How big of a deal is this PIPA shit?

[Cantih]

Who stands to gain from this bill? I see it as nothing but a corporate sweep with lots of heavy handed punishment. What will it do to help the businesses that are advocating it?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/1...ing-short-list

The House Judiciary Committee will meet today for a hearing on the controversial Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). What could have been an opportunity for the committee to hear from a variety of stakeholders has devolved into parade of pro-SOPA partisans. Scheduled to testify are representatives from the Register of Copyrights, Pfizer Global Security, the Motion Picture Association of America, the AFL-CIO, and Mastercard Worldwide—many of which helped to draft this legislation in the first place, and didn’t let anyone else into the room.

[Odon]

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/money

[Mistress Stowastiq]

I'm watching the hearing right now, really just happened upon this while sorting/adding peeps onto my info sec twitter list which includes a lot of internet freedom advocates including EFF.

All I know is that they need to make more people aware of this legislation if they want a max # of people on the petition.' They ' meaning pro internet freedom activists and those fighting SOPA. Yeah my lack of awareness on this is not a meter for all society but they need mainstream media to focus on this too so more people know about it.

Here is the stream, view best on win media player, classic spits it out but that may be my lack of win media classic pluggins for firefox.

Web page where stream link is, click on "Watch Video Webcast"
http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/hear_11162011.html

Direct link to stream [will open the stream in your browser and likely NSFW] works with IE due to Win media player pluggie
http://mfile.akamai.com/65764/live/r...p=39655&prop=n

Also EFF is live tweeting the event https://twitter.com/#!/EFFLive

EFF SOPA page & petition
https://wfc2.wiredforchange.com/o/90...ction_KEY=8173

Info on SOPA from Center for Democracy & Technology [click the "SOPA 2-pager final.pdf" link on right center page]
http://cdt.org/paper/sopa-summary


and lol "Pirate type folks" & "Techie people"

[BadKarma]

http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/


Someone needs to resurrect Thomas Jefferson and have him slap these fuckers with his governments shouldnt be in place for more then 50 years thing.

[kisada]

sounds like a big deal to me:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ate-google.ars

first part of article:

"The House Judiciary Committee today held an important hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act with a hugely stacked deck of witnesses—Google's lawyer was the only one of the six to object to the bill in a meaningful way. And it wasn't hard to see why. This wasn't a hearing designed to elicit complex thoughts about complex issues of free speech, censorship, and online piracy; despite the objections of the ACLU, dozens of foreign civil rights groups, tech giants like Google and eBay, the Consumer Electronics Association, China scholar Rebecca MacKinnon, hundreds of law professors and lawyers, the hearing was designed to shove the legislation forward and to brand companies who object as siding with "the pirates."

How low was the level of debate? The hearing actually descended to statements like "the First Amendment does not protect stealing goods off trucks" (courtesy of the AFL-CIO's Paul Almeida).

Right from the start, the knives were out for Google. Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) made it only halfway through his opening statement before asserting that "one of the companies represented here today has sought to obstruct the Committee’s consideration of bipartisan legislation. Perhaps this should come as no surprise given that Google just settled a federal criminal investigation into the company’s active promotion of rogue websites that pushed illegal prescription and counterfeit drugs on American consumers."

[Gwynplaine]

The issues and legal applications involved are quite complex, and I'm in favor of protecting intellectual property. But I have major concerns about these bills. In particular I don't think its proper to order and require the hosts (the ISP, the search company, or host site e.g. Youtube) to be held accountable for everything that goes on on their platform.

And I also think it's wrong-headed and plainly impractical for them to try and build IP protection around what OTHER countries do. A government by its nature can only deal with what its enforcements provide within its own borders. Dealing with foreign countries has to be left to other aspects of trade and law.

I think that ultimately the bill would ruin and hamper good and sincere U.S. web companies/websites by meddling and bringing on unintended consequences.

[Zelas]

EFF SOPA page & petition
https://wfc2.wiredforchange.com/o/90...ction_KEY=8173

thanks for this link

[Ksandra]

Well Firefox is taking a stand against this:

http://www.mozilla.org/sopa/


I'm wondering how the fuck this wasn't heard of really until today.

[Pikarya]

Been in the news for awhile now.

As for people giving a shit. No one will, that is until it actually passes & occurs.

Obligatory "This doesn't apply to me since I live in "______________".

[Ksandra]

Been in the news for awhile now.

Can't have been a popular story or anything, or it least it passed by my radar, and I'm pretty active about reading news sites.

Even then, things like the mozilla thing, I'm surprised they didn't start that sooner than today.

[Cantih]

Because usually it can get quashed before it gets this far.
And I'm guessing at this, but a trick may be the timing of rallying up the public. Too soon and fatigue/forgetfulness can happen.
Also, EFF has been working against this kind of legislation for a while, and they have managed to be successful about stopping it in Canada every time it comes up. You can trust that if they're doing a big push, it's time to act.

It has been getting coverage for months though, just not in the mainstream, mainly in tech and creative circles. If you want to start keeping an eye on this kind of thing, I'd suggest adding boingboing to your daily newssites.

[hey]

And I also think it's wrong-headed and plainly impractical for them to try and build IP protection around what OTHER countries do. A government by its nature can only deal with what its enforcements provide within its own borders. Dealing with foreign countries has to be left to other aspects of trade and law.

They plan to shut down sites by removing their DNS entries. In the case of .com, the dns registry is owned by verisign; a US company. They would still have no power over foreign TLDs. This is why some torrent sites, such as demonoid, switched their domain to one outside the US.

[6souls]

Can't have been a popular story or anything, or it least it passed by my radar, and I'm pretty active about reading news sites.

Even then, things like the mozilla thing, I'm surprised they didn't start that sooner than today.

Machinima & Dstructoid have had blips about the bill in it's various forms for the past few months, but besides them, nah, haven't seen this anywhere else.

[Talint]

Obama threatens veto if the bill passes.

[Karasu]

Obama threatens veto if the bill passes.

I believe that is a different bill.

[Gwynplaine]

I believe that is a different bill.

Yeah it doesn't sound like the same bill to me unless I'm missing something.

[Talint]

I believe that is a different bill.

I think you're right.

[Ksandra]

At least that bill underlines a similar idea, so hopefully it's a sign he won't let this one fly either.

[Greatguardian]

At least that bill underlines a similar idea, so hopefully it's a sign he won't let this one fly either.

Not really. The bill he's veto'ing looks like a repeal of net neutrality. SOPA is just a crazy, vindictive anti-piracy measure.

The former involves corporate throttling of legal websites that don't pay extra fees to an ISP. The latter involves corporate blocking of legal websites that unknowingly (or can at least claim the benefit of the doubt) host copyrighted/illegal material. One of these is a clear free speech issue, the other is more of an accountability issue.

[NynJa]

What do the rich companies plan to do when the poor have no money left to spend on their overpriced garbage?