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When I first saw the Patriot Act, I though the name was
an oxymoron. It's proudly called the Patriot Act, when
in fact the law has turned America into a police state
Hitler would be proud of.
Now along comes another bill with one of those cute oxymoron names. It's called the Protect-IP Bill and sounds like it is going to protect us from cyber criminals, when in reality it will allow the government to flush the First Amendment down the toilet and censor the internet.
Letter: Protect-IP Bill is bad for free speech Posted: Wednesday, November 30, 2011 7:00 am The upcoming Protect-IP Bill being debated in the Senate is bad for the Internet, in fact it is bad for America. This bill, in essence, would allow the government to block sites they deem "dangerous." Sites that allow users to share data such as music or movies. This in itself is not bad. What's bad about this bill is the ambiguous wording, and strict laws it creates. Protect-IP simply prohibits free speech. The bill, had its creation been years ago, would have allowed the United States to block Wiki-Leaks when diplomatic cables were leaked. It would allow the government to shut down and sue YouTube due to copyrighted material. Worse, it would make sites responsible for what their users post, effectively eliminating the availability of free speech on the Internet. Other countries are comparing this bill to China's "great cyber wall" which prohibits words like "freedom" and "democracy." What is worse, is that the inner workings of the bill would not effectively cut out pirating, because it only blocks domain names. One could simply post the IP address and still get away. This mockery of a law limits free speech through the only true universal connection we still have left. Christopher Scott
Eric Schmidt Suggests Alternative To Online Piracy BillSourceProtect IP Act: Eric Schmidt Suggests Alternative To Online Piracy Bill MINNEAPOLIS — Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said Wednesday that it would be a mistake for Congress to approve Hollywood-backed legislation meant to combat online piracy because it would be ineffective and could fundamentally alter the way the Internet works. Companion bills before the House and Senate would allow copyright holders to go to court to compel credit card companies and online advertising companies, including Google, to cut off websites dedicated to distributing pirated material. Prosecutors would be able to get court orders forcing search engines to drop the sites. The House's Stop Online Piracy Act the Senate's Protect IP Act are backed by the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which estimates the cost of online piracy at $135 million a year. Internet giants Google, Yahoo, Facebook have come out against the legislation. In response to a question after speaking Wednesday at the University of Minnesota, Schmidt said it would be a mistake to adopt the bills' approach to fighting piracy. "The problem with the two bills is that they go after all the wrong problems," said Schmidt. Schmidt said some provisions in the bills were technologically difficult, including giving copyright holders the right to delete links from the Internet and criminalizing the indexing of the content by search engines. "There are a whole bunch of issues involved with breaking the Internet and the way it works," he said. Another big problem, he said, was that the bills won't work. He said the criminal activity would immediately move to different websites and continue. "The correct solution, which we've repeatedly said, is to follow the money," Schmidt said. "Making it more explicitly illegal to make money from that type of content is what we recommend." Finally, Schmidt said they violated free speech rights protected in the First Amendment. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the author of the Senate bill, disputed that in a statement released by his office Wednesday afternoon. "There is no First Amendment right to steal," he said. "This (bill) will protect Americans' intellectual property rights, which in turn boosts our economy and promotes American jobs." Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., has introduced a separate bill that would update current federal copyright law to make clear that streaming copyrighted material for commercial purposes can be prosecuted as a felony. A spokesman, Linden Zakula, said Klobuchar "hopes that Leahy and the House authors work to address the concerns about the larger bill." Schmidt spoke at the university's Humphrey School of Public Affairs. The university is one of the biggest users of the Google's free applications in higher education in the United States, with more than 90,000 Google email accounts.
Anti-Piracy Bills Enrage Web Freedom GroupsSourceThe SOPA Scoop: Anti-Piracy Bills Enrage Web Freedom Groups, Divide Congress Wednesday 30 November 2011 by: Mike Ludwig, Truthout Misuse of copyrighted content is a fact of life on the Internet. Everyday, YouTube users upload homemade videos with copyrighted songs and peers share files that could have originated from a torrent site like Pirate Bay. Now, imagine that the US government granted itself sweeping legal authority to shut down alleged pirate sites and intervene when web sites host any kind of content that infringes a copyright. Imagine web users facing felony charges for streaming copyrighted content without permission. Two bills aimed at fighting Internet piracy are currently making their way through Congress and would give the Justice Department such authority. The bill's proponents say the legislation could save the US economy billions of dollars and protect consumers from fraudulent products like fake prescription medicine. A growing movement of opponents, including members of Congress from both parties, claim the bill is an Internet job killer that would open a Pandora's box of legal actions that could cripple online innovation and entrepreneurship while putting anyone connected to pirated content under threat of legal action. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate have reopened the fierce debate over the government's role in regulating the Internet, and both bills could be up for a vote within months. A movement to stop the bills has gone viral online. Web companies like Mozilla, Google, AOL and Facebook have come out against the legislation. Both bills would allow the Justice Department to take down sites deemed to be "dedicated to infringing activities" and both the department and copyright owners would be allowed to sue alleged infringers. The bills also allow the Justice Department to demand that search engines, payment processors like PayPal, social media sites and service providers remove links and block access to targeted sites. In addition, SOPA would make the unauthorized web streaming of copyrighted content a felony carrying a sentence of up to five years in prison, a measure that prompted the American Censorship coalition to claim "singing a pop song on Facebook could be a felony." Broad language in both bills targets web pirates, but because many pirating sites operate outside the US and copyrighted content is mixed in with user generated media, a wide range of third-party search engines and sites would be forced into the legal process. Under SOPA, private companies could ask the Justice Department to force search engines and providers to remove links to infringing sites and demand social networking sites police and censor users. The authors of the bills claim that third-party sites could challenge court orders and would not have to police pirating beyond what is technically feasible, but opponents say big media and entertainment companies would be granted new legal tools to tie up smaller competitors in expensive legal battles and squash up-and-coming social media sites like Soundcloud and Tumblr. "SOPA and [Protect IP] would place a major burden on all sorts of sites that accept user generated content, but it's heaviest for innovators and smaller organizations that don't have large legal teams," said Parker Higgins, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Under SOPA or [Protect IP], these sites may never be able to get off the ground." Censoring user-generated media could drive consumers toward more conventional sources, and it turns out the entertainment industry is a big supporter of the legislation. Comcast, Viacom, NBC Universal and industry groups like the Recording Industry Association of America have all joined the US Chamber in Commerce in supporting SOPA. Together, these groups have contributed more than $3.9 million to top members of Congress. Sen. Patrick Leahy's (D-Vermont) introduced the Protect IP Act, and the television, movie and music industries are his second-biggest campaign donor group, donating a total of $371,806 since 2007, according to OpenSecrets.org. The entertainment industry is top SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith's (R-Texas) biggest donor with a total of $59,300 in contributions since 2011. But some lawmakers are wary of regulating the Internet in tough economic times, and bipartisan opposition to both bills is building in Congress, with leaders like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) coming out against the legislation in recent weeks. (Pelosi took a side via Twitter.) Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) recently told members of the House Judiciary Committee that their legislation is a threat to the Internet as Americans know it. "In other words, the wrong approach to combating infringement could fundamentally change the Internet as we know it, moving us towards a world where transactions are less secure, ideas are less accessible and starting a website wouldn't be an option for anyone who couldn't afford a lawyer," Wyden said. SOPA is expected to receive markups on December 15 in the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate could vote on Protect IP by the end of the year or in early 2012.
The Protect IP Act is worse than you thinkSourceThe Protect IP Act is worse than you think By Eric Pusey, Minnesota Progressive Project November 30, 2011 As I wrote about yesterday, the Protect IP Act that will be considered in the Senate very soon is a very bad idea. Aside from ending a free and open internet, aside from critically hampering our First Amendment rights, aside from giving multi-national corporations and politicians the ability to stifle any online speech they don't like, it doesn't solve the one thing it is supposed to fix. This is why I'm baffled that Sen. Al Franken (DFL-MN) is a co-sponsor of it. Sen. Klobuchar is, too, but I'm not surprised. She's been lousy on net neutrality and doesn't take stands on issues. On the other hand, Al has been a real champion of net neutrality and I'm still shocked about him supporting this. I still haven't heard back from Franken's office about why he supports it and what he thinks it solves. Here's the deal. The Protect IP Act is supposed to shut down websites that infringe upon intellectual property rights. But many of these sites are outside of the US. The Protect IP Act would not prevent this. [ No need to worry, Congress could probably care less. Emperor Obama will invade any country that lets people violate our silly unconstitutional laws. Human rights? Don't worry you ain't got no human rights unless Emperor Obama says you have human rights. International law? Screw International law, If the American Empire says it's international law, then it in international law. And if you don't like it Emperor Obama will bomb and invade your worthless country. ] Leaving aside the general issue of freedom of speech (which shouldn't be left aside, but I want to focus on the technical issues here), PROTECT IP and SOPA would prevent a long-standing security hole from ever being closed, and it wouldn't even work. (Daily Kos) In fact, the Protect IP Act would destabilize the internet security-wise. If you follow the link provided you can read all about DNS spoofing and how the Protect IP Act would really muck things up. But don't believe me, I'm just an IT geek for a living. Believe Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Sandia National Labs: It turns out that Rep. Zoe Lofgren also doesn't like the idea of DNS hijacking, and asked Sandia National Labs for its assessment. Sandia has a long history with the Internet and its predecessor, the ARPAnet. Anyway, Rep. Lofgren asked a number of questions that were very on point, and Sandia responded. You can see the response here. One gets the feeling that the good scientists at Sandia were most pleased to give her a most thorough and helpful response ("One staff member characterized the proposed DNS filtering mandate as a 'whack-a-mole' approah that would only encourage users and offending websites to resort to low cost workarounds"). In summary, PROTECT IP and SOPA would not only likely result in the destruction or at least grave damage to the Internet as a means for peer to peer communication (as opposed to top down spoon feeding of so-called entertainment), it would threaten the future of the Internet for secure commerce and communication of all sorts, and it wouldn't even work. Please contact your senators and representatives today to ask them to withhold their support for this atrocious piece of legislation.
The PROTECT IP Act Is Heading For a Senate Vote: Voice Your OppositionSourceThe Electronic Frontier Foundation and other public interest groups, including Public Knowledge, Fight for the Future, and Demand Progress are asking the public to call in to the Senate and voice their opposition to The PROTECT IP Act (the sister bill of the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act, or, SOPA). Both PROTECT IP Act and SOPA were drafted in order to stop online piracy with groups such as the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) heavily lobbying Congress for passage. It is believed by many, from Google to EFF, that blacklisting sites with pirated content will adversely affect the channels of communication used by activists, rebels and whistleblowers. While SOPA is stuck in committee, the under-the-radar PROTECT IP Act has been fast-tracked out of committee and is set to be rushed through a Senate vote, according to EFF. In the Senate, only Rand Paul, Maria Cantwell, Ron Wyden and Jerry Moran have voiced opposition to the bill. EFF provides some talking points for calling your Senator: Hello, my name is [YOUR NAME] and I am a constituent of the Senator.For a list of Senators who oppose and support PROTECT IP (complete with phone numbers), head over to EFF, and sign Demand Progress’ ‘Stop Censorship’ petition.
The Revolt Against Congress's New Internet Piracy ProposalsSourceThe Revolt Against Congress's New Internet Piracy Proposals When Congress introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act on October 26th, its sponsors hardly expected a tidal wave of opposition from Silicon Valley. After all, SOPA was billed as a less onerous version of the Senate’s Protect IP Act, passed out of committee earlier this year. SOPA and Protect IP are the latest proposals for combating so-called “rogue” websites–criminal enterprises operating outside the U.S. that traffic in counterfeit goods and unlicensed entertainment. Many pretend to be legitimate outlets for movies, music, prescription drugs, and luxury goods, often selling dangerous or defective products to U.S. consumers. Unfortunately, SOPA, also known colorfully as the E-PARASITE Act, was no corrective. SOPA is a sweeping new law, effecting a radical change to how governments and private parties could police Internet content and business innovation in the name of protecting copyrights and trademarks. Can Internet Lobbying Be As Effective As Money Spent In Washington? Kashmir Hill Kashmir Hill Forbes Staff Stop the Stop Online Piracy Act. Jesper Andersen Jesper Andersen Contributor While SOPA did fix a few technical errors in Protect IP, it also introduced new definitions, new standards of liability for third parties, a deeply flawed system of private enforcement, and a provision that makes a felony of posting YouTube videos with copyrighted music—even playing in the background. The House version was nearly twice as long as its Senate counterpart. (See my detailed analysis of the bill, “SOPA: Hollywood’s Latest Effort to Turn Back Time,” and my more modest recommendations for fixing Protect IP, “Five Essential Changes to Protect IP”.) But the biggest surprise in SOPA has been outrage from Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the technology community. While Protect IP drew strong concerns, it was mostly from those who follow Washington’s efforts to regulate the Internet—the usual suspects, including me. SOPA’s introduction, on the other hand, immediately spawned a tidal wave of protest, from engineers to entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and public advocacy groups, editorial pages and leading technology companies. (Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has been the leading voice of outrage here, posting almost daily on the campaign to stop both bills.) Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, eBay and LinkedIn sent a letter to the bill’s sponsors, who held one-sided hearings on the bill a few weeks ago. And just check out the Twitter stream to see how ordinary users feel: it’s at #SOPA. SOPA’s sponsors clearly overreached. Perhaps they hoped most people would be put off by the intentionally complex structure and obtuse language of the bill and not realize its true nature. If so, the gambit failed. Or perhaps not. In Washington last week, many analysts I spoke with believe that SOPA was intentionally drafted to look worse than its Senate counterpart; a worst-case scenario bill written to make Protect IP look modest by comparison. Rumors are circulating that Majority Leader Harry Reid will use the backlash against SOPA as an opening to push through Protect IP, which will, however, need to overcome a threatened filibuster by Sen. Ron Wyden (D, Ore). The “Worst of the Worst” –in the Proposed Legislation No one but the criminals, of course, would defend the brazen rip-off of copyright and trademark holders. Unfortunately, legislation touted as targeting only the “worst of the worst” has morphed into something far broader. If passed in their current forms, Protect IP and even more so SOPA would effect a dramatic redesign of the Internet, making it a much smaller and decidedly less innovative place for entrepreneurs and consumers. Neither bill should become law. For example, SOPA would allow the U.S. government to condemn “foreign infringing sites” by forcing Internet service providers to misdirect requests from consumers attempting to access them. Leading Internet engineers rightly note this provision won’t actually stop users from finding infringing content. It will, however, wreak havoc on crucial international efforts to make the global domain name system more secure, as former National Security Agency general counsel Stewart Baker recently pointed out. But that’s nothing compared to the most unsettling provision of both bills, which creates a new private right of action for rightsholders to force ad networks and payment processors to shut down websites “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property.” While that sounds simple enough, SOPA’s version of this “market based mechanism” is over 30 pages long. Read carefully, it gives copyright and trademark owners sweeping new powers to cut off websites—foreign and domestic—whose business models they dislike. For example, based on nothing more than a good faith belief that infringement is taking place on even “a portion of” a website and a failure by the operator to confirm “a high probability of the use of the site” to commit infringement, SOPA allows private parties can order payment processors and ad networks to cut all ties to the site simply by sending a letter. Can Internet Lobbying Be As Effective As Money Spent In Washington? Kashmir Hill Kashmir Hill Forbes Staff Stop the Stop Online Piracy Act. Jesper Andersen Jesper Andersen Contributor This death blow requires no court, no criminal investigation, no legal oversight of any kind. Recipients need not investigate the claims. If action isn’t taken within five days, the rightsholder can sue the payment processor or ad network in federal court, and request an immediate injunction. “A portion of” isn’t even defined; it could mean a single page or even a single post. (Federal judges are left to work out the details, technical and legal, in many gray areas of the drafts.) You can guess what any general counsel worth her salary would recommend when such a letter arrives from the MPAA or RIAA or major movie studio, record label, or publisher. Why risk litigation for what is likely to be a small customer or startup service? Especially when SOPA grants legal immunity for any actions they take in response to the letter. Had SOPA been in effect a decade ago, would Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have made it off the ground? Maybe not. Today, Twitter users post 2,700 tweets per second, some of which link to infringing content. Twitter can’t possibly monitor all those posts. And those who care about privacy and free speech wouldn’t want them to try. Lessons Unlearned That’s just a taste of the legal landmines in both bills, particularly SOPA. Maybe Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D, Ca.) wasn’t overreacting when she condemned SOPA as “the end of the Internet as we know it.” As outrage grows over this misguided and ill-considered legislation, let’s take a step back from the brink and see what, if anything, can be salvaged. First, what is the actual, demonstrable problem these laws are trying to solve? Is it specific foreign rogue websites, or is it any even technical violation of intellectual property rights? The bills’ proponents insist it is the former, but even the most casual reading of the drafts makes clear the targets are both unlimited and undefined. Can Internet Lobbying Be As Effective As Money Spent In Washington? Kashmir Hill Kashmir Hill Forbes Staff Stop the Stop Online Piracy Act. Jesper Andersen Jesper Andersen Contributor How serious is the problem of rogue websites, anyway? Of course no rights enforcement system is ever perfect, but is there any credible evidence that U.S. copyright and trademark abuse has reached the crisis proportions necessary to justify draconian new regulations? Even SOPA’s authors seem dubious of the doom and despair claims of the entertainment industry, recycled with the introduction of every new technology, from player pianos to photocopiers to VCRS. The House bill, for example, orders the U.S. copyright czar to analyze the extent and methods by which “notorious foreign infringers” are damaging the U.S. economy I applaud the study idea but not the timing. Until we know how much real damage is being done, as well as where and how, we can’t possibly draft effective legislation that balances the costs and benefits of tailored remedies. That analysis needs to take place before new rules are burned into law. It’s not as if rightsholders are defenseless today. Existing U.S. law, including the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, already provides a number of powerful tools for prosecutors and private parties to take down unlicensed content. These tools have proven to be both effective and cost-effective. Protect IP and SOPA, by contrast, create a dizzying array of new and untested weapons aimed randomly at poorly-defined problems that haven’t been studied or quantified. Each new remedy creates its own unintended risks for innovation, lawful expression, privacy and cyber security. As Sen. Wyden put it, SOPA detonates “a bunker-buster bomb when a laser beam would do.” A rising bi-partisan chorus has condemned SOPA. (Its supporters are also bi-partisan). That result could easily have been avoided. Over the summer, House leaders promised to clean up poorly-drafted provisions from a Senate version of the law introduced earlier this year. Many in the technology community offered carefully-considered alternatives. Instead, SOPA’s authors made Protect IP more dangerous. The House version adds alternative definitions, vague requirements, and open-ended technology mandates that require ISPs and other service providers to modify complex networks and systems to comply with undetermined future demands. Its authors seem to have little understanding for how the Internet works. Worse, they don’t seem to care. This is scorched earth, take-no-prisoners lawmaking. Never mind the collateral damage or civilian casualties. It’s especially disappointing to see this approach from the same Republicans who fought to reign in the Federal Communications Commission and their newly-enrolled net neutrality rules. The two efforts are dangerously similar. The FCC’s rules, like Protect IP and SOPA, undermine incentives for future innovations and subject entrepreneurs to the pre-approval of a federal bureaucracy. They favor one interest group (content providers in the case of net neutrality, copyright and trademark holders in the case of anti-piracy law) over another (ISPs in the case of net neutrality, technology companies in the case of Protect IP and SOPA). Both efforts wrap themselves in the flag of protecting consumers and jobs. But both are much more accurately efforts at winning in regulation what has proven difficult to achieve in the market. A majority of the House and a near-majority of the Senate saw net neutrality rules for what they were and voted to nullify them, falling just a few votes short. (Court challenges are already in progress.) Conservative lawmakers should apply the same skepticism to industry demands for sweeping new regulations to curb a few rogue websites. And Congress needs to change its approach. Regulation of dynamic, economy-growing technologies requires surgical precision. All the affected parties need to be part of the drafting and the debate, including the engineers who actually know how the technology works. The bottom line: We need to tailor narrow solutions that stop the flow of cash to foreign websites that flout the law. That’s the one salvageable idea deeply buried in the text of both bills. Everything else is just noise. What do you think of the proposed laws? Follow me on Twitter at @LarryDownes to keep up with the latest developments.
Here are some more articles on the police state Protect-IP Bill. |