One of my favorites from XM Chill.

Burial & Four Tet - Moth - YouTube

noteworthy wrote:
Can the signatories to the letter be said to "support the bill" that is presently under consideration?

The above language differs from an earlier letter of May 25 to the Senate, in which a somewhat different group of organizations more explicitly endorsed a specific bill.

Thanks for posting the links to the letters. I think its important for people to understand the breadth of groups that support creating a centralized internet censorship infrastructure in the United States.

Perhaps a personal Boycott wouldn't work, but there are more visible actions that can be taken.

RE: SOPA: Put your money where your mouth is

Dagmar wrote:
Jesus.... I've only been saying this for about a week and a half now, man. I can't find any other more plausible explanation for how hard these bills are being pushed.

Its plausible. I haven't watched this yet:

This one is shorter:

RE: SOPA, NDAA, and the revolution

Charles Stross herein presents a conspiracy theory that I'll admit having considered, at least in part, but hadn't taken seriously enough to post:

The NDAA and SOPA are designed to provide tools to counter future ArabSpring & Wikileaks type events in the United States, fueled by online social media and the worsening of the housing crisis.

Copyright is just a distraction. During the revolution they want the infrastructure in place to block access to foreign coordinating sites as well as the ability to round up suspected dissidents without charge.

On some level, it doesnt really matter whether or not this is a concious desire - these bills will do what they do.

SOPA, NDAA, and the revolution

Third -- and this may have been the point of the entire exercise -- it gave Polis an excuse to insert the full lyrics of the popular Internet meme "The Internet is for Porn" into the official congressional hearing record for SOPA. (Representative excerpt: "All these guys unzip their flies / For porn, porn, porn!")

'Internet is for Porn' pops up during House SOPA debate | Privacy Inc. - CNET News

Although I'm not posting to Twitter, in general, right now, I think that it is important to recognize people in Congress who stood up for freedom today:

As an Internet security professional, I want to thank @jasoninthehouse @darrellissa @repzoelofgren & @jaredpolis for standing up to #SOPA.

Twitter / @_decius_: As an Internet security pr ...

“The criticism of this bill is completely hypothetical; none of it is based in reality. Not one of the critics was able to point to any language in the bill that would in any way harm the Internet. Their accusations are simply not supported by any facts," Smith added.

It is a fact and a reality that bogus intellectual property claims are used to silence criticism and dissent in the United States today. It is a fact and a reality that bogus intellectual property claims are used for political censorship and the manipulation of elections in the United States today. SOPA will serve to pour gasoline on the fire. These are the facts. This is the reality.

Lamar Smith lives in a fantasy land.

To assuage copyright concerns, Google-owned YouTube has engineered a filtering system enabling rights holders to upload music and videos they own to a “fingerprinting” database.

Universal said Google’s private system doesn’t count as an official takedown notice under the DMCA and thus it was immune from legal liability.

“What they are basically arguing," said Ira Rothken, Megaupload’s attorney, "they can go ahead and suppress any speech they want without any consequences. That’s not a workable paradigm.”

I also learned from this article that Universal previously argued that people can file DMCA takedown notifications without incurring liability even if they know that the target is making a fair use of the material. That case isn't resolved yet (and has been slogging its way through the court system for many years) but fortunately it looks like Universal is going to be rebuked.

I'm going to start referring to these people as "The Copyright Power." I think its an apt analogy. They think they are above the law. They don't believe that due process applies to them. They have Congress so deep in their pockets that SOPA may pass in spite of universal condemnation. They are an anti-democratic force in this country. They should be seen as such.

Regarding Google, they are now in a very difficult position. As a Youtube user, I don't want Universal to have access to a takedown mechanism wherein they will not accept consequences for malicious misuse. They could kick Universal out. Perhaps they should, but the argument that Universal has made here applies to everyone who uses this system, so Google may have no choice but to shut the whole thing down, which probably has a lot of negative consequences for Google as well.

Its the kind of situation that you'd really want to go to Congress with - get them to clarify that the DMCA's rules apply to systems like this. But Congress is bought and sold by The Copyright Power, so you can't get a fair law out of them.

How does this end? How do we get The Copyright Power to acknowledge that they are also subject to the rule of law?

The Megaupload Case just got interesting

I did not realize that SOPA had an anti-circumvention provision.

Here, I analyze just one of the problematic provisions of SOPA: a new "anticircumvention" provision (different from the still-problematic anti-circumvention of section1201). SOPA's anticircumvention authorizes injunctions against the provision of tools to bypass the court-ordered blocking of domains. Although it is apparently aimed at MAFIAAfire, the Firefox add-on that offered redirection for seized domains in the wake of ICE seizures,[1] the provision as drafted sweeps much more broadly. Ordinary security and connectivity tools could fall within its scope. If enacted, it would weaken Internet security and reduce the robustness and resilience of Internet connections.

It will be illegal to build tools that allow people to evade the U.S. Government's internet censorship infrastructure.

Stopping SOPA's Anti-Circumvention

Mr Abrams,

In comments made this week at the Center for American Progress, MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd called comparisons between proposed American Intellectual Property laws and censorship of political speech by foreign repressive regimes "absolutely reprehensible" and an "outrageous and false comparison." He went on to reference an oped that you published in the Washington Post, in which you wrote "The proposition that efforts to enforce the Copyright Act on the Internet amount to some sort of censorship, let alone Chinese-level censorship, is not merely fanciful. It trivializes the pain inflicted by actual censorship that occurs in repressive states throughout the world."

In November of this year, a security researcher named Trevor Eckhart discovered that a computer program developed by a firm called CarrierIQ was collecting information from consumer's mobile telephones without their permission. CarrierIQ responded to Mr. Eckhart's criticism of their software by threatening to sue him. CarrierIQ sent Mr. Eckhart a letter in which they made a number of bogus Intellectual Property claims and demanded that he remove his criticism of their product from his website.

These events directly undermine your assertion that there are no legitimate concerns about the abuse of Intellectual Property laws for the purposes of stifling criticism and dissent in the United States. Unfortunately, Mr. Eckhart's experience is not usual. Bogus Intellectual Property claims are often made by large firms to quash criticism and other undesired but Constitutionally protected speech. These tactics are successful because individual citizens often don't have the financial resources to defend themselves against bogus legal threats.

This is why it is so important that Intellectual Property laws contain safeguards that prevent their abuse. The original draft of the Stop Online Piracy Act required payment processors and advertising networks to pull the plug on websites they serve within 5 days of receiving an allegation of wrong doing from an alleged copyright holder. Absolutely no independent third party was placed in the process to evaluate the legitimacy of the allegations. Such a process is ripe for abuse, and abuse of these processes does actually happen in practice.

Hollywood and its allies would be well served by pulling their heads out of the sand and acknowledging that serious, documentable First Amendment problems exist with these processes in the United States. If Hollywood truly cares about freedom of speech on the Internet, they should invest their vast policy analysis resources into developing proposals that contain real, functional safeguards and severe consequences for those who would abuse them.

Regards,
Tom Cross
Individual Citizen