Anti-piracy laws will smash internet, US constitution - legal eagles Legal experts are warning that the proposed PROTECT IP and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation, currently working their way through Congress, will damage the world's DNS system, cripple attempts to get better online security and violate free speech rights in the US constitution. In an essay published in the Stanford …
We hear a lot about piracy, how terrible it is, but I've yet to see a reliable statement of economic impact showing how a media company's been hurt through it. Sure, it will complain that "such and such's sales have been weak due to piracy" but everyone know the real reason is that whatever they're selling sucks.
This is more about control over the net. The media conglomerates want to own it. Its a valuable resource that's owned by the public and these day's that sort of thing is regarded as obscene. Media consolidation also has some very nasty social side effects -- if the media companies can control information flow then they can control thought.
Look at Canada. Four major media conglomerates, Rogers, Bell, Telus and Shaw, control almost all our internet, telephones both wired and cell, own most of the tv networks and the specialty channels and even many of the newspaper chains. And one of the corporate sector, Quebecor, is launching major attacks on our only alternative media, the gov't funded CBC.
Look at our current federal gov't and you can see the result of this corporate control.
Hark back to the early 1980s when Telstra auto-censored words which with a few selected letters deleted (primitive steganography?) revealed their hidden "naughty" meanings .........
SH(ellgr)IT
F(iretr)UCK
C(o)UNT(ry)
(s)T(op)WAT(ch)
SP(el)UNK
W(atert)ANK
C(a)L(am)IT(y)
and of course the obvious ARSE(nal), (Hitch)COCK, DICK(ens), etc.
Those were the days of REAL censorship!
SOPA is for pissants!
That's when Virgin Media in the UK censored all three of Arsenal, Hitchcock and Dickens (and also "canals").
I also recall a couple of years ago one very annoyed Guild Wars player complaining he couldn't name his character "Scunthorpe United", and another protesting he couldn't name *his* toon after the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb.
It was the /etc/hosts file (unix) and HOSTS.TXT (vms)
As it is in unix you can put in you own human readable entries into
/etc/hosts that suplement DNS.
So what will happen, I guess, is if sites are blocked people will make their
own entries to thier local file.
That will fragment the internet. Good thing too. Less easy to control, when its fragmented.
SOPA will shoot its self in the foot.
I would've thought the screams of first amendment violations would stop this thing dead in its tracks. The fact it hasn't are chilling...
But, like the rest of the comments... America, fuck yea!
It's the death cry of an empire, entropy in action - 'so long, and thanks for all the fish. (copyright D. Adams)'
"Even the legislators themselves are expressing concern at the lack of technical expertise they can access during House Judiciary Committee hearings on the bills and the speed with which they are being asked to act."
Never stopped them before - they usually pass laws without any burden of knowledge or technical insight.
It even goes so far as them not having a clue big enough to even ask the right people to help them - like when they wanted to get expert opinion on climate change and asked an author of science fiction to tell them, rather than the academies of science.
Right after they pass this, US Patent holders will argue that you can't see a web site because one product outside the US legally uses similar capacity to their patent.
How far they can take it is as far as politicians here will let them. Since money talks and Bullsh*t walks, I assume it is just going to happen that way.
I don't mind a lock-out for reasons of national security, which is a lot to choke on if you really believe in free speech, but this stuff is no where near it.
(Lock-out - Ref: No publication of recent research on how avian flue can be genetically modified)
They should have to take it to the courts.
Having read quite a lot about this it seems that the bill has provisions written into it that outlaw any attempt to access the effected website via any means. So promoting or spreading tools like Tor or VPNs could potentially be illegal. Look at how hard the US government has gone after gambling websites. I have no doubt the Justice Department would go full pelt after copyright infringers (particularly when Hollywood commercial interests are involved).
As an American who is profoundly angry and worried about SOPA, I find the support and assisance of our friends across the pon - wait, what? Oh, then fuck you, too. I get that you didn't like Bush very much, and that his every policy was agreed with 100% by every american, and that we all carry guns and own huntin' dawgs. But hey, I have no love lost for Blair or Brown, and honestly Cameron's euro-baiting is getting on my nerves too.
So what do we get? Near-universal hatred and disdain, and an absurdly arrogant "You're so worthless we don't need you anyway". Right. Google, Microsoft (sorry, guys, every large company in .eu isn't going to instantly switch to a flavor of linux not headquartered in the US). Ford, GE, Lockheed, Boeing, Intel, AMD? Hey, how about those useless little chipmakers, anyway? Ehh, just use CyrixInstead!
At any rate, it'll never happen. When money is at stake, greed finds a way.
The self-inflicted euro zone debt crisis is a vastly, vastly greater threat. Unfortunately, it seems that the euro zone is too busy bickering over etiquette to bother doing what everyone knows must be done.
And, of course, Britain, doing its best to use utter worldwide armageddon as a tool to pander to Daily Mail readers.
We've all got our problems, guys. And trust me, if your "makes 2008 look like a pinprick" debt contagion starts knocking at our door, I'll take an opportunity to sever all ties if I can get it.
that your own statement «[w]hen money is at stake, greed finds a way», now applies to such a degree to US political institutions (which, as is the case elsewhere as well, never have been squeaky clean) that the buying and selling resemble that described by Frederik Pohl and C M Kornbluth in their novel from 1953, «The Space Merchants» (capped by the US Supreme Court's decision last year in the Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission case, which allowed corporations to contribute unlimited sums of money to politicians' campaigns, in the name of «free speech»). The criticism of the United States on this thread which you decry is not of the noble myths you were taught in elementary school, but of the country and its political, economic - and not least, military - leadership as it manifests itself today. I fear you will have to get used to it - as the Empire declines, it is taking more or more desperate measure both at home and abroad, and despite its control of the corporate media, people around the world are beginning to wake up to the true nature of the beast....
Henri
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
