On 1/19/2012 10:56 AM, Invisible wrote:
> (Inevitable, isn't it?)
>
> OK, so a few days ago I hadn't heard of this. (Why would I?) Wikipedia
> was threatening to shut down for a day, in protest of a law which might
> shut it down. (Isn't that like opposing lower motorway speed limits by
> driving really slowly? Weird...)
>
> So for a day Wikipedia was gone. (Or rather, it appears, and then
> immediately vanishes.) QC had a big banner at the top. And XKCD was a
> petition as well.
>
> So what's this all about then? Well, according to Wikipedia (who,
> remember, are protesting this), these are new laws intended to stop
> online content piracy. (This is comparable to passing a law to try to
> make water not wet any more.) Obviously I haven't read the actual text
> of the bills. (I wouldn't understand a word of it.) But according to the
> sources I've seen, there are a number of problems:
>
> 1. If any website contains greater than zero items of illegal content,
> it can be blacklisted.
>
> 2. Proof is not required. A media company merely needs to /claim/ that
> illegal content is present, and the site will be blacklisted. There is
> no requirement to notify the site, nor to prove anything in any court of
> law.

Which is where I man the barricades.  The Spanish Inquisition ended 
centuries ago, and should not be brought back.

> The problem is that it seems to be laughably easy to blacklist
> something, absurdly hard for an innocent site to get itself off the
> blacklist, and lets not forget the best part: Any half-competent
> computer nerd can trivially circumvent the blacklist. So this is going
> to have *such* a big impact on piracy...

Actually, the laughably easy part is for a pirate site to register a new 
domain, spam out their new address to heaven and earth, and be back in 
business in, what, a day?

It is the stereotype of government solutions:  Give authorities an 
easily-abused power that will do little if anything about the problem 
that the law is supposed to combat.

Regards,
John

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