDZlb lE&pli=1#gid=0) tracks companies that support the legislation. Tell those companies what you think.

Further reading: Wikipedia has left their SOPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act) and PIPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act) pages up. The EFF has a series (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech) of articles (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally-gets-chance-break-Internet) explaining (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/january-18-internet-wide-protests-against-blacklist-legislation) in more depth what is wrong with the bills. Here are some protest letters written to Congress from human rights groups (http://cdt.org/files/pdfs/SOPA-letter-from-Intl-human-rights-community.pdf), law professors (http://cdt.org/files/pdfs/SOPA_House_letter_with_PROTECT_IP_letter_FINAL.pdf ), and internet companies (http://www.protectinnovation.com/downloads/letter.pdf).

Go forth and educate.

[Deathcricket]

http://www.facebook.com/CampaignforLiberty

Campaign for Liberty (http://www.facebook.com/CampaignforLiberty)


Rep. Lee Terry has officially dropped his support for SOPA, and Sen. Marco Rubio has backed away from PIPA! Keep those calls going today!




Campaign for Liberty (http://www.facebook.com/CampaignforLiberty)


Another one bites the dust. Senator Roy Blunt is withdrawing his cosponsorship of PIPA.

[double moo]

Though Hatch is listed as a proponent of this bill he is trying to keep it from a vote until issues are resolved. Looks like Lee is on board too.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/283902-letter-to-majority-leader-reid-january-13-2012.html

[double moo]

great black out for today!!!

http://theoatmeal.com/

[Don]

Sen. Hatch is now backing away from this thing.


HATCH STATEMENT ON THE PROTECT IP ACT


by Orrin Hatch (https://www.facebook.com/OrrinHatch) on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 12:44pm

Our Founding Fathers understood that protecting people’s ideas is essential to a robust and healthy democracy. With the advent of the Internet, intellectual property theft is a real and growing problem that everyone acknowledges must be combated.

After listening to the concerns on both sides of the debate over the PROTECT IP Act, it is simply not ready for prime time and both sides must continue working together to find a better path forward. Despite the concerns about the unintended consequences of this legislation, the Senate remains on a path to consider this bill next week. Rushing something with such potential for far-reaching consequences is something I cannot support and that’s why I will not only vote against moving the bill forward next week but also remove my cosponsorship of the bill. Given the legitimate vocal concerns, it is imperative that we take a step back to allow everyone to come together and find a reasonable solution.



https://www.facebook.com/notes/orrin-hatch/hatch-statement-on-the-protect-ip-act/10150489342453499

[Don]

Rep. Matheson now has a position as well.

From the office of Congressman Jim Matheson:
Washington, D.C.—Congressman Jim Matheson opposes two bills aimed at stopping the theft of intellectual property—The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA)—saying that while they attempt to address the important issue of online piracy, they are ill-conceived and could harm the open, dynamic innovation made possible by the Internet.
“Intellectual property is an important form of property that should be protected from Internet piracy, but these bills are not the way to go,” said Matheson. “It’s wrong to pass bills that could censor information on the Internet—stifling innovation and interfering with the livelihood of businesses on the Internet. This is a complicated issue, and Congress should obtain much more stakeholder involvement as it addresses the issue.”
Matheson said he supports the goal of stopping online piracy. But he said these bills—instead of attacking the pirates directly (mostly because they are offshore and outside U.S. jurisdiction) — look at Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and use them as the enforcement mechanism. Matheson said disrupting the system in this way might even lead to a less secure Internet for everyone.


http://utahdemocrats.org/2012/01/jim-matheson-opposed-to-internet-censorship/

[Don]

LOL, Sen. Lee has a new Twitter avatar. :haha:

50735

[Don]

On Twitter he's saying the Senate servers are down, so here's the announcement from FB.

Lee Reaffirms Opposition to PROTECT IP Act


by United States Senator Mike Lee (https://www.facebook.com/senatormikelee) on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 3:09pm

Since the Senate servers are having trouble loading Senate websites today as many voice their concerns over PIPA/SOPA, here is my statement on the PROTECT IP Act: WASHINGTON – Today, Senator Mike Lee reaffirmed his opposition to the PROTECT IP Act, flawed legislation that would unduly burden certain online businesses, threaten Internet security, and stifle innovation.

“Protection of private property rights is an essential foundation of our nation’s free market economy. Online piracy poses a significant threat to the intellectual property rights of American innovators, and much of that threat comes from foreign websites that are currently unaccountable to the rule of law. I am committed to making certain that these infringing pirate sites are not able to continue stealing our country’s intellectual property without consequence.

“While I am sympathetic to the basic objectives of the PROTECT IP Act, I have consistently expressed concern that several of its provisions would threaten Internet security, stifle the free flow of online information, and unduly burden third parties. As a result, I declined to cosponsor this legislation and have worked from the beginning to make critical changes to the bill to resolve these concerns. Unless and until such revisions are made, I will continue to oppose the bill.

“Rather than rush to vote on such deeply flawed legislation, the Senate should carefully discuss and debate how best to protect American intellectual property, preserve Internet security, and promote the free exchange of ideas. I hope and expect that Leaders Reid and McConnell will ensure that we have ample opportunity to explore the issue and attempt to resolve these concerns before the Senate holds a vote.”

Note: Last week, Senator Lee joined several fellow Judiciary Committee members in a letter calling on to Senate Majority Reid to postpose Tuesday’s scheduled vote on the Protect IP Act and allow for full discussion and debate.


https://www.facebook.com/notes/united-states-senator-mike-lee/lee-reaffirms-opposition-to-protect-ip-act/324771154221251



He's updated his FB avatar as well:

50736

[accadacca]

OH SNAP!

50738

[accadacca]

"███████everything█████████████████████████████████ ███is██████████████████████████████████████████fin e██████████████."#SOPA"

[Mtnseeker1]

No worries here. Unlike the idiots that are still camping out for ah what are they trying to promote I forgot. 99% of what?
This is just a political feeler. I mean really If per say I do a ride report and show a pict. with Burger King and say you can see that the ketchup is H-----. Can you really shut me down. Anybody get this?
Relax it is only a feeler. The A-- lows in want to be charge are to d-- Dumb to ever get it right . Besides they are still looking for WMD.:fitz:

When round two comes up then get exited.

However theft is theft and should be delt with in a just and legal way.
There is no room for deliberate copy right infringement. 9 out of 10 times simple permission works without cost or trouble. But if your making money off of someones skills without authorization then be prepared to pay the bill, the courts, and in blood..........

[CarpeyBiggs]

Relax it is only a feeler. The A-- lows in want to be charge are to d-- Dumb to ever get it right . Besides they are still looking for WMD.:fitz:
huh? easy on the schlitz there ed.

if it wasn't for the fact that people have started an online version of a riot, this would be on the floor in the next week or two. only because of the uproar is it getting temporarily shelved. the entertainment and music lobby damn near snuck this one through.

[Iceaxe]

http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/1932218_460s.jpg

[hank moon]

the internet - possibly the last bastion of "freedom" in the United States. "with ... virtual liberty for all..." har har...

[Sombeech]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7bIDBD6eus&feature=g-logo&context=G28d0386FOAAAAAAAHAA

[Iceaxe]

http://5.asset.soup.io/asset/2839/5237_2fdf_500.jpeg