Stop Online Piracy Act

There’s a disturbing bill making the rounds on Capitol Hill right now called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. It’s purportedly designed to thwart music and movie piracy by empowering copyright holders to isolate and shut down websites or online services found with infringing content. SOPA is the House version of the bill, introduced by Representative Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), and there’s another in the Senate called the Protect IP Act, introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). Hearings on SOPA began Wednesday, and the chances it’ll pass are excellent, because it’s backed by powerful business lobbies and has bipartisan majority support in both the House and Senate. If it does pass, the only thing that could shut it down would be a veto by President Obama.

In short, SOPA, if passed, would allow the U.S. government to blacklist any website found to have infringing material, inhibiting access to said sites using DNS filtering techniques similar to those employed by China and Iran. What’s “infringing material”? Anything deemed in violation of copyright, say a few posts by users in a web forum or on a social network—even links sent in email. What’s more, a website or Internet communication medium’s owners would be held liable for any infringing content, and the government would be empowered to cut off revenue to those sites’ owners and force search engines to block them, too.

lil_tuffy said:
EFF Call to Action

...

The current bills -- SOPA explicitly and PIPA implicitly -- also threaten engineers who build Internet systems or offer services that are not readily and automatically compliant with censorship actions by the U.S. government. When we designed the Internet the first time, our priorities were reliability, robustness and minimizing central points of failure or control. We are alarmed that Congress is so close to mandating censorship-compliance as a design requirement for new Internet innovations. This can only damage the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read and publish.

The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open Internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a neutral bastion of free expression. If the US begins to use its central position in the network for censorship that advances its political and economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.

Signed,

Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP, one of the "fathers of the Internet", signing as private citizen
Paul Vixie, author of BIND, the most widely-used DNS server software, and President of the Internet Systems Consortium

SOPA online piracy bill markup postponed

The House Judiciary Committee confirmed Tuesday that it will delay continuing debate on the Stop Online Piracy Act until after Congress returns from its winter recess.

Committee spokeswoman Kim Smith said in an e-mailed statement that the hearing is expected to be scheduled for “early next year.”

After two days of heated debate last week, the committee adjourned its markup session on the measure without a vote. The debate over SOPA has been framed as a fight between old media and new media. Organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America have been backing the bill, while Internet firms such as Reddit have been mobilizing their users against it.

Thistle said:
this will pass because many people in Congress simply don't give a shit how this will effect internet users.

mydogfarted said:

No, the problem is they don't understand it. They're lead to believe the internet is nothing but porn and stealing music/movies.

Canadian_Coat said:

That's to true....they also know about Facebook and Twitter....unfortunately.

Thistle said:

I may be misunderstanding, but it sounds like this bill will not do what it supposedly intends to do (stop piracy) but will create a situation where websites can be shut down without any sort of due process.

Lawmakers' unwillingness to understand or consider technical ramifications leads me to believe that this will pass because many people in Congress simply don't give a shit how this will effect internet users.

motorfirebox said:
SOPA, or something like it, is going to pass. There's simply too much money behind it.

IDGAS said:
GoDaddy Faces boycott over SOPA support

Move your domains away from GoDaddy and show them how you feel about a free Internet.

Boycott the Bastards!