Thought for the day: "If SOPA does pass, we will have to depend on the judgement of well
informed, internet-savvy judges to not jump the gun.Those exist, right?" tweeted by Dan Shive on Dec 14, 2012, just before the first round of SOPA voting.
Ok. So, I posted this to my Facebook wall last night. Sparky then asked me what SOPA actually was, since she had looked it up but was still a bit confused. Thus, since I haven't posted in a couple of days(they can be summarised as Cold, Wet, And Boring: A Play in Two Acts) I thought I'd give an overview of
Let's start with what SOPA is. SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act, an bill currently before the United States House of Representatives. There is a competing bill before the Senate, the Protect IP Act. The problems with thte bills are largely similar, so we're going to stick with SOPA here.Ok. So, I posted this to my Facebook wall last night. Sparky then asked me what SOPA actually was, since she had looked it up but was still a bit confused. Thus, since I haven't posted in a couple of days(they can be summarised as Cold, Wet, And Boring: A Play in Two Acts) I thought I'd give an overview of
- What SOPA is
- The Protests(specifically the blackouts)
- And the latest news on SOPA's pass/fail status.
The idea behind SOPA is as follows:
- The Internet, as regards copyrighted materials, is a bit like an Old West boom town between Sheriffs: Law is an abstract concept, and the most responsible people are the ones running the brothel.
- People in general, and Americans in particular, should be able to buy and sell their works on the Internet without fear that they will be undercut by some pirate site.
Now, we can all agree that the intentions here are good. Very good. I'm sure Lucifer appreciates the paving stones for the Road to Hell.
See, the bill is catastrophically, unforgivably, horribly worded. The problems with SOPA are, in brief:
- The bill bans anything which might be used to block copyright enforcement. Remember all those proxy servers that helped preserve anonymity of posters during the Arab Spring uprisings? Illegal, under SOPA.
- The bill threatens user created content sites. Cloud services, Youtube, Flicker; they're all at risk, because some users might use them to disseminate copyrighted materials. But what about when those copyrighted materials belong to the user, not some outside company or person? Well...
- Fair Trials are right out the window with SOPA. If you hold a copyright, and you CLAIM that someone has uploaded your intellectual property, the act ASSUMES you to be telling the truth and allows the Dept. of Justice to have your site blocked. You can, of course, hire a lawyer and contest it, but if the website is your primary source of income, and it's now blocked, well... You Are Screwed.
- The damn thing won't actually stop pirates. The wording makes it clear that the writers of the bill have no idea how the technology they're regulating works; in the first place, they don't know the difference between an IP address and a DNS (Caveat: though it was one of the major flaws in the bill, the DNS blocking has been removed from the bill. There are, of course, plenty of others)
Reddit.com
Tucows.com
The entire Cheezburger Network Thus Saith Ceiling Cat: YOU CAN NO HAZ SOPA.
Destructoid.com
Hacktivist group, Anonymous
Red 5 Studios, developer of the Firefall MMO
Mojang.com and Popular MMO, Minecraft
NLB Creations
Webmaster community Admin Forums
Web design company, Skytemple.com
Gaming site Video Game Generation
Right Angle Recording
All sites in Major League Gaming’s network
GamingBus.com
Errata Security
XDA Developers
Gaming site, GOG.com
Hey It’s Free!
Harder Blogger Faster
Colossal Mind
Sonic Retro
BrentAnderson.info
Working It Out
e-cloudy.com
Seibertron.com
NewGrounds
Through the Eyes of a Pirate
Cynical Brit
Platform Nation
Digital Suicide
GOOD Evening
Rage Maker
FreakOutNation
TheLeakyWiki
Doxie Lovers Club
Twitpic – They won’t be going completely black, but will be posting censored versions of their site.
Age of Coins
A Softer World
This Is Why Im Broke
Cake Wrecks
Dance Top 40
Code Labs
MediaMyriad.com
Also, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter are all very publicly against SOPA, and will probably do something similar(see Twitpic above).
So, that's the basics of SOPA and why it's bad. You want more, go read around, there's plenty on it. Heck, go read the bill itself. If you want to get involved, remember that Blackout Day is Jan. 18, but the bill probably won't go to vote for some time afterwards. Plenty of time to complain to your congresspersons; I did, and got back responses, too (One wants to scrap it wholesale, the other wants to rewrite it).
In the meantime, good luck, God speed, and may the Schwartz be with you (while I'm still allowed to say that under copyright).
Bill.
While I don't question the intelligence of my lawmakers (a question we already know the answer to), I can't see SOPA passing in the end. Upsets too many teacarts =P And we all know Google could cripple most governments at the push of a button if worse comes to worst, especially our own given that more or less everything is on their serves somewhere. The entertainment industry has deep pockets, but not THAT deep.
ReplyDeleteOh. Okay then. That makes more sense...So, it's probably nothing to worry about, but we should help protest anyway just to be safe?
ReplyDeleteI think you may need to read the post again...
DeleteThink she meant the 'probably not going to pass' thing from your comment.
DeleteWith due respect to the people posting...
ReplyDeleteYou absolutely need to question the intelligence of the lawmakers. Every day. The lawmakers are given their jobs by the American public. And until they figure out how to bypass the American public and do internal hiring like any corporation, they need to answer to us. And lately they've been doing a piss-poor job of listening.
The entertainment industry certainly does have DEEP pockets. Deeper than anyone can possibly imagine. As a single reference, I offer as exhibit A, Paramount Pictures. They have almost violently crushed ANYONE that so much as cosplayed or posted online ANY Star Trek franchise. Nobody wants anything to do with Star Trek anymore, unless you are officially licensed by Paramount. Certainly not the disillusioned fanbase that put them there in the first place.
Most of Europe has some version of SOPA in place already. And it has already been enforced. I could make a reference to the type of politics they have, but then I'll detract from the subject.
It's nothing to worry about? That's what 1930s Europe said about Adolph Hitler and his Nazi party. My particular fear is that Congress will ignore the overwhelming outcry like they did with Obamacare, and pass SOPA anyway.
At this point, all we can do is watch and wait.
No one claimed it was nothing to worry about. And anything that gets the Internet to stop acting like dicks to each other has my full backing on general principle. But, in comparison to the revenue generated by online business, the entertainment industry is playing in a sandbox. Once lawmakers realize that, I don't think we'll have much to worry about; I claimed not to question the intelligence of my lawmakers with the implication that most of them are borderline retarded. But they do understand money =P
DeleteAs supreme overlord and moderator of this blog, I must remind all my readers to play nice, and remind you all, pre-emptively remind you not to invoke Godwin's Law(http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GodwinsLaw) under the Usenet formulation:
ReplyDelete"Any off-topic mention of Hitler or Nazis will cause the thread it is mentioned in to come to an irrelevant and off-topic end very soon; every thread on UseNet has a constantly-increasing probability to contain such a mention."
Granted, 1930s politics was perhaps not the best reference, but I'll stand by it. I'll no longer be posting.
Delete