Princess Luna
14th January 2012, 19:54
I find it weird for such a major issue, there isn't any threads about it. So post any news relating to the Stop Online Piracy Act or its twin Protect IP Act.
Rep. Smith Waters Down SOPA, DNS Redirects Out
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the chief sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act, said Friday he is removing a major provision of his bill that would force changes to internet infrastructure to fight online copyright and trademark infringement.
The announcement from the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee came a day after Sen. Patrick Leahy, the main sponsor of similar legislation in the Senate, announced the same move. For the time being, that means if the bills become law, ISPs won’t have to perform DNS redirecting of sites the attorney general concludes are facilitating online copyright and trademark infringement.
Both Leahy and Smith left open the possibility that redirecting could be brought back in at a later time. But the lawmakers appear to have conceded to opposition from security experts who say the plan would sabotage U.S. government-approved efforts to secure DNS against hackers and break the internet’s unified naming system by introducing lies into infrastructure.
“After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision. We will continue to look for ways to ensure that foreign websites cannot sell and distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers,” Smith said in a statement.
It was not immediately clear whether Smith would also remove the requirement that, if an ISP decided not to redirect, it must employ other censoring methods as outlined in the bill such as IP address filtering to prevent American citizens from visiting sites the attorney general maintains are dedicated to infringing activities.
The two bills are in response to Hollywood’s arguments that hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost every year due to pirate websites. On the other side, much of the tech world maintains that the open nature of the internet has created millions of jobs, that millions of people pay for content online and that copyright and trademark holders already have the legal tools to fight copyright infringement.
“Both proposals still threaten openness and freedom online with a range of overbroad measures,” said Matt Wood, a Free Press policy director. “We believe that the rights of content creators should be respected, but many problems remain with the approach these bills take to achieve that goal.”
Michael O’Leary, a Motion Picture Association of America vice president, continued dismissing technical criticism of the bill Thursday, saying the DNS issue was overblown (.pdf) and echoing a statement he gave in a SOPA hearing in November.
“We continue to believe that DNS filtering is an important tool, already used in numerous countries internationally to protect consumers and the intellectual property of businesses with targeted filters for rogue sites. We are confident that any close examination of DNS screening will demonstrate that contrary to the claims of some critics, it will not break the internet,” he said.
Internet experts maintain that the SOPA (.pdf) and the Senate’s Protect IP Act would break the internet’s universal character and hamper U.S. government-supported efforts to roll out DNS-SEC, which is intended to prevent hackers from hijacking the net through fake DNS entries.
However, both bills essentially grant the government the authority to bring lawsuits against so-called rogue websites and obtain court orders requiring search engines like Google to stop displaying links to them. They would allow rights holders to seek court orders instructing online ad services and credit card companies from partnering with the infringing sites.
In May, the PIPA legislation sailed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee that Leahy heads, but it was blocked from going to a Senate floor vote by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) who invoked a rarely used Senate hold.
On Jan. 24, the Senate is expected to vote on whether to unwind Wyden’s hold, which would take 60 votes. On the House side, a Judiciary Committee markup of the SOPA bill was abruptly halted in December, and no House Judiciary Committee vote dates have been set.
What’s more, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) will conduct a hearing Wednesday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Issa, the committee’s chairman, is calling prominent internet security experts and others to testify about the security ramifications of DNS redirecting.
Among those summoned are Stewart Baker, a former Bush administration Department of Homeland Security policy director, who has said tinkering with the Domain Name System “would do great damage to internet security.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/dns-sopa-provision/
House Majority Leader: SOPA Will Not Get Floor Vote Without Some Consensus
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) brings some good news for those against the Stop Online Piracy Act: he has decided that he won't allow it to come to the floor of the House for a vote unless there is some real consensus on the bill. If this tells us anything it is that the American people have flooded House members with phone calls and emails complaining about this bill and how it is being fast-tracked by some members with power like sponsor Lamar Smith (R-Texas).
This news comes after House Judiciary Committee Chairman Smith indicated that he would amend SOPA to remove the DNS blocking provisions. While opponents of the bill applauded this step, they still say that SOPA is unacceptable.
Darrell Issa (R-California) said that he will postpone the House Oversight Committee's hearing on the bill, which would have seen experts in the tech industry's expert testimony on Wednesday. From Issa:
"While I remain concerned about Senate action on the Protect IP Act, I am confident that flawed legislation will not be taken up by this House. Majority Leader Cantor has assured me that we will continue to work to address outstanding concerns and work to build consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote," said Chairman Issa. "The voice of the Internet community has been heard. Much more education for Members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential if anti-piracy legislation is to be workable and achieve broad appeal."
"Earlier tonight, Chairman Smith announced that he will remove the DNS blocking provision from his legislation. Although SOPA, despite the removal of this provision, is still a fundamentally flawed bill, I have decided that postponing the scheduled hearing on DNS blocking with technical experts is the best course of action at this time. Right now, the focus of protecting the Internet needs to be on the Senate where Majority Leader Reid has announced his intention to try to move similar legislation in less than two weeks."
With the momentum on SOPA slowed a bit, lawmakers now have the time to educate themselves properly on this issue. This is important because of you are going to regulate the entire online ecosystem than you'd better get it right the first time or not do it at all. We obviously prefer the latter. Now the only other thing to be done is to stop PIPA from making it to the Senate floor for a vote.
http://gamepolitics.com/2012/01/14/house-majority-leader-sopa-will-not-get-floor-vote-without-some-consensus
Wikipedia Mulls SOPA Blackout as Other Sites Join In
It’s been a whirlwind few days as I’ve been doing my best to beat my internet drums to get people to pay attention to internet censorship law SOPA, and how it will affect everyone, and so has the rest of the web.
This week Reddit announced a blackout Wednesday, January 18th to protest SOPA, and I called for Google and Facebook to do the same for it to really make an impact. The idea of such a thing happening may be too lofty however, so I tried to be more practical yesterday where I said Google should at least have a censored logo with SOPA information attached.
As for Facebook? Since I’m almost positive they won’t go dark in protest, I’m trying to organize a flood of censored posts on the site to coincide with the blackout on the 18th, and you can read more about that initiative here, as well as join the Facebook event where you can invite your friends. So far, there have been 50,000 invites with 5,600 attending in under 24 hours.
The anti-SOPA movement is really starting to pick up steam in the wake of the announced Reddit blackout. The internet was against SOPA before, but now many sites are putting their money where their mouth is. Gaming giant Destructoid is going offline on the 18th (even appropriating my logo), as is the entire 50-site network of Cheezburger, as announced by founder Ben Huh on Twitter. Major League Gaming just announced they’re going dark that day, and recently WordPress came out with a strong condemnation of SOPA, though it can’t shut itself off as it would unpower about 15% of the internet, as many, many sites run on its platform, and you’d have a hard time getting most to consent to that.
Most notable however is that Wikipedia appears to be very close to announcing a blackout or something like it to coordinate with Reddit going dark. Here’s what founder Jimmy Wales had to say on a Wiki discussion page about the topic:“I’m all in favor of it, and I think it would be great if we could act quickly to coordinate with Reddit. I’d like to talk to our government affairs advisor to see if they agree on this as useful timing, but assuming that’s a greenlight, I think that matching what Reddit does (but in our own way of course) per the emerging consensus on how to do it, is a good idea. But that means we need to move forward quickly on a concrete proposal and vote – we don’t have the luxury of time that we usually have, in terms of negotiating with each other for weeks about what’s exactly the best possible thing to do. As I understand it, the Foundation is talking to people about how we can geolocate and guide people to their Congressperson, etc. Geoff will know about that. Our task is to decide to do it with a thumbs up / thumbs down vote.” Wikipedia would undoubtedly be the most attention grabbing site that could feasibly go dark, as it doesn’t have to worry about quarterly profits the way Google and Facebook do. On Google+, Google employees have been saying that there is much talk about what exactly Google can and should do to protest SOPA, but it’s all secretive with nothing announced yet.
It’s good to see this picking up steam, and hopefully it becomes an inescapable avalanche of website blackouts and a flood of censorship posts that will educate the public about what SOPA actually is, and how it will effectively ravage the internet by allowing the government and media companies to control it. Then at last, we can beat it.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/01/13/wikipedia-mulls-sopa-blackout-as-other-sites-join-in/
Rep. Smith Waters Down SOPA, DNS Redirects Out
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the chief sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act, said Friday he is removing a major provision of his bill that would force changes to internet infrastructure to fight online copyright and trademark infringement.
The announcement from the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee came a day after Sen. Patrick Leahy, the main sponsor of similar legislation in the Senate, announced the same move. For the time being, that means if the bills become law, ISPs won’t have to perform DNS redirecting of sites the attorney general concludes are facilitating online copyright and trademark infringement.
Both Leahy and Smith left open the possibility that redirecting could be brought back in at a later time. But the lawmakers appear to have conceded to opposition from security experts who say the plan would sabotage U.S. government-approved efforts to secure DNS against hackers and break the internet’s unified naming system by introducing lies into infrastructure.
“After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision. We will continue to look for ways to ensure that foreign websites cannot sell and distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers,” Smith said in a statement.
It was not immediately clear whether Smith would also remove the requirement that, if an ISP decided not to redirect, it must employ other censoring methods as outlined in the bill such as IP address filtering to prevent American citizens from visiting sites the attorney general maintains are dedicated to infringing activities.
The two bills are in response to Hollywood’s arguments that hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost every year due to pirate websites. On the other side, much of the tech world maintains that the open nature of the internet has created millions of jobs, that millions of people pay for content online and that copyright and trademark holders already have the legal tools to fight copyright infringement.
“Both proposals still threaten openness and freedom online with a range of overbroad measures,” said Matt Wood, a Free Press policy director. “We believe that the rights of content creators should be respected, but many problems remain with the approach these bills take to achieve that goal.”
Michael O’Leary, a Motion Picture Association of America vice president, continued dismissing technical criticism of the bill Thursday, saying the DNS issue was overblown (.pdf) and echoing a statement he gave in a SOPA hearing in November.
“We continue to believe that DNS filtering is an important tool, already used in numerous countries internationally to protect consumers and the intellectual property of businesses with targeted filters for rogue sites. We are confident that any close examination of DNS screening will demonstrate that contrary to the claims of some critics, it will not break the internet,” he said.
Internet experts maintain that the SOPA (.pdf) and the Senate’s Protect IP Act would break the internet’s universal character and hamper U.S. government-supported efforts to roll out DNS-SEC, which is intended to prevent hackers from hijacking the net through fake DNS entries.
However, both bills essentially grant the government the authority to bring lawsuits against so-called rogue websites and obtain court orders requiring search engines like Google to stop displaying links to them. They would allow rights holders to seek court orders instructing online ad services and credit card companies from partnering with the infringing sites.
In May, the PIPA legislation sailed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee that Leahy heads, but it was blocked from going to a Senate floor vote by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) who invoked a rarely used Senate hold.
On Jan. 24, the Senate is expected to vote on whether to unwind Wyden’s hold, which would take 60 votes. On the House side, a Judiciary Committee markup of the SOPA bill was abruptly halted in December, and no House Judiciary Committee vote dates have been set.
What’s more, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) will conduct a hearing Wednesday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Issa, the committee’s chairman, is calling prominent internet security experts and others to testify about the security ramifications of DNS redirecting.
Among those summoned are Stewart Baker, a former Bush administration Department of Homeland Security policy director, who has said tinkering with the Domain Name System “would do great damage to internet security.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/dns-sopa-provision/
House Majority Leader: SOPA Will Not Get Floor Vote Without Some Consensus
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) brings some good news for those against the Stop Online Piracy Act: he has decided that he won't allow it to come to the floor of the House for a vote unless there is some real consensus on the bill. If this tells us anything it is that the American people have flooded House members with phone calls and emails complaining about this bill and how it is being fast-tracked by some members with power like sponsor Lamar Smith (R-Texas).
This news comes after House Judiciary Committee Chairman Smith indicated that he would amend SOPA to remove the DNS blocking provisions. While opponents of the bill applauded this step, they still say that SOPA is unacceptable.
Darrell Issa (R-California) said that he will postpone the House Oversight Committee's hearing on the bill, which would have seen experts in the tech industry's expert testimony on Wednesday. From Issa:
"While I remain concerned about Senate action on the Protect IP Act, I am confident that flawed legislation will not be taken up by this House. Majority Leader Cantor has assured me that we will continue to work to address outstanding concerns and work to build consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote," said Chairman Issa. "The voice of the Internet community has been heard. Much more education for Members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential if anti-piracy legislation is to be workable and achieve broad appeal."
"Earlier tonight, Chairman Smith announced that he will remove the DNS blocking provision from his legislation. Although SOPA, despite the removal of this provision, is still a fundamentally flawed bill, I have decided that postponing the scheduled hearing on DNS blocking with technical experts is the best course of action at this time. Right now, the focus of protecting the Internet needs to be on the Senate where Majority Leader Reid has announced his intention to try to move similar legislation in less than two weeks."
With the momentum on SOPA slowed a bit, lawmakers now have the time to educate themselves properly on this issue. This is important because of you are going to regulate the entire online ecosystem than you'd better get it right the first time or not do it at all. We obviously prefer the latter. Now the only other thing to be done is to stop PIPA from making it to the Senate floor for a vote.
http://gamepolitics.com/2012/01/14/house-majority-leader-sopa-will-not-get-floor-vote-without-some-consensus
Wikipedia Mulls SOPA Blackout as Other Sites Join In
It’s been a whirlwind few days as I’ve been doing my best to beat my internet drums to get people to pay attention to internet censorship law SOPA, and how it will affect everyone, and so has the rest of the web.
This week Reddit announced a blackout Wednesday, January 18th to protest SOPA, and I called for Google and Facebook to do the same for it to really make an impact. The idea of such a thing happening may be too lofty however, so I tried to be more practical yesterday where I said Google should at least have a censored logo with SOPA information attached.
As for Facebook? Since I’m almost positive they won’t go dark in protest, I’m trying to organize a flood of censored posts on the site to coincide with the blackout on the 18th, and you can read more about that initiative here, as well as join the Facebook event where you can invite your friends. So far, there have been 50,000 invites with 5,600 attending in under 24 hours.
The anti-SOPA movement is really starting to pick up steam in the wake of the announced Reddit blackout. The internet was against SOPA before, but now many sites are putting their money where their mouth is. Gaming giant Destructoid is going offline on the 18th (even appropriating my logo), as is the entire 50-site network of Cheezburger, as announced by founder Ben Huh on Twitter. Major League Gaming just announced they’re going dark that day, and recently WordPress came out with a strong condemnation of SOPA, though it can’t shut itself off as it would unpower about 15% of the internet, as many, many sites run on its platform, and you’d have a hard time getting most to consent to that.
Most notable however is that Wikipedia appears to be very close to announcing a blackout or something like it to coordinate with Reddit going dark. Here’s what founder Jimmy Wales had to say on a Wiki discussion page about the topic:“I’m all in favor of it, and I think it would be great if we could act quickly to coordinate with Reddit. I’d like to talk to our government affairs advisor to see if they agree on this as useful timing, but assuming that’s a greenlight, I think that matching what Reddit does (but in our own way of course) per the emerging consensus on how to do it, is a good idea. But that means we need to move forward quickly on a concrete proposal and vote – we don’t have the luxury of time that we usually have, in terms of negotiating with each other for weeks about what’s exactly the best possible thing to do. As I understand it, the Foundation is talking to people about how we can geolocate and guide people to their Congressperson, etc. Geoff will know about that. Our task is to decide to do it with a thumbs up / thumbs down vote.” Wikipedia would undoubtedly be the most attention grabbing site that could feasibly go dark, as it doesn’t have to worry about quarterly profits the way Google and Facebook do. On Google+, Google employees have been saying that there is much talk about what exactly Google can and should do to protest SOPA, but it’s all secretive with nothing announced yet.
It’s good to see this picking up steam, and hopefully it becomes an inescapable avalanche of website blackouts and a flood of censorship posts that will educate the public about what SOPA actually is, and how it will effectively ravage the internet by allowing the government and media companies to control it. Then at last, we can beat it.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/01/13/wikipedia-mulls-sopa-blackout-as-other-sites-join-in/