This is a worthwhile page to look at: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/money" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/money</a> Take a look at all the supporters. From a congress looking at which is best for revenue, compare the 'For' vs 'Against'. On the for you've got people like: Big pharma Nike Every media company imaginable Nintendo 3M Philip Morris NBA/NFL Dow Walmart Xerox Ford J&J On the against you've got: Every person that has ever pirated something and heard of this bill Google Facebook Microsoft Yahoo eBay Bloomberg (surprisingly) CEO/Founders of startups and VCs I can see how as a dumb congressman I would think this would be a good idea. You've got some radical techies (4chan, torrentfreak, internet geeks) making noise while the rest of corporate america gives it a big fat thumbs up with a pay check to back it up. I wish we could just boycott movies and music, and go to only independent until they realize they are touchable. That whole media industry needs to choke on a turd-dick taco.
I've admittedly been lazy in keeping up with this sort of thing. With regards to usenet, isn't that sort of like Fight Club? You aren't supposed to talk about it? I do understand this. My point is that some smart person will come up with a new way to pirate shit they haven't paid for in a long time.
This is pretty interesting http://www.perthnow.com.au/lifestyl...rigins-wolverine/story-fn7bsj10-1226227353107 Not so much the guy going to jail for pirating xmen but the bit at the bottom. While the site doesnt factor in Dynamic IP's my guess is a lot of the named organizations are probably utilizing static IP's anyway. This should really be a wake-up call for these guys... if your own staff are stealing your content there's a real issue with your distribution methods.
... Yeah, but who gives a fuck? SOPA isn't going to break the internet because it will impact pirates. SOPA will break the internet because there won't be any way to run a legitimate small business producing content on the web any more. Unless you can afford dedicated lawyers - any kind of endeavour that involves placing content on the internet (IE running a forum like TheIdiotBoard.com ) can be taken offline any time someone alleges, without proof, that you've breached their copywrite. With no safe harbour provisions and no onus of proof on the accuser. It will effect everyone using US domain suffixes (.com, .org, .net, etc). Worse still, is that even if you have moved to .co.uk or something to avoid the US registrars, US financial groups like Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and etc will be unable to pay you once a SOPA order has gone through. So if you try and make money from donations, membership, selling things, advertising or even amazon referrals, and someone files a SOPA claim against you? No money for you. Even though there's no proof that you actually breached copywrite. And Big copywrite holders have already proven time and time again, that they're lying cocksuckers who make false claims. False DMCA takedowns are common place and unbelievable. UMG's recent takedown of Mega's promo video was blatantly unwarranted and bullshit. They aren't even claiming that they owned the content in court - they're claiming that even though they had no rights over anything in the video - because YouTube gave them tools to pull down infringing material - they can use it to take down anything they want and they're no liable. And the way it reads from the extracts of the agreements that have been published - they're right. SOPA isn't targeting users - it's targeting things like The Pirate Bay and MusicMP3.ru - to cut off their finances even though they're otherwise completely exempt from US law. But the way it's written - it will fuck over Americans, and completely legit sites just as much.
So basically if this passes someone will be able to troll the entire government by submitting SOPA's against government sites?
Pretty much. But the government has enough lawyers to cope. Youtube might survive for a while until Google decide the legal costs aren't worth the revenue. But anyone who can't afford dedicated lawyers will be priced out of the intarwebs.
We're not immune to this sort of thing on our side of the Pacific. There's currently a case before the High Court of Australia (absolute top of the heap) when copyright holders are suing ISPs for transmitting pirated material through their users. Or, in other words, the ISPs are getting sued for what their subscribers are downloading. The case has been heard earlier this month and judgment is currently reserved - http://www.hcourt.gov.au/cases/case-s288/2011
The last time I checked, albeit this was several years ago, while your physical computer may well be protected by privacy laws, your online presence, including e-mail was not. In fact, last time I checked, all e-mails are screened by software on all providers (who have 'voluntarily' installed the software on servers) for certain key words, and the data compiled. I am honestly aghast that people in America scream about rights, yet have absolutely no clue just how non-private our lives have become.
If you don't like it, there is an easy way to avoid it. You have to get all your friends to use it as well, though (which, I guess, is the hard part). On-topic: They honestly think that they can stop piracy with this? Ain't gonna happen. The pirates will just move onto something else. The people who WILL be impacted by it are legitimate businesses. And Congress doesn't seem to have a problem with this. I find it hilarious that the people who are sponsoring this bill probably represent themselves as fighters for entrepreneurship and technological innovation. Pathetic.
No. They don't think they can stop piracy with this. And while, yes, they do represent themselves as fighters for blah blah blah, they know full well that what they are fighting for is control over the content they want to charge you money to access. It's not complicated. There are areas of entertainment that entertainment companies are currently unable to charge you an admission fee for. This is upsetting to them, and they wish to change it.
Just a question for the tech- and SOPA-savvies out there: Could this whole mess not simply be avoided by moving? I.e. PayPal moving to another country and/or foreign reliable payment services springing up? What does it take to obtain a foreign domain? Do you need to physically move your HQ or can you just up and register somewhere else? Wouldn't this bill just really put another chink in the US economy? Sorry for my ignorance on the topic, I just find it hard to believe that a government could attack something as global as the internet with a strictly local bill.
Paypal, Visa and Mastercard would need to move all their assets, opperations and personel off shore to avoid the law. Completely non viable. You could register your domain off shore - but it couldn't be a .com/.org/.net address
Is it completely nonviable, though? They just have to do some simple math and figure out which method costs them more money: Moving to Canada or some other country (although, lets face it, Canada is most likely where they'd move) or losing money due to all the accounts that will have to close or that can't be used anymore. It sounds like PayPal would lose a lot of money if this bill passed, so up and moving isn't necessarily non-viable if it will cost them less, in the long run, than SOPA will. Don't get me wrong, it wouldn't be cheap, as they'd have to basically fire all their American employees that were unwilling/unable to relocate, find a new HQ someplace, and move everything there, but if that costs them less than staying in America, they'll do it. Or they'll close completely, which isn't out of the question. That said, in the process of moving, they'd probably end up firing a good number of people. In fact, it sounds as of this bill will end up costing a lot of jobs in the tech industry, which is kind of the exact opposite of what this country needs right now.
This is the biggest problem to me. You know who votes a lot? Old people. Who are the least likely people to understand the internet, or be reflexively scared of ebil piwates? I think you see where I'm headed. This bill is internet censorship, point blank. The potential for abuse is... well, I don't have a good analogy, but it's kind of like the Middle Ages approach to law enforcement: you have money, you tell the guards that someone's a bad guy, they get put in the stocks or have their arms cut off or whatever. This. Ultimately, what might happen is that any legitimate businesses will have one set of operations for the rest of the world and another, restricted set just for the US. Just like Google has to filter their search results for China. I can't tell you how this would fuck the US tech industry, but I can imagine. Didn't want that job-producing economic sector anyway... As for piracy: private trackers and encrypted torrents. They're not very secure but they're better than nothing. Or just go Usenet/IRC & XDCC/direct downloads (megaupload etc). Everything but the latter is Greek to me.
Just to get a quick sensus here. How many of you think there's a legitimate danger that this bill will pass?
I do. NDAA passed despite the outcry against it. This has more outspoken and richer opponents than NDAA, but NDAA won by a huge majority in the Senate and a fair majority in the House. I can easily imagine the opponents of this bill being able to turn some congressmen, but not enough to kill this bill.
I think there's almost no way this bill DOESN'T pass. But go ahead and keep making fun of OWS and anyone else trying to make the public more aware of who's actually controlling your government, y'all. I'm sure it will be fine.
Yeah. You'll never get the entire executive staff of those businesses to offshore or cash out. Even a majority, or just enough influence at a high enough level seems just as unlikely. Too many people with too much influence who wont want to move their kids and their lives off shore. Too hard a sell at too high a level. Especially when the ones who don't want to move have nationalism / complying with the law on their side and can threaten to leak memos showing anti american sentiment to the press if they're forced out and etc. Political clusterfuck. Anything's possible I guess, but I can't see it happening.
This bill as just as insane as NDAA, which was passed and signed by that fuckstick Obama (and I voted for his ass). Obama: "I regrettably sign this with great reservations." Uh.. then why the fuck did you sign it? No one has a gun to your head. Obama could have sent NDAA back to Congress for further debate and a greater consensus. The thing is: His statement was just for show. Obama WANTED NDAA to pass. You know, the law that states that any US citizen can be held indefinitely without charge, for suspicion of terrorism, but again, WITHOUT CHARGE. That means the United States can throw any of you bozos in the US in jail for life if it deems it beneficial for it to do so. Of course that probably won't happen to the average guy, but it could. And that's the scary part. It was not remotely constitutional and it passed. If anything, NDAA was an even bigger shit on our Constitution - perhaps one of the biggest shits on our Constitution in the past few decades -- than anything, far surpassing the stupidity of SOPA --- and it passed the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate with flying colors, signed gladly by Obama. Wait.... in the past 4 years we couldn't get fucking anything done, agree on any bill at all, but the one bill that is jetisoned through both parties and chambers with unanimous agreement is fucking NDAA? This Congress is bought and paid for. Anyway since that was passed and far worse than SOPA, I wouldn't be surprised if SOPA passed either. And SOPA basically means the internet as an anonymous and open forum will be greatly altered at its core as we know it. It's not even about piracy - it'll screw over legitimate websites. The idiot board can be shut down because Crazy Wolf's avatar contains copyrighted material from Starcraft. Okay I'm not sure if copyrighted, but most things are, and maybe with this crazy law you don't even need to be the original copyright holder in order to even forge a complaint to the ISP and US Government. Virtually everything has a fucking copyright on it. Even Rick Perry's advertisement and the RIAA (crappy organization that brings on lawsuit against pirates/ music industry police) have been found to have unauthorized copyrighted material. What's basically going to happen is that websites are either going to have to strip their content to bare bones stuff and police users/ content like it's Nazi Germany, or otherwise the government and Big Industry is basically going to shut down any 'little guy' or opinion website or rebel news source or small business by inundating them with endless suits and complaints to the ISP to shut down their websites. It's terrible, everyone in Congress is a cheap whore, it'll pass with most Americans not knowing what the fuck is going on as usual, and the people will eat shit quietly yet again.