torsdag 17 november 2011

More voices against SOPA and PIPA!


Via boingboing.net:

"The undersigned Internet and technology companies write to express our concern with legislative measures that have been introduced in the United States Senate and United States House of Representatives, S. 968 (the “PROTECT IP Act”) and H.R. 3261 (the “Stop Online Piracy Act”)."

AOL Inc.
eBay Inc. 
Facebook Inc. 
Google Inc. 
LinkedIn Corporation 
Mozilla Corp. 
Twitter, Inc. 
Yahoo! Inc. 
Zynga Game Network  


Congressional SOPA hearings: no opponents of the bill allowed
Irony Alert!
"The House is holding hearings on sweeping Internet censorship legislation this week -- and it's censoring the opposition! The bill is backed by Hollywood, Big Pharma, and the Chamber of Commerce, and all of them are going to get to testify at the hearing.

But the bill's opponents -- tech companies, free speech and human rights activists, and hundreds of thousands of Internet users -- won't have a voice"


From Techdirt.com:
"With the hearings this morning (more on that later), there were also more statements publicly made against SOPA this morning. Two key ones are, unfortunately, behind Politico's paywall, so I can't link or quote too much. The first, by former Homeland Security Assistant Secretary and former NSA General Counsel, Stewart Baker, was raised a few times during the hearings. Baker focused on the problems of SOPA and PROTECT IP and their impact on online security. He notes that the DNS blocking portions of both bills "run directly counter" to the government's cybersecurity efforts:
Because “block and redirect” is exactly what crooks are doing today to bank customers. If the bills become law, the security system won’t be able to tell the difference between sites that have been blocked by law and those that have been sabotaged by hackers. Indeed, it isn’t hard to imagine crooks redirecting users to sites that say, “You were redirected here because the site you asked for has violated copyright,” while at the same time planting malware on the user’s computer.
There's much more in the article as well, noting that these laws won't actually help Hollywood and will "leave the rest of us hurting and poorer for years." The really tragic part of the hearing is that when all of the panelists were asked about Baker's statement, every single one of them admitted that they didn't understand the technology enough to really comment. The best that the MPAA's Michael O'Leary could blurt out was that he "didn't agree."


"Today, we’re joining pretty much every major internet and technology company in voicing our opposition to the PIPA (PROTECT IP Act) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) legislation before the House and Senate. For those who have never heard of these two acts, they are proposals before Congress that give incredibly aggressive censorship controls to our government (acting on behalf of rights holders).

The way copyright is currently protected on the web in the U.S.A. was established by the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). The DMCA created the principle of ‘safe harbor’ for ‘service providers’ (like Google, Facebook, Twitter, or foursquare). What ‘safe harbor’ means is that a site with content from its users doesn’t have to censor everything that is posted, so long as it acts in good faith to remove infringing content and links as they’re alerted to them. Openness coupled with responsibility.

The PIPA and SOPA proposals turn that model on its head, restricting openness and imposing preemptive censorship. If a couple of rogue links are found in our Tips, PIPA and SOPA could allow the government to shut foursquare down. So, either we censor all our users (and sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter do the same) or risk being shut down by the government."

"Tumblr, Firefox and Reddit drew broad black lines on their websites Wednesday to protest a proposed U.S. law that Internet companies have dubbed “censorship” and entertainment companies “piracy protection.”

Their symbolic design tweaks coincide with what several open Internet advocacy organizations have declared American Censorship Day — a day some of the Internet’s biggest web companies have dedicated to encouraging users to speak out against the Stop Online Piracy Act (called the Protect IP Act in the Senate)."

More to come....

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