This bill is making the rounds, with the goal of protecting intellectual property and patent rights. Naturally, it is getting strong opposition from the likes of Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Reddit, and many other companies with a strong internet presence. On the surface of it, I would say this looks like a horrible bill, especially this part:
I don’t like the idea of courts deciding what websites are copacetic at all. The whole thing seems misguided to me, but I will confess that I don’t know a whole lot about it. Anyone wish to convince me this bill is a good idea?
Traditional publishing companies don’t want to admit technology is changing the entertainment business. They keep trying to have the government step in and preserve their way of selling entertainment.
Do I support piracy? No. But the publishing companies are going to lose if they keep trying to insist that the only alternative to piracy is their own system where you pay for the package in order to get the content you want and the package costs ten times more than the content. Publishers need to develop a system that sells content not packages.
This is the witch hunt model of law enforcement: Punish based on mere accusation, and then maybe have a trial after the damage has been done. Even if you’re acquitted, or the case is never formally brought to trial, your business is still gone.
If it isn’t stopped, American business will be crippled: New businesses will no longer be able to challenge the existing ones in one of the most vibrant sectors of the economy, which will hand China and India a massive advantage.
And, as if this actually needed to be said, this will in no way stop piracy. The pirates already know how to circumvent everything this law proposes as a ‘remedy’ for their actions. The people who already know how the Internet works will be perturbed but not stymied.
That leads to my last point: This will further the divide in this country between the people who know how the Internet works and those who do not. If you are unaware of this divide, or doubt how important it is, you are on the wrong side of it. Those who know how computers and networks work are already living markedly better lives than those who don’t. This will turn a garden fence into a brick wall and further the divide within our culture.
My only hope is that the Internet represents a large enough sector of our society and our economy that its advocates can stop this.
I don’t know. I have a pretty good idea how the Internet works yet I still prefer to buy my music through iTunes rather than through some piracy web site. It’s easier and more reliable, and it doesn’t cost that much. Judging by its success a lot of people agree.
The key thing that Apple got right was that the way to fight piracy was not by laws, but by making a legal download site that was better than the pirate sites.
Also, the harsher and less concerned with actually innocence or guilt the law (and corporations, for that matter) become, the more it cedes the moral high ground to the pirates. More and more people will pirate without guilt, or even with a sense of virtue because “I sure don’t want my money going to those guys”; that’s certainly the pattern I’ve seen with music.
Where do people of this board see this heading anyway? Am I going to end up having to pay for proxy server access in the Cayman Islands just to access my favorite websites? Looking through my browser history, my most visited sites are SDMB, 4chan, Youtube, thePiratebay, and Reddit; all of which seem likely to be blocked with this legislation. Where do I go to protest this? If there’s a large rally planned, I have some vacation time at work I’d be willing to take, if it helped block this type of legislation.
How does this even help anything? The fact that content providers want to impose such draconian measures has pretty much sealed the deal for me. I’ll be damned if I spend one dime that ends up in their coffers.
We’ve already seen this to some extent; every time the penalties increase, copyright infringement goes deeper underground and gets more wary of things that might be single points of failure.
We’re not just being encouraged to break the law, we’re being systematically trained to do so.That should frighten lawmakers a lot more than anything the entertainment industry can do.
Here’s the thing, at most it will block DNS resolvers, not direct IP contact. Now, while it will cripple legitimate businesses on the “grey side” (i.e. Machinima content), torrent sites, watch movies online sites etc will DEFINITELY have fans get a page up with direct IP links to the sites.
Oh, but that will get taken down? There will be thousands of mirrors, all from completely different IP blocks, likely uploaded through 7 proxies, by completely different people. Sure, they can find a way to take these down eventually, but not before every pirate on the planet has the ips stores locally on their machine in a plaintext file. From there all it is is a matter of finding the right person (not too difficult on the internet) and asking them. Unless, of course, they propose sites monitor every single email and chat log “just in case”.
Not to mention this could practically kill youtube, viddler, etc. Currently the burden is on the user to not post content, under threat of account ban etc. Under this bill any SITE suspected to have a large amount of copyrighted content is suspect, this will cause the sites to crack down even more. Youtube is paranoid about things being reported already. All this will cause is them to monitor any uploaded video and kill anything remotely suspicious before anyone views it.
It also makes me very concerned for a large part of the internet centered around fan-created content. Machinima and Let’s Plays are sizeable parts of the internet, it would be a shame for a legitimate website and business like Machinima or Something Awful to face heavy penalties for things that have defined a large internet subculture.
Sure, a LOT of companies consider fan support great and call it free advertising, but for supportive company like Valve there are the ones that want iron control over their content.
I’m not arguing that the internet is always going to be such a wild west, tweens dancing to Lady Gaga, AMVs, and yes, even a large amount of machinima have been riding the danger zone for a long time, but this goes so far overboard it could potentially redefine the culture of the whole internet. Besides, what constitutes infringing? All the company has to do is claim they did, they get blocked, and by the time the court case is over the site is dead anyway. Hell, this could be used to blackball review sites a company isn’t fond of.
I guess they never learned about the lessons that we got from the prohibition era. In the fine recent documentary by Ken Burns one commentator made the point that he did not bother with alcohol as he does not like it too much, but if it was banned, you bet that he would look for it.
Another big problem I see with this is that they are trying to make the enforcers of this new law the people that oppose jerk moves like this and on the other side we have organizations that will (I know already by looking at past history) use the law to close and censor everything that they do not like; yeah, that will work wonderfully.
I’m worried about the power plays. Say for some reason Cox decides it’s better off with Fox’s favor instead of Disney’s, so they get rather… er… sluggish at censoring things that infringe on Disney’s copyrights, but any mere hint of a whiff of a Fox film being used improperly and it’s an instant block. This takes the net neutrality debate to a whole different level.
I also wonder how this will affect our internet security. Honestly, somebody could more or less cause worldwide panic and failure by taking down a couple top-level DNS servers. The more people we give access to alter these servers (especially for a reason like this), the more you’re opening yourself up to catastrophic failure in your future.
Jragon: I don’t think the infringers’ solutions would be as primitive as what you’re describing, which is essentially how the Internet worked before we has DNS (plain-text hosts files being mailed around and stored locally, which worked then because there were fewer than a dozen machines on the Internet total and very few were added or removed at any one time). I think it would be more sophisticated, because, frankly, the smart people want their porn and their legal-gray-area machinima and if getting that involves fucking Sony over, the number of fucks not given will dwarf the national debt.
And that’s something I’ve touched on indirectly twice so far: This will not only widen the divide between the ‘knows’ and the ‘know-nots’, this will further teach the ‘knows’ not only how to break laws, but that breaking laws is essential to living a reasonable life in the only culture that really celebrates their knowledge and talent.
(Side note: The current DNS system is close to broken for many people, because of things like this and other crap. If we go through with this, the rest of the world will replace the DNS system America has control over with something we can no longer influence. That would effectively split the Internet for most of the ‘know-nots’ and put America in an Internet ghetto relative to most of the rest of the world, by which I mean China and India.)
Well, I’m sure my fellow computer geeks can come up with something fancier (I’m not a network guy, more of an AI and theory of computing sort of guy), I was just saying that there exist solutions on the infringer’s side that are no more complex than Yahoo Messenger and a plaintext file.
I’m sure there’s voodoo they can do with site content obfuscation, tricky scripts, redirects, aliasing, whatever that will bypass the problem near completely.
Unfortunately, this will only preserve the most illegal of illegal sites. I doubt sites like ThatGuyWithTheGlasses (legitimate, mostly law abiding gray area sites) will be able to survive it. I think we’re basically looking at backing up 4chan, The Pirate Bay, and other “notorious” sites, while sites run by businesses that would prefer being legit to changing their method of access and risking litigation will be affected.
So yeah, you’re basically encouraging people to be worse than they are now.
I think my main worry is this. Right now, if you and a few of your friends dislike a youtube video, you can get it taken down very easily by have a few people flood it with bogus copyright claims. Youtube WILL panic and take it down, it’s not even a question. If they put it back up, you and your friends can do this over and over until the user gets banned.
We’re essentially looking at the same thing with corporations. A copyright claim here, and “suspicious” claim there and you’re looking at legitimate sites, legitimate sites that would probably easily comply with a cease and desist notice, being taken down until proven innocent because Miramax didn’t like the cut of their jib. Hell, it even gives them discretion to say “well, I don’t really like the way this guy represents my work, but THIS site gives me a favorable image.” Not that they CAN’T do that with cease and desist orders now, but they don’t have the whole damn web in the palm of their hands like they will with this act.
Nearly everyone who makes a living directly from the internet would have their livelihoods threatened by SOPA. With sites taken down merely for accusations, mistakes will be made and trolls will take down sites they don’t like by falsely accusing copyright information. So what if the block gets removed… eventually? You’re losing a lot of money in the downtime. This is especially bad for anyone who makes a living off Youtube or streaming video. Streaming video has become a blossoming business lately and it would die SOPA passed because there are very harsh penalties specifically for streaming video copyright infringement.
Also, if DMCA safe harbor provisions are removed by SOPA, then running a forum suddenly becomes a liability. Actually administrating any sort of user-content creation becomes a liability - you could get your site taken down or your advertisers pulled if you get a copyright infringement claim.
The thing that bothers me is that increasingly it seems like congress is on the wrong side of this. Remember that Lieberman’s Internet Kill Switch? And of course, ‘the internet is a series of tubes’. According to this article the senate version is only being held up by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon.
Another problem that others have noted, is that no trial is needed. Someone just has to make the accusation. What could possibly go wrong with circumventing due process?
The EU has officially come out against SOPA. This hinges directly on the fact the US controls the DNS root: ICANN, an American entity, controls what domain names resolve to with regards to the standard Internet protocols. So we can enforce our laws on foreign nationals:
Yeah, I’m gonna need you to abide by laws passed in a country where you have no legal representation or standing to bring suit. Your business is going to be hostage to what a foreign legal system thinks is fair play. Mmmm-kay? Greeeaaaat.
If you’re wondering what they could do, remember Helms-Burton and, more specifically, the reactions thereto:
I’m not saying this will be what the EU and the UK do in response to SOPA; I’m saying it’s precedent for the non-American members of the international community acting like sovereign powers as opposed to states without Congressmen.
So the response to Helms-Burton is the paradigm for an extreme (but possible) scenario. More likely, the Internet services legal to access in America will simply be ghettoized. I’m not talking about Compton, I’m talking about Medieval Europe, when Jews were legally confined to one part of the city. Except in this case, it won’t be the laws on the outside keeping us in, it will be the laws on the inside, and the only meaningful walls will be the ones of ignorance.
In the short term, the content providers will continue to have things their way. They’re a focused special interest which means they can target legislators to enact the laws they want.
But in the long run, a refusal to change will kill them. The alternatives are out there and too many people know it for the publishers to hope it’ll stay secret. The public will increasingly see the divide between the favoritism being shown the content providers and the alternatives that are being legally prohibited.
At some point, some politician will decide it’s an easy issue to grab onto. He’ll make a campaign issue out of denouncing corporate protectionism and technological development moving overseas and helping out the little guy and a lot of voters will be saying “hell, yes.” Other politicians will jump on the bandwagon and the result will be a bill that’ll legalize all kinds of alternative content provider systems - basically putting the burden of proof back on to the publishers and making it so tough to prosecute a pirate that it’ll virtually legalize piracy.
Yes, it’ll go too far in the other direction and cause some genuine damage to legitimate copyright holders. But things will then start being dialed back and we’ll hopefully end up with a reasonable system that directs money to content creators through competing low-cost distribution channels.
I just sent a letter to my Congresscritter about this (not that I’m sure Giffords will be present for the vote), pretty much the first issue I’ve EVER contacted my representative about. I’m considering organizing a protest (in Southern Arizona), but I’m hesitant since I’m pretty sure any protest on this bill will more or less get ignored and lumped in with OWS. Unless Anonymous gets involved, I guess, but if Anonymous gets involved I fear that people will use that as an excuse to pass the bill (because they’re pirates and hackers and trying to confuse you to spread their vast pirate empire… or whatever).
Wow. The wild days of the 'net are almost over, huh?
Man, remember when you could go on YouTube and see all these covers and mash-ups and amateur music videos? Well, it’s over now, the next generation will have to go back to samizdat and zines for pop culture appropriation.
I’m actually curious to see what a post-internet America will look like.