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(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.
3. Once blacklisted, it's DNS records are required to be removed from
all US servers. All US search engines are required to delist it. All US
financial institutions are barred from interacting with it (most
specifically payment processing and advertising services).
4. As far as I can tell, it is not possible to dispute the blacklisting
or have it removed, ever.
In other words, these laws give media companies the power to arbitrarily
remove any site from the Internet without any reason whatsoever. Or at
least, to stop anyone in the USA accessing said website.
You can /kind of/ see where the authors were going with this... If a
site is operated from outside the USA, you can't sue them. These bills
make it possible to block them instead. It kinda makes sense.
[This assuming you're not cynical enough to suggest that they actually
did all this on purpose and the "prevent piracy" thing is just a
outright lie.]
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...
I almost wonder: Maybe they wrote a ridiculously over-the-top bill just
to get everyone really outraged. And then they will write another, much
less outrageous bill and everyone will quickly accept that because it's
much better than the first one. Whereas if they'd produced that in the
first place, nobody would have swallowed it.
It remains to be seen whether either of these things will pass. It seems
to me that even if they do not, the likes of the MPAA and the RIAA will
continue to produce more bills like these until one of them actually
passes into law. It remains to be seen what effect if any a USA
blacklist would have on the rest of the world.
While these bills look like very bad news, the way people like Wikipedia
describe them could also perhaps be regarded as slightly over the top. I
mean, not to claim that these laws are a good idea, but let's get some
perspective here: If you don't use the Internet, these laws will have
*no effect* on you. If they were planning to make it legal to lock
Americans up without trial, *that* would be seriously disturbing.
Censoring the Internet is merely worrying.
Perhaps more frightening than the bills is what I was on Failblog. A
whole bunch of Twitter comments such as
"What the hell? Why is Wikipedia not working?!" (Um, it says why right
there on the page?)
"OMG, how can we fix it?"
And, most worryingly,
"If Wikipedia is gone for good, there's no way I'll survive college."
Now, OK, this is Failblog. At least 95% of its content is fake anyway.
Even if that last comment is real, the poster might have been joking.
But seriously. Are there really people so utterly dependent on Wikipedia
that they cannot hope to complete their studies without it? WTF?! o_O
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I have to say I like SOPA (soup) and PIPA (kite). Funny names for such serious
freedom threats.
BTW, you could easily get away with the wikipedia block by simply hitting ESC
just before it blacked out.
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On 19/01/2012 04:33 PM, nemesis wrote:
> I have to say I like SOPA (soup) and PIPA (kite). Funny names for such serious
> freedom threats.
Depends on your sense of humour. ;-)
> BTW, you could easily get away with the wikipedia block by simply hitting ESC
> just before it blacked out.
...or disable JavaScript, yes.
After all, they're not actually trying to stop you accessing the
content. They're just trying to make a point.
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On Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:56:30 +0000, Invisible wrote:
> If they were planning to make it legal to lock Americans up without
> trial, *that* would be seriously disturbing.
They already have that. It was part of the most recent defense
appropriations bill that was signed into law.
Obama issued a 'signing statement' saying that his administration
wouldn't use indefinite detention on American citizens, but there's
nothing to stop the next administration from doing that.
> Censoring the Internet is merely worrying
Maybe for you. We have this thing here in the US called "free speech"
which means that the government cannot pass laws that restrict speech
here. But SOPA/PIPA and similar laws (DMCA, anyone?) allow content to be
removed from the Internet (or would allow, in the case of laws not passed
yet) merely on the word of someone claiming copyright. The burden of
proof is on the alleged infringer, not on the alleged copyright holder.
Pardon me for saying this, but that's fucked up.
Because here in the US we *also* have something called "due process",
which ensures that we have a right to legal representation, a fair trial,
etc.
Except with these laws, due process is entirely circumvented.
The point of the protest yesterday was to raise awareness and get these
bills shelved.
And it was successful.
Jim
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On 19/01/2012 5:31 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> Maybe for you. We have this thing here in the US called "free speech"
> which means that the government cannot pass laws that restrict speech
> here.
Is that 100 percent true?
--
Regards
Stephen
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On Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:47:55 +0000, Stephen wrote:
> On 19/01/2012 5:31 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Maybe for you. We have this thing here in the US called "free speech"
>> which means that the government cannot pass laws that restrict speech
>> here.
>
> Is that 100 percent true?
Obviously not, since there are laws that restrict free speech.
But those laws violate the US Constitution (specifically, the bill of
rights). But to be removed, they have to be challenged.
Jim
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On 1/19/2012 8:56 AM, Invisible wrote:
> All US
> financial institutions are barred from interacting with it (most
> specifically payment processing and advertising services).
This part I didn't know, and is even more fucked up. The rest... isn't
enforceable, and is absurd anyway. Most truly illegal shit is being done
on "darknets" now, networks that either operate only indirectly through
the regular network, or any completely independent of it. Second, as
long as some DNS, some place, provides the IP data to get to a site, all
you need to do is have your machine look at *that* DNS site for the
data, instead of the closest one. So, that is out. Its trivial to set up
a DNS, so, everyone with a damn computer could be running a sort of peer
to peer like background task, kind of like folding at home, which does
nothing but feed DNS data to every machine connected to it, so that
*any* machine with that installed on it could be polled to get the
correct IP to connect to the site. The level of complete stupidity in
the bill is astounding, even if you ignore the fact that the morons in
Congress and the Senate that originally backed it, where claiming,
probably due to not knowing any better, that it was, "bringing online
law into parity with the regular laws", despite the fact that I have
*never* heard of a law that basically requires that all access,
information on how to find, GPS, road signs, etc., a business must be
"removed", until innocence is proven, because some asshole renting space
in the building was selling fake Pokemon cards, or printing T-Shirt with
Lucas Art copyright material on it, or even bootlegging entire DVD
collections.
Last I checked, the non-online laws requires the people, once they find
out about it, to a) inform the cops, and/or b) kick the bastards out of
their building, not serve jail time for having accidentally allowed them
on their property, or, even stupider, allowing them to post the address
of their illegal business on the public advertisement board, in the
hallway. Parity my ass...
And its only funnier that one of the idiots supporting this thing was
found to have illegally used a copyrighted image on his own government
web page over the last 24 hours.
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>> If they were planning to make it legal to lock Americans up without
>> trial, *that* would be seriously disturbing.
>
> They already have that.
OK. In that case, if I had the misfortune to live in America, I'd be
*way* more worried about that...
>> Censoring the Internet is merely worrying
>
> Maybe for you. We have this thing here in the US called "free speech"
More like "had", by the looks of things...
> The burden of
> proof is on the alleged infringer, not on the alleged copyright holder.
>
> Pardon me for saying this, but that's fucked up.
Yeah, whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? That's just
*wrong*. You shouldn't be able to punish people without one shred of
evidence of any crime.
> Because here in the US we *also* have something called "due process",
> which ensures that we have a right to legal representation, a fair trial,
> etc.
>
> Except with these laws, due process is entirely circumvented.
That's just wrong.
> The point of the protest yesterday was to raise awareness and get these
> bills shelved.
>
> And it was successful.
I'm not so sure about that... While I grant that many more people have
now heard about this (e.g., me), I'm not hearing anything about that
stopping this stuff actually becoming law. And even if these bills never
become law, surely the lobbyists will just keep bills like this coming
year after year until one of them /does/ make it into law...
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On 20/01/2012 04:44 AM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> On 1/19/2012 8:56 AM, Invisible wrote:
>> All US
>> financial institutions are barred from interacting with it (most
>> specifically payment processing and advertising services).
>
> This part I didn't know, and is even more fucked up.
Yeah, the idea is that if some illegal site operates off-shore, you
can't sue them, but you can still financially strangle them into
shutting down. I mean, assuming they make any significant money from the
US market in the first place...
> Second, as
> long as some DNS, some place, provides the IP data to get to a site, all
> you need to do is have your machine look at *that* DNS site for the
> data, instead of the closest one.
I don't care whether you delete the DNS record or block that IP address.
Sophisticated pirates can trivially circumvent such restrictions. If a
"web site" is hosting illegal stuff, you might plausibly be able to
block access to it. (Until somebody connects to a proxy outside America
- oops!) But if illegal stuff is on a peer to peer network, and all you
need is the IP address of any peer in the network in order to access all
the stuff... So, what, you're going to blacklist every peer in the
swarm? Good luck with that.
This isn't going to stop technical experts from pirating stuff. It /is/
going to stop the average, non-technical American from looking at stuff
that industry and government don't want them to look at. All that
scientific evidence about global warming... wouldn't it be convenient if
all that just quietly "disappeared"? Wouldn't that be nice?
> The level of complete stupidity in
> the bill is astounding, even if you ignore the fact that the morons in
> Congress and the Senate that originally backed it, where claiming,
> probably due to not knowing any better, that it was, "bringing online
> law into parity with the regular laws"
I do not know much about how US law works. (Hell, I don't know much
about how UK law works!) But I do wonder if the people behind this
*actually* believe it will work, or whether they know damned will this
will have no effect on piracy, and that's just a smokescreen in the
first place... Perhaps I have become too cynical?
> Last I checked, the non-online laws requires the people, once they find
> out about it, to a) inform the cops, and/or b) kick the bastards out of
> their building, not serve jail time for having accidentally allowed them
> on their property, or, even stupider, allowing them to post the address
> of their illegal business on the public advertisement board, in the
> hallway. Parity my ass...
Yeah, well, to some extent it comes from people's frustration that
foreign servers are helping piracy, and Americans can't sue them out of
existence. If you can't shut them down, censor them. There aren't too
many equivalents of that in the physical world.
> And its only funnier that one of the idiots supporting this thing was
> found to have illegally used a copyrighted image on his own government
> web page over the last 24 hours.
I can't comment on that...
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On Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:14:37 +0000, Invisible wrote:
>>> If they were planning to make it legal to lock Americans up without
>>> trial, *that* would be seriously disturbing.
>>
>> They already have that.
>
> OK. In that case, if I had the misfortune to live in America, I'd be
> *way* more worried about that...
Indeed, there has been some noise about that addition to the
appropriations bill.
>>> Censoring the Internet is merely worrying
>>
>> Maybe for you. We have this thing here in the US called "free speech"
>
> More like "had", by the looks of things...
What do you base that statement on? SOPA and PIPA are not actually laws
that are being enforced - they are just bills that are currently dead.
>> The point of the protest yesterday was to raise awareness and get these
>> bills shelved.
>>
>> And it was successful.
>
> I'm not so sure about that... While I grant that many more people have
> now heard about this (e.g., me), I'm not hearing anything about that
> stopping this stuff actually becoming law. And even if these bills never
> become law, surely the lobbyists will just keep bills like this coming
> year after year until one of them /does/ make it into law...
The BBC had a story about it on their website.
And sure, RIAA and MPAA are not done yet. They're currently engaged in a
smear campaign against companies like Google who pushed on this.
Jim
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