SOPA And Protect IP Act

[warr666]

i did a search and saw a thread over in p&n, but nothing here.

That's because P&N Is the proper discussion forum.

ATOT Moderator ElFEnix

SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act.

it is a proposed law to fight against online piracy but some people are saying there is too much power being granted to do it.

"the way this law is written, it means that the government may make email companies and internet service providers monitor links you send through email or on social networking sites. It also means that someone from the government or a private corporation can cause a whole site to be removed from Google results and block people from viewing it, as well as preventing online payments from being made to the person who owns the site. It is, essentially, a law that creates a government blacklist, a la the Great Firewall of China."

i'm going to look more into it by reading the actual documentation of the acts, but from what i read, these proposed laws are very bad.

so what does it mean for us? we spend significant amounts of time connected to the internet. it is part of our lives. these proposed laws will give certain corporate entities and heavy-handed government the legal power to fuck up our internet. the consequences, you know there will be more rampant intrusiveness and abuse. in this situation pertaining to the internet, there should also be very limited censorship.

these laws should not be passed as they are.

https://donate.mozilla.org/page/s/SOPA?source=snippet
https://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/11/15/mozilla/

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http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticl...e_Piracy_Act_Puts_Future_of_Internet_at_Stake

The Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261, introduced Oct. 26, has generated a firestorm of controversy, with critics assailing it for its chilling effect on the web and the internet... The...purpose of the bill is to combat the activities of alleged "rogue websites" based outside the U.S., which are engaged in widespread copyright infringement of entertainment content and the sale of counterfeit goods like prescription drugs.


Like many bills the language of the proposed law itself may seem relatively innocuous and reasonable, but the powers it grants to enforcement agencies and the concern that those agencies will abuse those powers fuel most of the criticism.


A companion bill, the "Preventing Real Online Threats of Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011" Senate Bill 968, which was introduced earlier this year, generated a similar level of concern and criticism. Among other critics of the PROTECT act were more than 100 law professors nationwide, who sent a letter to the Senate objecting to the overbreadth and constitutional issues the bill presents. In the spirit of full disclosure, I was one of the signatories to that letter.


So what's all the fuss about? SOPA, which is sponsored by U.S. Reps. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, John Conyers, D-Mich., Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and Howard Berman, D-Calif., and others, contains four key provisions which are generating the most concern.


Overbreadth. SOPA allows penalties to be imposed against websites that have any infringing content, regardless of its source (i.e., posted by a third party, such as an item on eBay), forcing the takedown of such a site. Unlike the immunity offered to internet service providers under the current law -- the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- ISPs who host sites where third parties post infringing content will also be held liable -- a major departure from prior practice, and which, if enforced vigorously, might pose a threat to the operation of these ISPs, which are a key component of the internet.


A further overbreadth concern is that a claim that a site contains any infringing content (regardless of its amount relative to the rest of the site) can trigger severe and highly expensive penalties, and forms the basis of a right to obtain a court order blocking access to the entire site. Coupled with the use of the vague term "facilitates," as discussed in item three below, there appears to be a valid concern that this broad scope of liability will severely chill online activity at a time when this industry is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal and limited economic recovery.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/8...opa-bill-and-why-is-it-causing-such-a-ruckus/

It’s been a busy couple of days in the discussion of free speech in the United States, and if you’re a regular reader of tech blogs, chances are you’ve begun to hear about one of this week’s issues: the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. This bill, intended to help stem online piracy and backed by companies like Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner, has set off the alarms of many sites and companies on the internet because it essentially allows the government and private corporations to censor entire sites that they fear are illegally distributing copyrighted material. Many companies—including Google, Twitter, Facebook, AOL, Zynga, Mozilla, LinkedIn, and Ebay, which took out a full-page ad in the NYTimes with a letter to the congressmembers involved—and numerous sites and civil-liberty groups—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, Creative Commons, Wikimedia, and others—have spoken up against the act. Some sites that would likely be among the blocked, including Tumblr, are self-censoring in protest. A coalition of Internet civil liberty and IP groups declared Wednesday, November 16—the day that hearings began on the SOPA bill—American Censorship Day and are orchestrating a campaign to have people contact their representatives to speak against the bill. They developed this infographic that explains why they are worried about the bill (excerpted above).

The gist of the opponents’ argument is this: While the problem of online piracy is real, the way this law is written, it means that the government may make email companies and internet service providers monitor links you send through email or on social networking sites. It also means that someone from the government or a private corporation can cause a whole site to be removed from Google results and block people from viewing it, as well as preventing online payments from being made to the person who owns the site. It is, essentially, a law that creates a government blacklist, a la the Great Firewall of China.

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-this-scary-sopa-bill-everyone-is-talking-about-2011-11

The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes SOPA as the "blacklist bill" because it would "allow the U.S. government and private corporations to create a blacklist of censored websites, and cut many more off from their ad networks and payment providers."

That means the Attorney General would have the power to cut off select websites from search engines like Google. It could also cut off advertisers and payment processors like Visa from the sites. The Attorney General could essentially kill all of a site's traffic and revenue in a matter of days.
SOPA only allows targeted sites five days to submit an appeal. That doesn't leave much time for them to defend themselves before losing their site and their revenue altogether.