Government bill to Censor some websites, supported by the big three and Apple.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is a bill currently in the US Congress, with the stated goal of curtailing copyright infringement, but with the actual effects of setting up a government firewall to block out unwanted sites, and giving the US jurisdiction over foreign sites that have anything to do with infringement of US copyright.

It is repellent.

A Reddit user discovered a document [PDF] hosted by the Global Intellectual IP Center ("Global"), from before the introduction of SOPA, urging Congress to enact such a measure. Among those corporate sponsors is Nintendo, who is demonstrably and justifiably upset about piracy, and committed to taking all the wrong steps to stop it.

Other companies signing off in favor of this anti-"rogue site" legislation, in the interest of protecting their IP online include Sony -- Sony Electronics, Sony Music, and Sony Pictures, separately. EA is also listed, along with Rite Aid (what?) and Zippo (what?)

Okay, so you already know how we feel about this thing. If you feel the same way, you can write or call Congress. November 16 saw concerted "Stop Censorship" efforts (Tumblr black-barred everyone's dashboard in protest, for example), but you can, of course, still contact your representatives. If you're outside of the US, uh, cross your fingers and hope you don't lose all the US-based visitors to your sites.

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Link

So what do you guys think? Personally, I am very against piracy but still hate this idea.

I am very much against this sort of action to curb piracy. The government should know by now that people will find a way around to pirate things. This will only hurt the average person by setting up a way to (if a corporation or the government wanted) easily curtail access to free information for any citizen.

I think the government should be allowed to regulate the wasteland that is the internet. You can call it censorship or whatever, but it's definitely a good thing.

I don't think this bill is going to pass,but I do believe the internet does need some regulations.

It would practically shut down eBay and Youtube so it'll never happen. Far too vague with this iteration of censorship bill to pass.

Sigh, these companies really need to stop trying and focus on adapting their business to current technology.

Just another way for Big Business to flex their muscle and keep people in check. They know we can't do anything about it, really. Maybe they'll just force 10 GB caps on everyone. That would curb piracy pretty fast.

[quote name='Chacrana']I think the government should be allowed to regulate the wasteland that is the internet. You can call it censorship or whatever, but it's definitely a good thing.[/QUOTE]

[quote name='themaster20000']I don't think this bill is going to pass,but I do believe the internet does need some regulations.[/QUOTE]

This bill doesn't give them some rights, this gives them the right to basically shut down whatever website for basically any reason, even if the reason is due to the users and not the host. If enough people link torrents/ROMs here, though it's against the rules and will be removed within minutes, it gives the government the power to censor the website.

There are much more important things the government could regulate.

I've actually been following this for a while. Honestly it's rather a pathetic attempt at trying to quell the issue due to so many issues.



1) DNS Blocking is entirely useless. You can manually enter who your DNS provider is. There is absolutely no way to enforce this. Even if ISPs did 'monitor' for different DNS settings on a users side, you still can't enforce it because if I own a domain and a server, I am able to set up DNS however I please. They would essentially need to contact millions of places inside the US and force them all to change things, but that's not going to happen (Nearly all businesses get external DNS records from external sources as full DNS of the internet is too big to host themselves). So they're only going to enforce it on major DNS providers such as ISPs and a few other places like googles public DNS. Even then you can edit the hosts file on your computer. This would be the biggest deterent for your average person however because they know jack all about computers. However anyone with knowledge of computers beyond beginner level can circumvent this easily.


2) Social media blocking. What the hell is this supposed to do? Stop the spread of piracy through facebook and crap? Big deal. Websites don't have free speech because you agree to the EULA/TOS when you sign up for it. I'm surprised they don't do this already because I sure as hell do this where I work for businesses all the time.


3) Search engine blocking. So are they going to block only the .com version of a search engine? Do they not realize that even if search engines enforce it to where you can't do to places like google.ca or google.co.uk that there are very simple ways around that such as VPN and IP/Address spoofing?


4) The rules they set in place are waaaay too broad. Sites can be blocked way too easily even if they aren't at fault in any way. So many businesses will get snuffed out just because there are idiots using the service. imgur, tinypic, imagehost, shorturl, tinyurl, $$$$$$$, Ebay, Youtube, various file hosting companies and countless others are very much at risk of losing a large portion of their hits, which generates ad revenue for the business to stay alive and keep paying employees. There's virtually little to no way these sites can policy every single image or url that is submitted and if they did put it to a submission policy, it slows the whole process considerably and people will look elsewhere for their needs.



TL;DR - Basically it will help to shutdown legit businesses because your average user from accessing websites due to shitty rules and regulations beyond any of our control. Plus this won't affect anybody who really cares to pirate as there are simple ways around it that they can't enforce.

Once again big business and government have shown that they know jack shit about how computers and the internet work.


EDIT: LOL @ Google's URL shortener URL being censored here.

[quote name='Vinny']This bill doesn't give them some rights, this gives them the right to basically shut down whatever website for basically any reason, even if the reason is due to the users and not the host. If enough people link torrents/ROMs here, though it's against the rules and will be removed within minutes, it gives the government the power to censor the website.[/QUOTE]
More importantly, it sets a precedent for other bills. That's the real issue.

Finally something done under obama's administration!

[quote name='GUNNM']Finally something done under obama's administration![/QUOTE]

Obama didn't have any part to do with the bill,and said he would veto the bill if it passes in the senate(which it won't).

My good friend, who works against such crap, posted stuff about the campaign against it in his LJ.

http://osewalrus.livejournal.com/971148.html

He says it has been very effective so far.

It won't go through. The people won't allow it.