SOPA - Stop Online Piracy Act

Maybe these guys are gonna start uploading child porn to piratebay and sites like that, then say stuff like "oh thse sites provide an easy way for pedophiles to share child pornography"

Who the fuck knows what they are capable of.

  On 1/22/2012 at 5:45 AM, chenGOD said:

Smetty - while I'm sure some interesting amendments are going to be takced on to HR1981, I'm curious how they're going to equate protection of "intellectual property" with "protecting the children".

Anyways - maybe you could ask your lawyer friend to bring this to people's attention before the bill gets voted on?

Unrelated pork gets added to laws all the fucking time, especially since the post-Depression years. If you look at your state legislatures, you would be amazed at how much of your money doesn't go towards "roads", but rather a bridge connecting to business districts well outside of the traditional realm of civil infrastructure...lots of other examples too.

Yeah but a bridge is somewhat tangentially related to roads.

IP and CP not really related - unless the MPAA is gonna start getting into CP?

its as easy as making the connection that legal restrictions on what can be presented on the internet are necessary to protect children from undue harassment. It sets precedent for more increasingly batshit laws to pass under its umbrella. Remember the Parental Advisory debacle?

maybe I should clarify about the bridge issue; it was a real one in my community. Basically it amounted to a bridge strictly for commercial use i.e. only two major businesses in my area were using it, it wasn't on a public road basically. Yet they almost had taxpayers pay for the construction of the bridge. Luckily someone was able to point out county law which forbids taxpayer money to be used for strictly commercial construction.

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h112-1981

Pay close attention to SEC. 4.

  On 1/22/2012 at 6:32 AM, Smettingham Rutherford IV said:

its as easy as making the connection that legal restrictions on what can be presented on the internet are necessary to protect children from undue harassment. It sets precedent for more increasingly batshit laws to pass under its umbrella. Remember the Parental Advisory debacle?

 

 

 

maybe I should clarify about the bridge issue; it was a real one in my community. Basically it amounted to a bridge strictly for commercial use i.e. only two major businesses in my area were using it, it wasn't on a public road basically. Yet they almost had taxpayers pay for the construction of the bridge. Luckily someone was able to point out county law which forbids taxpayer money to be used for strictly commercial construction.

Yeah well, it was still a bridge, which is accessed by roads - and it seems like that amendment got overturned.

"legal restrictions on what can be presented on the internet are necessary to protect children from undue harassment."

Too broad - and that refers to content, not "intellectual property".

But I'm not a legal scholar. Again though, if your lawyer friend is worried, tell him to use that goddamned freedom of speech and raise some havoc to make sure those provisions don't get amended onto HR1981. Once his concerns have been voiced on the net, (tell him to post it on reddit/digg/4chan....or actually tell him to get someone else to post it on 4chan lol) it's out in the public eye. Ask him to e-mail Issa, or better yet someone he knows who lives in Issa's constituency.

Active participation is required.

Apparently, there was a bill similar to SOPA introduced a few days ago called the OPEN act.

  On 1/22/2012 at 7:47 AM, HoA said:

Apparently, there was a bill similar to SOPA introduced a few days ago called the OPEN act.

There is also still ACTA https://www.eff.org/issues/acta

  Quote

 

 

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

 

 

What is ACTA?

 

In October 2007, the United States, the European Community, Switzerland, and Japan simultaneously announced that they would negotiate a new intellectual property enforcement treaty the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA. Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Canada have joined the negotiations. Although the proposed treaty’s title might suggest that the agreement deals only with counterfeit physical goods (such as medicines) what little information has been made available publicly by negotiating governments about the content of the treaty makes it clear that it will have a far broader scope and in particular will deal with new tools targeting “Internet distribution and information technology”.

In recent years major U.S. and EU copyright industry rightsholder groups have sought stronger powers to enforce their intellectual property rights across the world to preserve their business models. These efforts have been underway in a number of international fora including at the World Trade Organization the World Customs Organization at the G8 summit at the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Advisory Committee on Enforcement and at the Intellectual Property Experts’ Group at the Asia Pacific Economic Coalition. Since the conclusion of the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Issues of Intellectual Property in 1994 (TRIPS) most new intellectual property enforcement powers have been created outside of the traditional multilateral venues through bilateral and regional free trade agreements entered into by the United States and the European Community with their respective key trading partners. ACTA is the new frontline in the global IP enforcement agenda.

To date, disturbingly little information has been released about the actual content of the agreement. However despite that it is clearly on a fast track, treaty proponents wanted it tabled at the G8 summit in July and completed by the end of 2008.

Why You Should Care About It

 

ACTA has several features that raise significant potential concerns for consumers’ privacy and civil liberties for innovation and the free flow of information on the Internet legitimate commerce and for developing countries’ ability to choose policy options that best suit their domestic priorities and level of economic development.

ACTA is being negotiated by a select group of industrialized countries outside of existing international multilateral venues for creating new IP norms such as the World Intellectual Property Organization and (since TRIPs) the World Trade Organization. Both civil society and developing countries are intentionally being excluded from these negotiations. While the existing international fora provide (at least to some extent) room for a range of views to be heard and addressed no such checks and balances will influence the outcome of the ACTA negotiations.

The Fact Sheet published by the USTR together with the USTR's 2008 "Special 301" report make it clear that the goal is to create a new standard of intellectual property enforcement above the current internationally-agreed standards in the TRIPs Agreement and increased international cooperation including sharing of information between signatory countries’ law enforcement agencies. The last 10 bilateral free trade agreements entered into by the United States have required trading partners to adopt intellectual property enforcement obligations that are above those in TRIPs. Even though developing countries are not party to the ACTA negotiations it is likely that accession to and implementation of ACTA by developing countries will be a condition imposed in future free trade agreements and the subject of evaluation in content industry submissions to the annual Section 301 process and USTR report.

While little information has been made available by the governments negotiating ACTA a document recently leaked to the public entitled "Discussion Paper on a Possible Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement" from an unknown source gives an indication of what content industry rightsholder groups appear to be asking for – including new legal regimes to "encourage ISPs to cooperate with right holders in the removal of infringing material" criminal measures and increased border search powers. The Discussion Paper leaves open how Internet Service Providers should be encouraged to identify and remove allegedly infringing material from the Internet. However the same industry rightsholder groups that support the creation of ACTA have also called for mandatory network-level filtering by Internet Service Providers and for Internet Service Providers to terminate citizens' Internet connection on repeat allegation of copyright infringement (the "Three Strikes" /Graduated Response) so there is reason to believe that ACTA will seek to increase intermediary liability and require these things of Internet Service Providers. While mandating copyright filtering by ISPs will not be technologically effective because it can be defeated by use of encryption efforts to introduce network level filtering will likely involve deep packet inspection of citizens' Internet communications. This raises considerable concerns for citizens' civil liberties and privacy rights and the future of Internet innovation.

What You Can Do

 

Despite the potentially significant harmful impact on consumers and Internet innovation and the expedited timeframe in which the treaty is being negotiated the citizens that stand to be directly affected by the treaty provisions have been given almost no information about its real contents and very little opportunity to express their views on it.

But there is still time to do something to change that! If you live in the US tell your Senators to demand more transparency in ACTA!

I heard that the TSA has the right to search your laptop/iPod/computer/whatever for pirated content and that ACTA will further strengthen their power to do so. It's disgusting. What gives them the right to search my things so that they can protect fucking copyright law? What's the point of making a normal, nonviolent, functional person a criminal?

Oh yeah, money money money. It makes me want to barf.

  On 1/23/2012 at 10:01 PM, Hoodie said:

I heard that the TSA has the right to search your laptop/iPod/computer/whatever for pirated content and that ACTA will further strengthen their power to do so. It's disgusting. What gives them the right to search my things so that they can protect fucking copyright law? What's the point of making a normal, nonviolent, functional person a criminal?

 

Oh yeah, money money money. It makes me want to barf.

Just out of curiosity, how would an entity like TSA prove that your device contained pirated material?

  On 1/23/2012 at 10:17 PM, patternoverlap said:

  On 1/23/2012 at 10:01 PM, Hoodie said:

I heard that the TSA has the right to search your laptop/iPod/computer/whatever for pirated content and that ACTA will further strengthen their power to do so. It's disgusting. What gives them the right to search my things so that they can protect fucking copyright law? What's the point of making a normal, nonviolent, functional person a criminal?

 

Oh yeah, money money money. It makes me want to barf.

 

Just out of curiosity, how would an entity like TSA prove that your device contained pirated material?

IP logs, subpoenas to ISP's, etc. if they don't have the "hard" evidence of the mp3, they still have evidence that your computer was behind the transaction.

  On 1/23/2012 at 10:17 PM, patternoverlap said:

  On 1/23/2012 at 10:01 PM, Hoodie said:

I heard that the TSA has the right to search your laptop/iPod/computer/whatever for pirated content and that ACTA will further strengthen their power to do so. It's disgusting. What gives them the right to search my things so that they can protect fucking copyright law? What's the point of making a normal, nonviolent, functional person a criminal?

 

Oh yeah, money money money. It makes me want to barf.

 

Just out of curiosity, how would an entity like TSA prove that your device contained pirated material?

I was wrong. It's US Customs that can search your computer and electronic devices, which is definitely another story compared to the TSA (US Customs doesn't have to follow the 4th Amendment).

here's a great infographic about sopa and pipa:

jesus...thanks for the post..that gives me some ideas for a discussion!

oh cool, so that SOPA chart basically shows us what happened to Wikileaks can happen to your website if you host copyrighted content, the entire corporate and government would work in concert to block your website

im about ready to quit the internet. i can hire people to fetch out the data im looking for. no reason for me to expose my thoughts to skynet. join me

no

enjoy surveillance

i usually like those things assgasm posted but this has a few obvious issues.

post-censorship is obviously ineffective considering how fast things move in the internet, besides bringing the hippie bible into this is also a bit silly, it can't really adress current-gen trends properly.

some conclusions in the fallout section are plain wrong, making it difficult to access illegal content will obviously affect the amount of infringement statistically, you gotta see people having trouble with un-raring things on pirate bay comments. putting the threshold higher will definelty filter some pirates, making google filter stuff more thouroughly will obviously affect the amount of infringement.

there's also a very apparent "medicinal marijuana" kind thing going on about this whole ordeal...and im glad for that !

what the fuck does that even mean? other than nothing

ET, I have a teddy bear. Would you like to snuggle with him?

yes.

yes i would.

so what does this ACTA mean?

Canada Bill C-11

http://www.webpronews.com/bill-c-11-sopas-canadian-hellspawn-2012-01

I thought you guys were the smart ones.