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The Life and Mind of DamnBlackHeart
This is to help me stay actively writing. So expect to see rants, tips on writing, thoughts on subjects, me complaining of boredom, reviews, anime, movies, video games, conventions, tv shows and whatever life throws at me.
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The Law That Will Censor The Internet |
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As you may have notice, as soon as you get on Tumblr you’ll see that your pictures and writing have been censor by gray bars. It it is alarming to see but it’s a way for Tumblr to get users attention to give us the important message about the law.
You see, this law doesn’t just effect Tumblr it also effects so many other websites and the next innovative social network, or future web hosting service.
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as H.R.3261, was introduced in the US House of Representative on October 26, 2011 by Representative Lamar Smith and a bipartisan group of 12 initial co-sponsors. The aim of the bill is to help U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders fight online piracy of intellectual property. This bill “modernizes [United States] criminal and civil statutes to meet new IP enforcement challenges and protect American jobs.”
The bill is divided into two Titles with the first focusing on combating foreign infringing websites, websites outside U.S. jurisdiction that enable or facilitate copyright infringement, which is SOPA and the second which is Protect-IP is focusing on increased penalties to combat intellectual property theft via digital means.
Ramifications
SOPA is also known by some as the E-PARASITE (Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation) Act. According to co-sponsor Representative Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s Intellectual Property sub-panel, SOPA represents a rewrite of the PROTECT IP Act to address tech industry concerns. Goodlatte told The Hill that the new version requires court approval for action against third parties such as search engines. The Senate version, PROTECT IP, does not. But Goodlatte called it “unrealistic to think we’re going to continue to rely on the DMCA notice-and-take down provision” Known as safe harbor, the provision protects YouTube and other sites such as social networks hosting uploaded user material from liability, provided the sites promptly remove infringing material brought to their attention, removing “the risk that the few users among millions who post copyrighted material, libelous statements or counterfeit goods would subject the site to business-crushing legal liabilities.”
Technical
The bill would require internet service providers to filter DNS queries of offending websites, rendering them unresolvable. This would conflict with DNSSEC, a protocol introduced to prevent with illegitimate DNS tampering. This was criticized both by representatives and Google, who said “DNS blocking methods in bill will harm U.S. efforts to make Internet more secure.”
Additionally, immunity provisions would allow internet service providers to preemptively block sites they believe to be in violation of included laws. Rep. Maxine Waters believes that “Immunity provisions will have unintended consequences, letting ISPs unfairly block sites that don’t infringe.”
Reciprocity
Critics, including Google, believe that introducing such legislation blocking foreign sites would harm United States interests, as they fear the foreign countries may begin to block United States sites in return.
Opposition
Opponents of the bill include tech giants such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Reddit, AOL, Linkedin, eBay and Wikimedia Foundation, as well as human rights organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Human Rights Watch.
“This bill cannot be fixed; it must be killed,” the EFF said on October 28 2011, calling the bill a “massive piece of job-killing Internet regulation.” Reporters without Borders said the bill was “clearly hostile to freedom of expression” and said it “would allow copyright and intellectual property owners to impose content filtering and blocking without independent judicial control.”
“Is this really what we want to do to the internet? Shut it down every time it doesn’t fit someone’s business model?” asks Harvard Business Review blogger James Allworth, concluding that the bill would “give America it’s [sic] very own version of the Great Firewall of China.”
The Library Copyright Alliance (including the American Library Association) objects to the broadened definition of “willful infringement” and the introduction of felony penalties for noncommercial streaming infringement, stating that these changes could encourage criminal prosecution of libraries.
November 16, the day US Congress held hearings on the bill, was dubbed by many opposition groups including the Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, the “American Censorship Day” Many opposing services, such as search engine DuckDuckGo and social feed site reddit have placed black banners over their site logos with the words “NO CENSORSHIP”, in protest of the bill.
 DamnBlackHeart · Fri Nov 18, 2011 @ 06:21pm · 0 Comments |
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