Author Topic: SOPA (Read 1749 times)

hubag bohol · « **on:** January 20, 2012, 08:59:09 PM »

What Is SOPA?

If you hadn't heard of SOPA before, you probably have by now: Some of the internet's most influential sitesâ€”Reddit and Wikipedia among themâ€”are going dark to protest the much-maligned anti-piracy bill. But other than being a very bad thing, what is SOPA? And what will it mean for you if it passes?

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #1 on:** January 20, 2012, 08:59:38 PM »

SOPA is an anti-piracy bill working its way through Congress...

House Judiciary Committee Chair and Texas Republican Lamar Smith, along with 12 co-sponsors, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act on October 26th of last year. Debate on H.R. 3261, as it's formally known, has consisted of one hearing on November 16th and a "mark-up period" on December 15th, which was designed to make the bill more agreeable to both parties. Its counterpart in the Senate is the Protect IP Act (S. 968). Also known by its cuter-but-still-deadly name: PIPA. There will likely be a vote on PIPA next Wednesday; SOPA discussions had been placed on hold but will resume in February of this year.

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #2 on:** January 20, 2012, 09:00:11 PM »

...that would grant content creators extraordinary power over the internet...

The beating heart of SOPA is the ability of intellectual property owners (read: movie studios and record labels) to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim. If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of The Dark Knight, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, andâ€”most dangerouslyâ€”that the site's ISP prevent people from even going there.

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #3 on:** January 20, 2012, 09:00:46 PM »

...which would go almost comedically unchecked...

Perhaps the most galling thing about SOPA in its original construction is that it let IP owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off. All it required was a single letter claiming a "good faith belief" that the target site has infringed on its content. Once Google or PayPal or whoever received the quarantine notice, they would have five days to either abide or to challenge the claim in court. Rights holders still have the power to request that kind of blockade, but in the most recent version of the bill the five day window has softened, and companies now would need the court's permission.

The language in SOPA implies that it's aimed squarely at foreign offenders; that's why it focuses on cutting off sources of funding and traffic (generally US-based) rather than directly attacking a targeted site (which is outside of US legal jurisdiction) directly. But that's just part of it.

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #4 on:** January 20, 2012, 09:01:10 PM »

...to the point of potentially creating an "Internet Blacklist"...

Here's the other thing: Payment processors or content providers like Visa or YouTube don't even need a letter shut off a site's resources. The bill's "vigilante" provision gives broad immunity to any provider who proactively shutters sites it considers to be infringers. Which means the MPAA just needs to publicize one list of infringing sites to get those sites blacklisted from the internet.

Potential for abuse is rampant. As Public Knowledge points out, Google could easily take it upon itself to delist every viral video site on the internet with a "good faith belief" that they're hosting copyrighted material. Leaving YouTube as the only major video portal. Comcast (an ISP) owns NBC (a content provider). Think they might have an interest in shuttering some rival domains? Under SOPA, they can do it without even asking for permission.

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #5 on:** January 20, 2012, 09:01:50 PM »

...while exacting a huge cost from nearly every site you use daily...

SOPA also includes an "anti-circumvention" clause, which holds that telling people how to work around SOPA is nearly as bad as violating its main provisions. In other words: if your status update links to The Pirate Bay, Facebook would be legally obligated to remove it. Ditto tweets, YouTube videos, Tumblr or WordPress posts, or sites indexed by Google. And if Google, Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook, etc. let it stand? They face a government "enjoinment." They could and would be shut down.

The resources it would take to self-police are monumental for established companies, and unattainable for start-ups. SOPA would censor every online social outlet you have, and prevent new ones from emerging.

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #6 on:** January 20, 2012, 09:02:30 PM »

...and potentially disappearing your entire digital life...

The party line on SOPA is that it only affects seedy off-shore torrent sites. That's false. As the big legal brains at Bricoleur point out, the potential collateral damage is huge. And it's you. Because while Facebook and Twitter have the financial wherewithal to stave off anti-circumvention shut down notices, the smaller sites you use to store your photos, your videos, and your thoughts may not. If the government decides any part of that site infringes on copyright and proves it in court? Poof. Your digital life is gone, and you can't get it back.

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #7 on:** January 20, 2012, 09:03:50 PM »

...while still managing to be both unnecessary and ineffective...

What's saddest about SOPA is that it's pointless on two fronts. In the US, the MPAA, and RIAA already have the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to request that infringing material be taken down. We've all seen enough "video removed" messages to know that it works just fine.

As for the foreign operators, you might as well be throwing darts at a tse-tse fly. The poster child of overseas torrenting, Pirate Bay, has made it perfectly clear that they're not frightened in the least. And why should they be? Its proprietors have successfully evaded any technological attempt to shut them down so far. Its advertising partners aren't US-based, so they can't be choked out. But more important than Pirate Bay itself is the idea of Pirate Bay, and the hundreds or thousands of sites like it, as populous and resilient as mushrooms in a marsh. Forget the question of should SOPA succeed. It's incredibly unlikely that it could. At least at its stated goals.

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #8 on:** January 20, 2012, 09:04:20 PM »

...but stands a shockingly good chance of passing...

SOPA is, objectively, an unfeasible trainwreck of a bill, one that willfully misunderstands the nature of the internet and portends huge financial and cultural losses. The White House has come out strongly against it. As have hundreds of venture capitalists and dozens of the men and women who helped build the internet in the first place. In spite of all this, companies have already spent a lot of money pushing SOPA, and it remains popular in the House of Representatives.

That mark-up period on December 15th, the one that was supposed to transform the bill into something more manageable? Useless. Twenty sanity-fueled amendments were flat-out rejected. And while the bill's most controversial provisionâ€”mandatory DNS filteringâ€”was thankfully taken off the table recently, in practice internet providers would almost certainly still use DNS as a tool to shut an accused site down.

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #9 on:** January 20, 2012, 09:05:28 PM »

...unless we do something about it.

The momentum behind the anti-SOPA movement has been slow to build, but we're finally at a saturation point. Wikipedia, BoingBoing, WordPress, TwitPic: they'll all be dark on January 18th. An anti-SOPA rally has been planned for tomorrow afternoon in New York. The list of companies supporting SOPA is long but shrinking, thanks in no small part to the emails and phone calls they've received in the last few months.

So keep calling. Keep emailing. Most of all, keep making it known that the internet was built on the same principles of freedom that this country was. It should be afforded to the same rights.

http://gizmodo.com/5877000/what-is-sopa

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #10 on:** January 20, 2012, 09:07:34 PM »

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MikeLigalig.com · « **Reply #11 on:** January 20, 2012, 09:17:43 PM »

SOPA is the death of the Internet. Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc are all against this pending law.

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #12 on:** January 21, 2012, 07:23:22 AM »

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #13 on:** January 21, 2012, 07:24:17 AM »

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Lorenzo · « **Reply #14 on:** January 21, 2012, 07:54:21 AM »

bwahahahaha!

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #15 on:** January 21, 2012, 08:57:20 AM »

Give me a crash course in . . . internet piracy
by BRIAN BOYD

Why couldnâ€™t I get on to Wikipedia last Wednesday? As a protest against the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) in the US, Wikipedia and other sites went dark for 24 hours.

So is Wikipedia pro-piracy? No, but it regards Sopa as draconian and as an assault on freedom of expression.

What is Sopa all about? Hollywood and media corporations want to stop the many internet users who download music, films and TV shows illegally and without paying the copyright holders. If Sopa is passed, it could mean that search engines, such as Google, could be sued for hosting links to web pages that carry these illegal sites.

Where does Richard Oâ€™Brien fit into this? Heâ€™s the young Englishman facing extradition to the US because, it is alleged, he ran a website with links to illegal downloads of copyrighted material. His says he was not to blame for what people did with the links he provided. And that question is the issue.

But surely illegal downloading is wrong and everyone should be opposed to it? Illegal downloading causes job losses and is destroying the music and film worlds, but the reason media companies, such as Google, are opposed to Sopa is that they believe they should not be held responsible for information they carry, given that they cannot monitor every posting.

But this is all happening in the US. Iâ€™m in Ireland and can download what I want for free, canâ€™t I? No, you canâ€™t. Legislation is in place here also. If you are providing links to illegal sites, you could face extradition to the US.

Why might Sopa play a part in this yearâ€™s US presidential election? President Obama, while opposed to internet piracy, has distanced himself from Sopa for pretty much the same reasons as Wikipedia opposes it. Obamaâ€™s stance is important because he has alienated Hollywood and the US media companies, which are all pro-Sopa and could withdraw funding from the Obama re-election campaign.

Why is Rupert Murdoch tweeting about this? You could say he is pro-Sopa. He has tweeted that â€œObama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymastersâ€.

But if not Sopa, what else is there to stop internet piracy? Sopa is ill thought out. What is needed is education on the effects of piracy. It can seem like itâ€™s media conglomerates picking on the small guy who is just downloading one lousy show or film, but that isnâ€™t the real story. Piracy on the internet puts people out of work. -- http://www.irishtimes.com/

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islander · « **Reply #16 on:** January 24, 2012, 04:59:27 PM »

good gracious, what legislators can do to affirm their idiocy by caving in to piracy claims of big business.

in my simple understanding of this sopa thing, would it mean then that pretty soon, when i post in tubagbohol a picture of a cute cat from some other generous website, tubagbohol will be closed? estoryaheee ra god ko nga bugo bahin ug web-web, huhuhu.

unsa na man ni, ako nga nag-download, i-extradite sa u.s. to be imprisoned for 5 years? does the u.s. believe it owns everything in the world, including our right to enjoy and share what we find on the web? whatchamatta na man uy?

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islander · « **Reply #17 on:** January 24, 2012, 05:03:33 PM »

kining madunggan nato sa radio o makit-an sa tv, information man pod na. atong i-record kunohay kay atong ipasa, that's the same process, only the media are different. prisonable ba ta ana? what about newspapers and magazines, akong ipasa aron makabasa ang uban. prisonable ba ko ana?

why do idiots occupy congress?

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insurectus · « **Reply #18 on:** January 24, 2012, 09:53:02 PM »

goodbye megaupload, filesonic og uban pang mga pay per download site padung na pod.

Godaddy lost more than 20K domains in less than 2 days kay ni suporta sa t sopa
ang PIPA ambot molusot ba kaha ni

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Lorenzo · « **Reply #19 on:** January 25, 2012, 05:02:20 AM »

kining madunggan nato sa radio o makit-an sa tv, information man pod na. atong i-record kunohay kay atong ipasa, that's the same process, only the media are different. prisonable ba ta ana? what about newspapers and magazines, akong ipasa aron makabasa ang uban. prisonable ba ko ana?

why do idiots occupy congress?

isles, this is the problem with having 'big government' !

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Lorenzo · « **Reply #20 on:** January 25, 2012, 05:03:10 AM »

goodbye megaupload, filesonic og uban pang mga pay per download site padung na pod.

Godaddy lost more than 20K domains in less than 2 days kay ni suporta sa t sopa
ang PIPA ambot molusot ba kaha ni

they already closed down limewire last year.

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insurectus · « **Reply #21 on:** January 25, 2012, 04:25:04 PM »

Maayo pa diay diri sa atoa.

http://www.pinas.net/2012/01/omb-chief-to-seek-meeting-with-palace-adviser-caught-buying-pirated-discs/

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #22 on:** February 04, 2012, 03:10:28 PM »

Bwahaha! Lain-lain lang ang interes aning tawhana, angayan kaayo sa iyang katungdanan...

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hubag bohol · « **Reply #23 on:** February 04, 2012, 03:11:06 PM »

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chriswise · « **Reply #24 on:** February 09, 2012, 03:42:44 PM »

kinahanglan diay na,,daghan patyon kay,,para ma free,,he,he,he,,di diay pod patas ang batas diha..

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insurectus · « **Reply #25 on:** February 10, 2012, 09:09:53 AM »

patay na pod si btjunkie, patyon pod tingali sunod si piratebay

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islander · « **Reply #26 on:** February 10, 2012, 12:13:28 PM »

naunsa... gapasabot ba kaha ni nga mas mahalon diay ang money kay sa kinabuhig tawo. uroy ba...

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