Thread: Vote : Stop Internet Censorship

January 17, 2012 George Takei

For 24 hours that began at midnight tonight, I will join Wikipedia and sites like Reddit in protest over pending legislation in Congress.

The bill is known as SOPA–the “Stop Online Piracy Act–backed by Hollywood and the music industry, but opposed by most of Silicon Valley. SOPA is aimed ostensibly at protecting copyrighted material, but as drafted threatens to choke off the Internet in much the way China does now–by killing the source of oxygen.

In its worst proposed form, SOPA would require U.S. search engines, advertising networks and other providers to withhold their services to certain “flagged” sites, so that users couldn’t find them and payment processors couldn’t fund them. That’s right: Someone ELSE would get to decide what YOU can and cannot see. This is a flagrant violation of free speech and free association rights, and it must not be allowed to move forward.

Pushback from companies such as Google and Facebook and ordinary citizens has stalled SOPA, with its backers promising to revise the bill’s more controversial aspects. But you know how these things go. With big industry behind the bill, it will take a massive public outcry to kill it. I can tell you this: If SOPA is passed in its original form, or even some of the suggested “compromises,” sites like YouTube would go dark immediately. Indeed, this very FB community we have built, and which I hope you enjoy daily, could be shut down by a single complaint of copyright infringement that “flags” it.

There are already laws in place to deal with copyright infringement within the U.S., but so far no effective law to deal with overseas sites. The answer, however, is not to impose censorship at home.

So that is why I’m going dark, for a day. Please share this message with your online friends, and help us stop unAmerican censorship of the net. If you’d like to send your senator a message, sign the on-line petition through the link on the left of this blog post.

I’ll see you all Thursday at midnight. Live long and FREELY,

-GHT


http://www.allegiancemusical.com/blo...y/day-no-takei



"Fahrenheit 451"
By ray bradbury is a book about a world where books are illegal because knowledge is illegal why? Because the government said so.

"anthem" by ayn rand
A book where all technology/books/and knowledge are wiped off the face of earth. Why? Because the government said so

"1984" a book written by George Orwell
Plot: complete government control

Short story entitled "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegurt Jr.
Plot: government tells u what to wear and makes u dress with masks on so no one looked different.


These authors saw the future,

Open your eyes STOP SOPA NOW!

This should scare you!

Call your congressman

On Jan. 24th, the Senate is expected to pass a bill for the first ever U.S. internet censorship system. While the Senate is holding town halls and meetings at home, they need to hear why they need to block the vote and kill this bill.

See http://americancensorship.org/

What is SOPA? SOPA is an acronym for the Stop Online Piracy Act. It's a proposed bill that aims to crack down on copyright infringement by restricting access to sites that host pirated content.
SOPA explained: What it is and why it matters

http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/17/tech...ined/index.htm
money.cnn.com

The tech industry is abuzz about SOPA, an anti-piracy bill. Here are five main questions about the legislation, answered.

What is SOPA? SOPA is an acronym for the Stop Online Piracy Act. It's a proposed bill that aims to crack down on copyright infringement by restricting access to sites that host or facilitate the trading of pirated content.

SOPA's main targets are "rogue" overseas sites like torrent hub The Pirate Bay, which are a trove for illegal downloads. Go to the The Pirate Bay, type in any current hit movie or TV show like "Glee," and you'll see links to download full seasons and recent episodes for free.

Content creators have battled against piracy for years -- remember Napster? -- but it's hard for U.S. companies to take action against foreign sites. The Pirate Bay's servers are physically located in Sweden. So SOPA's goal is to cut off pirate sites' oxygen by requiring U.S. search engines, advertising networks and other providers to withhold their services.

That means sites like Google wouldn't show flagged sites in their search results, and payment processors like eBay's (EBAY, Fortune 500) PayPal couldn't transmit funds to them.

Both sides say they agree that protecting content is a worthy goal. But opponents say that the way SOPA is written effectively promotes censorship and is rife with the potential for unintended consequences.

Silicon Valley woke up and took notice of the implications when SOPA was introduced in the House of Representatives in October. But its very similar counterpart, PIPA (the Protect IP Act), flew under the radar and was approved by a Senate committee in May. PIPA is now pending before the full Senate and scheduled for a vote on January 24, though some senators are pushing for a delay.

Isn't copyright infringement already illegal? Yes. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act lays out enforcement measures.

Let's say a YouTube user uploads a copyrighted song. Under the current law, that song's copyright holders could send a "takedown notice" to YouTube. YouTube is protected against liability as long as it removes the content within a reasonable timeframe.

When it gets a DMCA warning, YouTube has to notify the user who uploaded the content. That user has the right to file a counter-motion demonstrating that the content doesn't infringe on any copyrights. If the two sides keep disagreeing, the issue can go to court.

The problem with DMCA, critics say, is that it's useless against overseas sites.

SOPA tackles that by moving up the chain. If you can't force overseas sites to take down copyrighted work, you can at least stop U.S. companies from providing their services to those sites. You can also make it harder for U.S. Internet users to find and access the sites.

But SOPA goes further than DMCA and potentially puts site operators -- even those based in the U.S. -- on the hook for content that their users upload. The proposed bill's text says that a site could be deemed a SOPA scofflaw if it "facilitates" copyright infringement.

That very broad language has tech companies spooked.

Sites like YouTube, which publishes millions of user-uploaded videos each week, are worried that they would be forced to more closely police that content to avoid running afoul of the new rules.

"YouTube would just go dark immediately," Google public policy director Bob Boorstin said at a conference last month. "It couldn't function."

Tech companies also object to SOPA's "shoot first, ask questions later" approach.

The bill requires every payment or advertising network operator to set up a process through which outside parties can notify the company that one of its customers is an "Internet site is dedicated to theft of U.S. property." Once a network gets a notification, it is required to cut off services to the target site within five days.

Filing false notifications is a crime, but the process would put the burden of proof -- and the legal cost of fighting a false allegation -- on the accused.

As the anti-SOPA trade group NetCoalition put it in their analysis of the bill: "The legislation systematically favors a copyright owner's intellectual property rights and strips the owners of accused websites of their rights."

Who supports SOPA, and who's against it? The controversial pair of bills, SOPA and PIPA, have sparked an all-out war between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. In general, media companies have united in favor of them, while tech's big names are throwing their might into opposing them.

SOPA's supporters -- which include CNNMoney parent company Time Warner (TWX, Fortune 500), plus groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America -- say that online piracy leads to U.S. job losses because it deprives content creators of income.

The bill's supporters dismiss accusations of censorship, saying that the legislation is meant to revamp a broken system that doesn't adequately prevent criminal behavior.

But SOPA's critics say the bill's backers don't understand the Internet's architecture, and therefore don't appreciate the implications of the legislation they're considering.
iReport: Share your SOPA view

In November, tech behemoths including Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Facebook lodged a formal complaint letter to lawmakers, saying: "We support the bills' stated goals. Unfortunately, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities [and] mandates that would require monitoring of web sites."

Where does the bill stand now? SOPA was once expected to sail quickly through committee approval in the House. But after a massive pushback from tech companies and their supporters, it's being extensively reworked. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has said SOPA won't come up for a committee vote as-is.

That means the bill could change a lot from day to day -- and one major tenet of the original legislation has already been removed. As originally written, SOPA would have required Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to sites that law enforcement officials deemed pirate sites.

But the White House said its analysis of the original legislation's technical provisions "suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity," and that it wouldn't support legislation that mandates manipulating the Internet's technical architecture.

The White House's statement came shortly after one of SOPA's lead sponsors, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, agreed to remove SOPA's domain-blocking provisions.

Smith's office says it's still planning to work through amendments to the bill, but his representatives declined to estimate how long that will take. They plan to resume revision of the bill in February.

A markeup process once expected to take days is now likely to last for months. As the outcry around SOPA grows louder, the bill's momentum in Congress appears to be fading.
0:00 / 2:36 What is SOPA?

What are the alternatives? One option, of course, is that Congress does nothing and leaves the current laws in place.

Alternative legislation has also been proposed. A bipartisan group of House members has begun drafting the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN), a compromise bill.

Among other differences, OPEN offers more protection than SOPA would to sites accused of hosting pirated content. It also beefs up the enforcement process. It would allow digital rights holders to bring cases before the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), an independent agency that handles trademark infringement and other trade disputes.

OPEN's backers have posted the draft legislation online and invited the Web community to comment on and revise the proposal.

SOPA supporters counter that the ITC doesn't have the resources for digital enforcement, and that giving it those resources would be too expensive. To top of page

First Published: January 17, 2012: 2:08 PM ET

http://lifeaftersopa.cheezburger.com/

I just called both the senators in my state... I don't know how that works... they asked for zip code and bill... do they really get the message? Both kids answering the phones were very polite, but quick to get off the phone so I didn't get to ask them.

What is PIPA?

PIPA is a poorly envisioned Senate copyright enforcement bill that will censor our Internet and kill jobs in the rapidly growing Internet industry. This bill (and its House counterpart, SOPA) were designed by lobbyists and are being sped through Congress with virtually no debate. Almost every Internet company has strongly come out against PIPA.

Why does this matter to me?

These bills threatens sites like Cheezburger, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and any others that rely on user participation. It will allow the government to censor sites and force companies to monitor your email and restrict websites that post or link to infringing content.

What can I do?

Call your Senator today and tell them to vote against PIPA. We have provided a list of phone numbers for each state below.
We don't like seeing this image. But this will be a reality under the Senate bill PIPA and its House counterpart SOPA.


January 17, 2012
http://lifeaftersopa.cheezburger.com/

The site lists the Senators and their contact information.

I do know that Vitter - LA has pulled his support because of the flood of calls to his office

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net...25557539_n.jpg

I googled my senators and PIPA... it seems John Cornyn has "urged congress to take a closer look" and based on contributions Kay Bailey Hutchison is likely going to vote for it... call your senators people, it is working on at least one in my state (and one in florida too but I only found that cause he's in the same article as Cornyn).

Well, I found a couple of quotes.

From Kay http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/H001016

Nov 3, 2011 Letter to constituent (Neutral)
"I believe copyright protection is a foundation for innovation. Intellectual property is the creative core of the information age. Patent and intellectual property ownership laws offer needed protection for the economic and other interests of inventors, entrepreneurs, performers, and other creative thinkers. These protections are also important to future growth and employment in important U.S. industries...Online promotion of counterfeit goods by foreign entities is also a growing concern. How to protect copyright, patent, and intellectual property rights - and do so without infringing on consumers' legitimate interests - requires dealing with a complex series of problems."
Source: OpenCongress letter

And from Cornyn
http://kfyo.com/senator-john-cornyn-...htful-process/

Cornyn is statement released Wednesday morning said, ” Texans have soundly rejected the ‘pass now, learn later’ approach that we saw with Obamacare, and the potential impact of this legislation is too far-reaching to ram it through Congress in such an abrupt way.

Stealing content is theft, plain and simple, but concerns about the internet and free speech necessitate a more thoughtful, deliberative process.”

The Chinese view of SOPA
By Evan Osnos | The New Yorker – 10 hrs ago

As members of Congress edge away from the Stop Online Piracy Act, leaders of the opposition can count among their most frequently used rhetorical tools a metaphor that has come to define this debate: SOPA = China.

The legislation would impose a “chilling internet censorship regime here in the U.S. comparable in some ways to China’s ‘Great Firewall,’” Wired wrote. Sergey Brin—who led G-Day, Google’s withdrawal from mainland China—said that the bills would “put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.” Rebecca MacKinnon, an Internet-freedom expert who used to be journalist in Beijing, says they would impose a “censorship mechanism that is almost identical, technically, to the mechanism the Chinese use to censor their Internet.”

So, how does it all look to the people who actually live with it? In China, the reaction to American protests has ranged from sympathy to gentle Schadenfreude, as Chinese Web users try to sort out whether they are being held up as victims or patsies or pirates. After several years in which American diplomats have inveighed against Internet censorship in China, the proposals have inspired a bit of snickering. “The Great Firewall turns out to be a visionary product; the American government is trying to copy us,” one commentator wrote. A Chinese message making the rounds on Thursday said: “At last, the planet is becoming unified: We are ahead of the whole world, and the ‘American imperialists’ are racing to catch up.”

Fittingly, perhaps, the discussion has unfolded on Weibo, the Twitter-like micro-blogging site that has a team of censors on staff to trim posts with sensitive political content. That is the arrangement that opponents of the bill have suggested would be required of American sites if they are compelled to police their users’ content for copyright violations. On Weibo, joking about SOPA’s similarities to Chinese censorship was sensitive enough that some posts on the subject were almost certainly deleted (though it can be hard to know). But among those that survived, a commentator known as Dr. Zhang wrote: “I’ve come up with a perfect solution: You can come to China to download all your pirated media, and we’ll go to America to discuss politically sensitive subjects.”

There are, needless to say, differences of degree. While Chinese sites censor references to Tiananmen Square, Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama and other third-rail political issues, the force comes not in the act of censorship, but in the instances when prosecutions follow: the Chinese woman sentenced to a year of reform through labor for retweeting a joke, or the student detained for forwarding what authorities called a “rumor” about the murder of eight village officials. (h/t Isaac Stone Fish at Foreign Policy.)

After Chinese Web users got over the strangeness of hearing Americans debate the merits of screening the Web for objectionable content, they marvelled at the American response. Commentator Liu Qingyan wrote:

We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics.

There was little expectation that Chinese Web sites would ever band together to express their opposition to censorship: “Baidu, would you dare do something like this?” one asked.

The most eloquent response to the controversy, perhaps, was one that nobody saw at all. Commentator Shi Han wrote about trying to post a comment to Tencent, the giant Chinese portal. “I’ve written a short article about SOPA. But when I tried to put it up, Tencent replied with a message: ‘Your content has not passed review.’”

http://news.yahoo.com/the-chinese-view-of-sopa.html

Protecting intellectual property doesn’t require SOPA, PIPA
By Amy Gehrt - GateHouse News Service Posted Jan 24, 2012 @ 11:22 AM

Advocates of a free and open Internet are celebrating a major victory.

Today was supposed to be the day the Senate was to hold a cloture vote on controversial legislation to curb online piracy, but last week’s massive Internet protests prompted lawmakers to rethink their plans. At least 75,000 websites, including online heavyweights such as Wikipedia, Reddit and MoveOn.org, went dark for 24 hours on Jan. 18 to call attention to the censorship threat posed by the Senate’s Protect IP Act PIPA and the House of Representatives’ own version of the bill, called the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Google, the most popular search engine in the world, stayed active but covered its logo with a black box and added the message “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the Web!” Clicking on the message link then took users to a page where they could read about the company’s concerns regarding the legislation — and where they could also sign an online petition, if they so chose. Seven million people in the U.S. opted to add their signatures, according to Google.

Other sites also posted messages and urged consumers to contact their lawmakers, which protest organizers say resulted in 3 million emails being sent to members of Congress. And Twitter reports that 2.4 million SOPA/PIPA-related tweets were sent out between midnight and 4 p.m. on the day of the protests.

Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced the PIPA vote would be delayed in the wake of what organizers call the largest online protest in history. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, quickly followed Reid’s lead and killed SOPA.

However, the fight is likely far from over. Major proponents of PIPA and SOPA, including the entertainment industry, pharmaceutical companies and other business industry groups, say intellectual property theft and the sale of counterfeit products cost them billions of dollars each year. I expect they will continue to devote their considerable resources and lobbying muscle to reviving these efforts on Capitol Hill.

I can even understand their frustration. Having someone take credit for someone else’s work, or make money off of it, is not right. My columns have frequently been posted on sites that do not have permission to do so –– perhaps the most memorable was when it was brought to my attention that a piece I wrote about then-Supreme Court justice nominee Elena Kagan had appeared on a number of pornography sites. The reason why still eludes me, and I imagine anyone on those sites who happened across it quickly moved on to more, ahem, titillating offerings.

The problem, however, is the way these bills were written. Those involved clearly had little to no technological know-how, by their own admissions, so allowing them to draft legislation aimed at keeping high-tech piracy at bay is a bit like asking me to step in and pitch for the Chicago Cubs during Game 7 of the World Series. “We really need people at the table who have the technical expertise about these issues, who can ensure that whatever bills are drafted have airtight, technically sound language, definitions and frameworks,” Erik Martin, Reddit.com general manager, told Reuters.

Seeking out experts when one is out of his or her depth seems like common sense to me, especially when writing legislation that will impact the entire country. But then again, common sense is one of many things the current Congress doesn’t seem to have an abundance of these days.

http://www.postsouth.com/opinions/co...uire-SOPA-PIPA

SOPA and Hollywood: Standing in the Way of Technological Innovation [INFOGRAPHIC]
By Charlie White | Mashable – 10 hrs ago

In case you're still unclear about the U.S. Congress's hapless SOPA legislation that went down in flames earlier this month, the Matador Network sums it up neatly with this angry infographic.

Once you've read this infographic about SOPA, you might become angry, too. That's because when you see the series of technological events that has led up to the present day, you'll start realizing that almost every innovation that came along has been seen by the motion picture industry as a threat to its existence.

Even more importantly, Hollywood has forgotten about how all that tech helped its industry, and has also forgotten the un-American activities blacklist that plagued Hollywood in the 1950s. Unfortunately, SOPA or legislation like it such as the ACTA (that's even more dangerous) could have a similar effect, serving as an Internet blacklist.

Despite the studio executives' awful record of predicting the outcome of tech innovation, new technologies have consistently helped the motion picture industry. The infographic will show you the details of the arm-twisting of movie studios and their political cronies, forever fighting the technology that ends up helping them. At the same time, the studios do their best to influence the political landscape to fulfill their desire for profits and power, regardless of what's best for their customers.

http://news.yahoo.com/sopa-hollywood...184643399.html

http://mashable.com/2012/01/29/sopa-and-hollywood/


http://7.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploa...nfographic.jpg