Get it? Sopa... Soup... Español... Anyway, yall are clamoring for for this thread, so here it is. Focus: Discuss SOPA, and the effect that it will/won't/could have on the future of the internet as we know it. This is a sober thread, so let keep the political aspect of it to a reasonable, respectable, and minimal level.
Between this and the NDAA...I just don't know anymore. I absolutely refuse to vote for anyone in future elections that support either of these measures. I comment I saw on Reddit said it best (they were referring to Ron Paul as an alternate candidate):
OK, maybe this is a stupid question and I'm a technological newb, but every time I hear about this, one question pops into my mind: How will they know what you download? I mean, I heard the government has to get a warrant to wire-tap a phone, so are these people somehow having the right to monitor everything you do online? I know there are tracking cookies and all that kind of stuff, but I've seen people on places like Demonoid say, "I downloaded this and got a letter from my internet provider about it." How much monitoring of what we do online is allowed? Isn't there some sort of violation of privacy in regards to this?
The burden of proof with this new legislation is so small, they don't even need to have evidence. They merely need to claim that something you posted online is an infringement, and your ISP will be legally obligated to no longer allow that URL to resolve. If Warner Brothers claims that a video we linked to is an infringemenet? BOOM, no more IdiotBoard. Not only would the board be gone, the burden of proof would be on us (chater...) to explain how what we did was legal.
And even for sites that ditch u.s. Registrars and domain suffixes, but take donations it find their sites by donations, visa and mastercard (and other payment channels) will be ordered to cease payments. Lamar Smith took half a million dollars of mpaa and riaa money as campaign contributions over the last ten years, then wrote this abomination. I wonder if he.even needed the after politics job offer to sell out, or if that's really all it takes to buy a congressman these days?
<a class="postlink" href="http://lifehacker.com/5869665/desopa-for-firefox-bypasses-sopa-dns-blocking" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://lifehacker.com/5869665/desopa-fo ... s-blocking</a> I don't know how legit this is, but it's something. With a 9% approval rating, they thought they should censor the internet? Amazing.
So, this likely showcases nothing more than my ignorance of the American political system/climate, but is it not entirely possible/likely that Obama would just be all "Presidential veto, motherfuckers!"? I mean, if it has a 9% approval rating, that can't do anything but garner him more support, right?
What I'd like to know though is how the RIAA or whatever is able to see what people are downloading now. How are they able to track torrents or whatever now? How is that legal?
I would think they just download the illegal copies themselves, then when you download it from a torrent, and are downloading the file from several people, you may be getting it from the RIAA. I think you can see everyones IP that you are downloading from or uploading to.
I gotta be honest with you guys: I use downloading to see if I like something enough to buy it. We've bought lots of music because we heard one song, decided to check out the CD and if we liked it enough, bought it. I can go to the library and borrow CDs, rip them and burn them and not pay shit if they like. Same thing with movies: If we hear about something we want to check out, we check it out. If we like it enough to own it, we buy it. I've heard a lot of people who download stuff do that.
Obama has been a shocking disappointment on all fronts, and is unlikely to spend the little political capital he has fighting the congress on a bill that the majority of the American public doesn't understand. As far as pirating, a big part of it is something that most people don't discuss, namely that it offers a better product than legitimate means, not just a better price. Right now I can go online, find any episode of any television show, or any movie, in a wide array of resolutions, download it and watch it, with just a few clicks. Can the studios offer me that as a paying customer? The closest they've come is Netflix streaming, and even that has limitations in terms of how and where you can use it, and huge limitations on the library. The closest I've seen a paid service come to replicating the product offered by pirating is STEAM's delivery of games. It's no coincidence that I've spent more money on STEAM games in the last year than I had on music, TV and movies combined in the last five. I haven't pirated a single game since STEAM made the purchase and delivery of games as easier or easier than pirating them. It also helps that they've been at the forefront of experimenting with pricing schemes and really driving toward the true market price of the content (Gabe Newell actually had an interesting piece about it), compared with music and movies which has been gouging customers for years and continues to do so.
That's not actually what SOPA relates too, but the way torrent swarms and trackers.work, swarm participants can see network information like ip addresses of other participants. Unavoidable limitation of the tech. You can limit impact with well secured private trackers and peer filter products like pert block / pert guardian help.
We need the President to do this: Spoiler In all seriousness I know this will fuck the internet in half, but I honestly don't believe there is anything that I can say or do that will stop it.
This shit is hilarious to me. This is like saying shutting down Napster in the early 90's stopped music piracy. What happened? Different services and methods came about (bittorrent) and old ones came back. That's all that would happen here. A new encrypted, untraceable service will emerge and everyone will move to that. Besides, things like this already exist: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/desopa/
The new untraceable service is already here. Usenet binary newsgroups. You do have to pay a small subscription fee for them but its not p2p tech. You aren't uploading the file for others (usually the main argument by rights holders in these cases as downloading the actual file isn't as big an issue as making that same file available for millions of others to download... which is what leads to ridiculous damages awards). Your IP isn't visible by everyone else in the swarm. Im sure once they are done demonizing bittorrent they will move onto this, but for now have at it.
You either don't understand the proposed legislation, economics, or technology. Bit coins are the emergent technology that might.preserve an internet as we know it, but that will require a massive.and unlikely cultural shift.