STOP "PROTECT IP (S. 968)/SOPA (HR. 3261)" - Page 86

On January 14 2012 06:56 e_i_pi_1_0 wrote:
Check this out:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57358947-261/dns-provision-pulled-from-sopa-victory-for-opponents/
Wonder how this is going to affect its chances of passing.

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."

Well, Lamar Smith, the Internet does mind your taking that on. We're not just talking about Reddit, either. Pretty much every major American tech company has stepped forward to protest the current version of SOPA, warning how it stands to quell innovation (read: kill jobs) despite Smith's past arguments that SOPA is a job-saving bill. Indeed it would help the entertainment industry to lock in more profits, but it would also change the architecture of the open web, opening the door to government censorship and possibly shutting down popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, some say. Along those lines, legal scholars -- including one well known Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe -- have called the bill unconstitutional, an assault on Americans' First Amendment rights. The Senate's PROTECT IP is, in many ways, a watered down version of SOPA, but it's also a bill that aim to solve a problem that Congress has more or less admitted it doesn't understand. So it's not a surprise at all that Senator Leahy would blink when confronted with the challenge of pushing the legislation forward. It remains surprising that Smith won't back down.

Earlier this week, Politico floated a hypothesis: "SOPA becoming election liability for backers." (That's inside-the-Beltway headline speak for "Americans appear to hate SOPA, politicians appear to start listening.") At the time, it seemed almost speculative to say that folks like Leahy or Smith would listen to the web's collective outrage about the laws and change their stances on the legislation. After all, it is an election year. So far SOPA's made a villain out of at least one politician, quite randomly. Paul Ryan is not the SOPA proponent that Smith is, but in an attempt to flex their crowd-powered muscle, Reddit decided to go after Ryan and helped raise thousands of dollars for his opponent's campaign. After Reddit's initial threat, Ryan's office denied that he supported the bill. But the damage was done.

What happens next depends on a number of factors. For PROTECT IP, a judgment day is peeking over the horizon in the form of a procedural vote scheduled for January 24. For SOPA, a hearing is scheduled for next Wednesday, during which a number of Internet experts (read: huge nerds) will testify, we predict, in strong opposition to the bill before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, of which outspoken SOPA opponent Rep. Darrell Issa is the chairman. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is one of the scheduled witnesses, and in solidarity with his vocal protest against the legislation, the link-sharing site will go dark for 12 hours. Other websites, like all of the meme-tastic Cheezburger blog network will follow suit.

It's unclear what's next for Smith and the House Judiciary Committee, where most of the hearings on SOPA have taken place. So far, he's not blinking like his colleagues and contradicting the many statements made by job-creating tech industry leaders. "There are some companies like Google that make money by directing consumers to these illegal websites," Smith told Reuters on Thursday. "So I don't think they have any real credibility to complain even though they are the primary opponent." Ohanian, one of those entrepreneurs that Smith is portraying as a villain, has said that SOPA would "cripple the Internet" and isn't shy about stating the bill's real implications bluntly. "This (SOPA) could potentially obliterate the entire tech industry -- a job-creating industry," Ohanian wrote on his blog recently. But if you're the type that likes to listen to Harvard professors, it could also obliterate the entire Internet as we know it.

Less than 24-hours after promising not to yield, the Texas congressman and author of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) Lamar Smith is yielding on the bill's controversial language that would allow the government to censor the Internet -- for now. "After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the [Judiciary] Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision," Smith said in a Friday afternoon press release. "We will continue to look for ways to ensure that foreign websites cannot sell and distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers."

RELATED: The Author of SOPA Is Also a Copyright Violator (Sort of)

First of all, three cheers for the Internet. (That's an evergreen sort of thing to say, but we're pretty sure the Internet is collectively cheering the new.) Second of all, it's still not time for civil rights types to start popping corks. The bill is not dead. As Chairman Smith says, the Judiciary Committee is only pumping the brakes on the progress of the bill, while Internet experts can properly study the implications of censoring the web by using DNS blocking. This is weird because pretty much every Internet expert in the country has unabashedly condemned SOPA's domain-blocking measures and, well, the entire bill. But it is certainly a little victory for the tens if not hundreds of thousands of freedom advocates who've been protesting the bill for months. If anything, it's a major, frankly embarrassing loss for Smith. Now, he not only looks like a hypocrite, he also looks like a waffler. Americans have a tendency not to (re-)elect wafflers.

On January 14 2012 17:15 e_i_pi_1_0 wrote:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120113/23560217407/sopa-delayed-cantor-promises-it-wont-be-brought-to-floor-until-issues-are-addressed.shtml

So uh.... now what?

On January 14 2012 17:47 DarkViator wrote:
This is why the American Government is a joke to me.

In any case, hopefully the old man who understands little of the internet pushing this, will sit down and shut up for once with both bills being killed. Piracy will always exist, I do not condone it, but it's going to be there. "Criminals" will always find ways to circumvent laws no matter how severe a law you enact (short of death but even then, criminals still find ways and still evade the law). To hurt the law abiding citizens (globally in this case) and halting innovation in favor of attempting to stop piracy, which is nigh impossible, to lose jobs in the United States (And Globally to a lesser extent) in the Tech sector. Does the United States really need to stifle profits and lose jobs in the only industry it has that is constantly growing and the ONLY reason it's economy is still afloat?

On January 14 2012 17:47 DarkViator wrote:
This is why the American Government is a joke to me.

In any case, hopefully the old man who understands little of the internet pushing this, will sit down and shut up for once with both bills being killed. Piracy will always exist, I do not condone it, but it's going to be there. "Criminals" will always find ways to circumvent laws no matter how severe a law you enact (short of death but even then, criminals still find ways and still evade the law). To hurt the law abiding citizens (globally in this case) and halting innovation in favor of attempting to stop piracy, which is nigh impossible, to lose jobs in the United States (And Globally to a lesser extent) in the Tech sector. Does the United States really need to stifle profits and lose jobs in the only industry it has that is constantly growing and the ONLY reason it's economy is still afloat?

On January 14 2012 17:59 Cyber_Cheese wrote:
On the 18th, many sites are going to shut down in protest for the day. Is TL one of them?

On January 14 2012 17:49 forgottendreams wrote:


You do realize a similarly sweeping bill in the EU (ACTA) is currently being debated in the House of Parliament... please keep the unneccesary regional snipes out because this is a global issue. SOPA/PIPA is the focus of RIAA/MPAA/Sony lobbyists in America because treaties don't hold the same teeth of enforcement as a treaty would in the European Union, which is why EU must remain vigilant themselves and support the opposition Parliament leaders against ACTA.

If anything the American public has had its first victory, hopefully not its last in this fight.

Saturday marked a major victory for opponents of proposed anti-piracy legislation Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), which would target foreign-based websites violating U.S. copyrights.

House of Representatives bill SOPA and its Senate counterpart PIPA are designed to punish websites that make available, for example, free movies and music without the permission of the U.S. rights holders. Opponents of the bills, however, worry that the proposed laws would grant the Department of Justice too much regulatory power. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has called the measures "draconian." Other Internet giants who oppose the bill include Facebook, eBay, Mozilla, Twitter, and Huffington Post parent company AOL.

The White House on Saturday officially responded to two online petitions, "Stop the E-PARASITE Act" and "Veto the SOPA bill and any other future bills that threaten to diminish the free flow of information," urging the President to reject SOPA and PIPA.

The statement was drawn up by Victoria Espinel, Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at Office of Management and Budget, Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, and Howard Schmidt, Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator for National Security Staff. They made clear that the White House will not support legislation that disrupts the open standards of the Internet.

"While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet," the statement read in part.

The White House statement went on to say, however, that the Obama Administration believes "online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy" and that 2012 should see the passage of narrower legislation that targets the source of foreign copyright infringement.

The letter also highlighted the following four points:

Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small. [...] We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. [...] That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders [...] We expect and encourage all private parties, including both content creators and Internet platform providers working together, to adopt voluntary measures and best practices to reduce online piracy.
This is not the end of the debate, the White House statement emphasized. "Moving forward, we will continue to work with Congress on a bipartisan basis on legislation that provides new tools needed in the global fight against piracy and counterfeiting, while vigorously defending an open Internet based on the values of free expression, privacy, security and innovation," the letter also read.

Following the release of the White House's statement, SOPA sponsor and House Judiciary Chairman (R-Texas) Lamar Smith issued a statement of his own.

“I welcome today’s announcement that the White House will support legislation to combat online piracy that protects free speech, the Internet and America’s intellectual property," Smith said, according to The Hill. "That’s precisely what the Stop Online Piracy Act does."

On Friday, CNET reported that Smith said he will remove from the bill one of the most hotly contested provisions, Domain Name System requirements. Previously, SOPA had called for DNS blocking of infringing websites.

On Thursday, PIPA author Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) said that "more study" was needed to asses the bill's DNS-blocking provision.

The White House's statement condemned DNS blocking in regulatory efforts and said that it "pose[s] a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk."

A House Oversight Committee hearing on SOPA's DNS-blocking provision had previously been scheduled for January 18. However, according to Tech Dirt, Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-California) said that the hearing will be postponed for the time being and that the focus now should be placed on the Senate's PIPA bill, which Senate Majority leader Harry Reid has committed to moving forward in the next two weeks.

On January 15 2012 04:58 Candadar wrote:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

On the front page

On January 15 2012 07:00 bOneSeven wrote:


I'm sorry, is that the same dude that said he would oppose the NDAA, and then sign it on new years eve like it's a fucking movie or fairy tale or some crazy story ?

On January 15 2012 08:26 Candadar wrote:


I'm sorry, would you rather him say "I LOVE THIS LAW AND WILL SUPPORT IT FULLY"?

On January 15 2012 08:28 bOneSeven wrote:


I'm merely saying that his word means nothing, as history proves it.