Slashdot Mirror

Fascinating reading, thanks. It confirms my knowledge of the situation adding much interesting color. However, I can't see any dates in there later than 2003. Might it not be time to revisit the issue, perhaps with more than one guy's efforts (bright and insightful though he may be)?

FYI, this (bottom of the page) doesn't exist. I'll see if I can find it at EFF (they probably moved it in the interim).

Good intent, execution could use work. Try it this way next time:

At least make a donation to the EFF. (And consider checking the box to make a monthly donation.)

Not really. While some briefs support neither side, many parties have vested interests when their briefs were accepted. In this case, Google is bringing to the court's attention some of the arguments that the MPAA has used is not entirely correct, and the MPAA may have left out information the court needs to decide. They also spell out how this decision may affect them.

From wikipedia

An amicus curiae (also spelled amicus curiæ; plural amici curiae) is someone, not a party to a case, who volunteers to offer information to assist a court in deciding a matter before it. The information provided may be a legal opinion in the form of a brief (which is called an amicus brief when offered by an amicus curiae), a testimony that has not been solicited by any of the parties, or a learned treatise on a matter that bears on the case. The decision on whether to admit the information lies at the discretion of the court. . .The situation most often noted in the press is when an advocacy group files a brief in a case before an appellate court to which it is not a litigant.

It has never meant "this brief does not help me in any way."

From Capitol v Foster, this brief was submitted by American Association of Law Libraries, the ACLU, the EFF, and Public Citizen. In the brief, the groups argue that Capitol should be made to pay for attorney's fees as the the losing party and why it was important that they do so.

Except that thanks to the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, depending on when it was copyrighted and under what set of limitations, the company can just pull it back out of the public domain and claim another copyright on it. Gotta love our supreme court.

TLS does nothing to prevent your ISP from knowing which sites your are going to, only the data you are sending and receiving from them.

That's why I use EFF's HTTPS Everywhere . Neither my ISP, nor any other entity between my machine and destination address, have a legitimate need to examine the contents of my traffic. I'm astounded by the number of users here that don't prefer secure connections, as evidenced by number of http links to sites that support https.

This is one of the areas that the DMCA creates an illusory right. The law specifically states that the right to fair use, which includes time and format shifting, is not to be affected by the law. The law also prohibits anyone from assisting in removing copy protection.

The key is that the ability to remove the protection for fair use _must_ be available and reasonable for the average person who has paid for the product, or the right to format shift in accordance with fair use doctrine is purely illusory. This is pretty common, and when it comes up in contract law, it's pretty straightforward - you can't give illusory rights.

IA(of course)NAL, and even lawyers will disagree, but the law explicitly states a right (fair use) that is not to be altered, and then effectively alters that right by making it illegal for nearly everyone to obtain access to it.

I would like to see the law struck down - or at least the traffiking in copy protection removal devices and software removed for any fair use right, including personal use.

Just one minor nitpick: Fair use does not include format shifting. According the EFF Fair Use FAQ the legal basis for format shifting "...is not completely settled yet..."

I can see why it isn't settled yet. The proliferation of standards and viewing devices presents a golden opportunity for content providers. Content providers want to get paid as many times as they can for the same content -- that's simply good business. The idea is the same one that requires you to buy a ticket each time you watch a movie in a theater. As far as content providers are concerned, shifting your Blu-Ray content to your iPod is no different than paying for a ticket to see a movie and then staying in the theater to watch it again without paying again. Nobody argues that the latter is a fair use of your movie ticket; why should the former be treated any differently, if it has the effect on the content provider's bottom line? Content providers can (and should) do anything they can to protect such a lucrative market, and who can blame them?

These cases help to make Joe Sixpack/Kegpack afraid of downloading. And that does impact file sharing.

Not by any evidence it doesn't. The amount of file sharing going on more than doubled in the first three years after they started suing people.

Although I suppose by "impact" you could mean "publicize the existence of file sharing and make people hate the record labels enough to use it instead of paying."

EFF Urges Supreme Court to Take Stand on Abstract Patents

Holy hell, warn some of us at work before posting that. Not that I mind reading up on it, but one thing I don't want to look at (at work or at home) is another man's junk.

Try this one instead: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Erotic_electrostimulation
Better yet, install EFF's HTTPS Everywhere.

There's no good reason to expose as much plaintext as possible to as many hops and packet sniffers as possible.

The problem is convincing geeks to all give money to the same organization, on a consistent basis, even after said groups issues a press release they don't like.

Speaking of which, you all may be interested in this link and specifically the box that says "I want to donate this amount monthly."

Good Lord, what a wall of text. Yes, collusion. The telecoms had to be given retroactive immunity for breaking the law at the government's request. https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/07/09 . Further, the 2008 FISA revision had to be enacted to make legal what the President had been ordering illegally.

the Intelligence Community is not authorized to collect on US Persons, except where allowed by law or authorized by a properly adjudicated warrant from a court of law. I know people on Slashdot don't like to believe this, and prefer to imagine that the sole purpose of the Intelligence Community is spying on our own citizens instead of, you know, doing the jobs they've been charged to do.

If that is the case, then how do you explain this or this or this. Sorry buddy, but you have to get your head out of the sand.

Accepted an agreement with lots of restrictions regarding distribution through the app store

I think you might be surprised about what you actually agreed to.
You've already violated the license by publicly discussing it.
It also disallows app distribution by any means other than the appstore.

And, AFAIK, Apple can still blacklist your dev key and purge your app(s) from the phone.

[...] This doesn't prevent me from distributing anything through any other means, though.

If your dev key gets blacklisted, any apps signed by your key are nuked, regardless of how they ended up on the phone.
No AppStore required.

people build and sign the app themselves

In other words: no.
At least not without making a $100 donation to Apple (for the dev license) and not including the Mac they'll have to buy to run Xcode (vmware/hackintosh notwithstanding).
Understanding how to build/sign/deploy their own apps might help too.

Sounds a bit different from "Click a link to an APK (for Android) or JAD (for Blackberry)".
But hey, I'm happy that you're happy in the walled garden - but please don't try to lecture me about how "open" it is.

Both Astrolabe and (especially) their counsel were incompetent here. Counsel never even served Eggert and Olson after filing a complaint September 30th. IANAL, but I think that they had to do that by January, and I assume that that had something to do with the EFFs statement January 12th :

"Today, we’re taking the battle to Astrolabe, and starting the process for seeking sanctions under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.Rule 11 requires litigants to conduct a reasonable inquiry into the facts and law before filing any paper with the court. Obviously, that didn’t happen here. Astrolabe now has 21 days to withdraw its Complaint. If it doesn’t do so, the Rule 11 “safe harbor” expires and we’re free to ask the court for sanctions.

Jan 12 + 21 days is Thursday, February 2nd. I imagine that Astrolabe and their counsel dropped the suit to avoid these sanctions.

Entirely different cookies, and different browser, might be enough to look like a different user, but I don't think there's any way to be sure.

I do something similar - I tend to use Chrome, with a Private Browsing window for Gmail. The disadvantage of this is that it's still the same browser, the same version, the same OS, and so will have the same 'signature', which Google might make use of. The EFF have done some work on this kind of thing, with Panopticlick.

Let's trust an ad-serving company with a track record of intentional privacy violations and a publicly hostile attitude toward privacy rights to generate our passwords for us.

Ever wondered why Chrome bundled Flash despite dropping H.264 in the name of openness? Advertiser Flash cookies. Chrome is also the last major browser not to support the Do Not Track privacy feature. Google wants access to all your data because you are their product, and advertisers are their users.

Of course, trolls will probably accuse me of being a shill again, even though the facts are staring everyone in the face. I'll stick with Firefox and the PwdHash addon for secure password generation, thanks.

Let's trust an ad-serving company with a track record of intentional privacy violations and a publicly hostile attitude toward privacy rights to generate our passwords for us.

Ever wondered why Chrome bundled Flash despite dropping H.264 in the name of openness? Advertiser Flash cookies. Chrome is also the last major browser not to support the Do Not Track privacy feature. Google wants access to all your data because you are their product, and advertisers are their users.

Of course, trolls will probably accuse me of being a shill again, even though the facts are staring everyone in the face. I'll stick with Firefox and the PwdHash addon for secure password generation, thanks.

Yet some of their models were positive on the EFF tests.

http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/ has some magnified images. At 10x zoom I would guess the diameter is about 1mm, so maybe 0.1mm for the original dots...

...is a Mechanical Turk / crowdsourcing engine for distributedly nuking crap patents with prior art. Occasionally, specific bad tech patents reach notoriety on /. and elsewhere and the comment threads fill up with posts from geeks who have potentially credible examples of prior art. Some 80% of those don't really understand how to read a patent (not really their fault; they don't exactly teach this in school), but overall there's a good chance the discussion turned up something that would narrow the patent in question. However, that leaves many, many other bad patents lurking below the notoriety threshold.

How many here would sign up to a service where you could subscribe to feeds for your fields / areas of expertise (e.g. "video compression algorithms" or "input devices", etc.), see an individual top-level claim and filing date, and get paid to point out examples of prior art that you are aware of?

Prior Art databases exist, but with some issues. EFF's Patent Busting project is a good start, but there are relatively few patents to bust, and no one with the incentive (other than ideological) to finance a specific action. I bet a lot of companies would be willing to pay a more than fair bounty for information that nukes a specific problematic claim in a competitor's overbroad patent.

Wishlist features:
* A quickstart guide for laymen / "non-lawyer professionals" on how to parse patent claim constructions, how to determine if prior work exactly matches ("prior art"), or "teaches" (alone or in combination with some other pieces) or "renders obvious" a claim, even if not an exact match. It can't make participants into patent lawyers overnight, but many do not even know the basics, and those basics would improve the quality of prior art submitted.

* Advice/tools for determining effective priority date. There are plenty of things (provisionals, continuations, filings across various countries, etc.) that will bamboozle many casual patent-busters in deciding if a piece of art is "prior" or not.

* Random / Rainy day browse modes. Claim-a-day sent to your mobile?

(Before anyone thinks this would just create another tool that could be used for evil, remember that the patent office - presumably in any country - is not supposed to be granting patents for things that already exist in the first place... so correcting such a mistake is not really foul play.)

A while back, the EFF proposed a similar payout scheme which would allow pirates to voluntarily pay a monthly fee and the money would get paid out to creators who's work was pirated based on the number of downloads. It sounds a lot like the EFF's suggested plan.
https://www.eff.org/wp/better-way-forward-voluntary-collective-licensing-music-file-sharing

Ownership of media conveys more rights than licensing it, in that the First-Sale Doctrine is entrenched case law for hard product, wheras applying it to digitally streamed media is still subject to some legal churn, so only applies to those than can afford the tort. Also given current trends, first-sale rights are only likely to erode.

They played their hand right here. It isnt about actual harm its about control '.' RIAA also says it's 'virtually impossible' to prove that a site infringed willfully, as OPEN requires." what this tells me (we already know this here) is that it was never about protecting artists, it was never about doing the right thing, it was always about control

Yep. It's pellucidly clear at this point that they're less concerned about absolute profit and the "rights of artists", and more concerned about absolute control of content distribution. It doesn't even matter if they hold the rights to a particular work or not: they feel entitled to control where and how it is viewed, played or read, and to be in charge of (*cough*) revenue distribution (I use the term loosely.) A few years ago, one record company executive complained that Steve Jobs and Apple Computer were being selfish by keeping the profits from iPod sales. He said he was "still waiting for Apple to share out some of the profits from iPod sales." This on top of the fact that they were already receiving the lion's share of iTunes music sales, and making more money than ever before: why the man's head didn't explode on the spot still amazes me. Translating music-industry speak into a real language, it comes out more like this: "You stole our control of content distribution, you bastard, and we don't like that, so you should compensate us handsomely for it." Yeah, sure. Whatever you want to say about Jobs, he knew how to play hardball with the music industry.

Fact is, they've never forgiven the scientists and engineers of this world for many things ... the player piano, audio tape recording, the VCR, writeable optical media, DAT, flash memory, general-purpose computing and, of course, the Internet. Anything, a n y t h i n g, that they perceive as a threat they attempt to destroy, even though they've ultimately made billions on those technologies that they failed to suppress (such as the VCR.) You'd think their stockholders would have picked upon on that by now, and risen up to slay them. Regardless, given the opportunity the sociopathic Luddo-freaks running the entertainment companies of the world would eliminate most of the technological advances in consumer electronics for the past hundred years. They would do so in a heartbeat, with a grand sense of entitlement that would make lifetime welfare recipients look positively progressive.

The other problem with the content cartels and front organizations like the RIAA (well, one of many) is that they a. lie at every opportunity and b. have cried wolf so many times, for so little reason, that anyone with even half a functioning cerebral cortex will dismiss anything they say as the ravings of the psychotic weasels that they truly are. And I mean that sincerely: any individual or group that is willing to cause so much damage to legal systems around the world, to risk disrupting the greatest asset to modern civilization, the Internet itself, should be given a very public psych evaluation. Then they should be locked up until they realize how unimportant they truly are in the overall scheme of things. And then ... well, at that point they should probably be taken out back and shot.

"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." -- Jack Valenti, 1982 For decades Jack was the voice other Motion Picture Association of America. He led the charge to get the VCR made illegal.

When that man died and was undoubtedly cast straight down into the Pit I, for one, didn't shed many tears. Unfortunately, not much has changed since then either, other than that they've infiltrated more governments around the world ... different people, same mindset.

If this OPEN Act passes, RIAA won't be able to push for a more draconian version written by them because Congress will say "we already have an act for that". As it stands right now, they can whine that there is an immediate need to "do something" hasty and ream some of their own legislation through. Or perhaps they prever to do their legislation in secret via international trade agreements like ACTA and the recently uncovered TPPA (Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement).

Between ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, TPPA only in the past year, it seems there is a relentless barrage of fire against fair use that can only end bad for us.

I'd say this bundle is unnecessary for most GNU/Linux users (we have package managers) but still handy if we need to quickly deploy anonymizing software in a public machine.

It's better to use the bundle. Information is leaky, and you can easily forget to toggle some obscure configuration option and blow your cover. If anything, browser fingerprinting is an excellent reason to use the bundle. Everyone using the bundle should have the same fingerprint, so your identity is more obscure than if you used your daily work browser which is probably identifiable.

Tor started off as a stand alone application. Then they started distributing the torbutton plugin, and deprecated the stand alone applicaion because it was too leaky. Now torbutton is deprecated because that was still too leaky. I expect this Videla bundle to be deprecated eventually, and they'll distribute VMs with browser, proxy, plugin and full disk encryption already enabled. That should be as leak free as possible.

Think those are bad? Look at what's next in the pipeline (makes them pale in comparison): https://www.eff.org/pages/trans-pacific-partnership-agreement

It's not really to the detriment of the majority of customers, most customers don't care about dual booting and those who do will buy a device capable of it instead.

No, back in the day I've seen phones which had crippled bluetooth so you couldn't send things like pictures you had taken with the camera. They wanted to charge for data over their network. A non-tech savvy customer mightn't know enough to complain about stuff like that but they are definitely still affected. A good example is the original iphones not allowing tethering.

Consider that you printer may be spying on you https://www.eff.org/issues/printers and how many people have used their phones to do things like record police misbehaviour. I think there is a real need for people to really own their devices whether the majority of customers are aware of it or not.

Oh, you mean the very same EU Data Retention Directive that has been condemned by the EU's own data protection authority, slammed by legal experts and is currently under evaluation within the European Commission and which, after being found in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights in Romania and staggeringly overpowered in Germany, will probably be either restricted so severely it will not matter much anymore or, if enough political pressure can be built in time, completely taken back.

Yeah, looks like a winner to me to introduce into your country now.

Page 3 reviews Comodo Dragon. What it doesn't mention is that if an HTTPS site uses a certificate that's domain validated, Dragon raises a warning "that the organization operating it may not have undergone trusted third-party validation that it is a legitimate business." Might this just be a way to threaten small-time webmasters, especially those who only started offering HTTPS to join EFF's HTTPS Everywhere initiative or to offer user accounts without running the risk of getting Firesheeped, into buying pricier EV certificates?

Incorrect. If there is a legitimate reason for the act that is not spoliation, it's not a crime.

For example, most companies I've worked at the past ten years introduced or substantially revised their corporate wide "data retention policies" to cut back on how long they kept data (esp. email) that they were not legally required to keep longer or which business needs didn't dictate keeping longer (for example, records of ownership of property owned for decades). The companies of course claim this is to reduce storage and administrative costs -- this is mostly a lie, but no one can prove that beyond reasonable doubt. The fact that every one of these particular companies instituted or dramatically revised/enforced these corporate wide policies within months of a round of scandals (I think it was the Enron debacle but I don't recall for sure) is, of course, a mere coincidence.

See here for a fairly frank discussion.

The anti theft mechanism described is not, I think, unreasonable for security reasons. It would be the prosecution's job to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was done to destroy evidence, not to protect sensitive from release/use if the computer was stolen. The only serious challenge I see right off the top of my head is explaining (although it's not the defense's obligation to explain anything, sometimes it's necessary to counter the prosecution's explanation) why the data was important enough to protect from unauthorized release but not important enough to back up somewhere.

What degree of anonymity are you looking for? Exactly which of the HTTP request headers do you wish to be anonymized? Okay so your proxy is not passing on your IP address. So It's not passing on common proxy behaviours (like HTTP 1.0 requests). And there's no 'proxy' anywhere in the request. You're not even using TOR. Well done. Now check Panopticlick. You're not anonymous. Now exactly what kind of proxy where you looking for and what kind of anonymity were you looking for?

Whenever someone files a false DMCA claim they are guilty of perjury (which carreis a 5 year jail term). So when Viacom went after YouTubers who were covered by the fair use provisions, Viacom committed perjury, but nobody pressed charges against Viacom.

I'm not so sure. If you read the relevant section of the DMCA Sec 512 (c)(3)(a)(iv) it says "A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed." That sure sounds like the perjury penalty only applies if the complaining party is not authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder.

i.e. You can lie as much as you like when alleging copyright infringement. You just have to be sure that whatever it is you're alleging was infringed, you hold the copyright to or the copyright holder has authorized you to act on their behalf. If the perjury penalty applied to both clauses, it would've been at the beginning of the sentence. i.e. "Under penalty of perjury, a statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and that the complaining party is authorized..."

OTOH, if you contest the DMCA takedown notice, you do so under the penalty of perjury. (Sec 512 (g)(3)(C)) BTW, this is one of the reasons why the DMCA is a terrible law. A good law respects the rights of both the accuser and the accused.

Look at the Business Software Alliance Members

Why would Microsoft and Apple buy Hollywood companies to kill those bills when when they agree with SOPA and PIPA? I don't see them on any of the "companies that oppose SOPA and PIPA" lists. Copyright is even more important for Microsoft and Apple (and the other members of the Business Software Alliance).

I sort-of agree with the article, but unfortunately the game producers (which IMHO are the successors to Hollywood entertainment complex) tend to support those bills! Electronic Arts supports it directly (instead of hiding in the Business Software Alliance, and pretending that they don't support it).

The real problem here is the open floodgates of money (and corruption) since the "Citizens United" Supreme Court ruling that Corporations can contribute unlimited quantities of money to any politician. Congress or these people need to update the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform law to limit corporate donations to those of an individual. As an individual, I cannot contribute unlimited quantities of money to a politician, so why should a corporation be able to? I don't expect congress to act on this, since they are the recipients of this new orgy of cash.

We need to lobby congress ourselves, or at least donate to these people to lobby on our behalf, in opposition of these bills.

DMCA is an abomination, and these bills take it to the next level of absurdity. There are no technical or legislative measures that can ever prevent all piracy! These MegaCorporations have already eroded our fair use rights with DMCA. They are already censoring free speech and shutting down fair use, with unwarranted DMCA takedown notices. There are no checks and balances to their power, and now they want to turn every citizen of this country into a felon. Enough is enough!

We could kill these bills with two amendments. The first one would be to require a different copyright symbol to apply the new law to a copyrighted work (or a company could go "all in" with all of their copyrighted works). This would be an opt-in arrangement. The second amendment would be to make any copyrighted works subject to these laws have an expiration time of one year from the copyright date. This would kill or neuter the bills. No copyright holder in their right mind would permit their works to expire in one year, even if they had one year of guaranteed "no piracy."

The next thing we need to do is to repeal the CTEA that will effectively make copyright permanent. In its place, the government could put in place a law where copyright extensions are possible, but with a fee that doubles every year, starting at USD $1M per year (from the original pre-CTEA copyright expiration dates). Given the small number of copyrights that this would apply to, a government-run website could easily disseminate a list of works that have had their copyrights extended, such as the original Mickey Mouse Cartoon that caused the CTEA to be enacted. Our government could certainly use the money! All other works not on that list (that have expired due to the original time limits) would then become part of the Public Domain! Copyrights were never intended to be "forever."

If that's true then the EFF is being misleading in their One-Page Guide to SOPA, which says in part:

Under SOPA, corporations could send notice to a site's payment providers, requiring those partners to cut the site off ...

So perhaps I'm misinterpreting the EFF's guide but it looks like this is similar to the take-down notice, direct from copyright holder to payment provider without passing through a court and due process and all that.

Could you give a reference to what in SOPA requires a court order? I'd like to read it.

If you are in Europe then contact your MEP about ACTA. Which has similar problems to SOPA and PIPA.
If you are in the UK you can do so easily at writetothem.com.
More info here and here.

"Everyone" may have the tools to broadcast details, but if the mainstream media do not bring it to attention of the masses and takedown notices can keep it out of the online limelight, then only the "fringe" will every hear about it - and so no meaningful political consequences. This latest news about urinating on dead Taliban smells like textbook spin to hide even worse news in its shadow. Control of the news re: war is exactly why the government and pro-goverment media is coming down so hard on the foremost US political prisoner of conscience, Bradley Manning and the rouge publishing site Wikileaks. They are successfully influencing the majority public opinion against the first bit of real solid news to escape the lockdown control of public debate since the Vietnam war. Note: Leaking of sensitive information is obviously NOT why he is being persecuted - more sensitive leaks go without investigation all the time. There is some hope however, with some new professional investigative news channels springing up funded by viewer donations... just need to build their audience - if possible.

The problem with this theory is that organizations that support privacy and corporate vs. consumer balance, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), tend to oppose such tactics and are loathe to use them.

Unfortunately, the only thing likely to get big money out of Washington if forced publicly funded elections with long prison terms for any persons or organizations that try to subvert the process. The big problem is that the people who would have to approve this change are the very same people that benefit from the current system.

Meanwhile, under the provisions of various US laws and policies your iPhone on a US network can still be wiretapped and information accessed.

https://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying

You said it yourself, the US NETWORK is what is tapped. Apple is not a phone network in the US or anywhere else.

The wiretaps are done at the phone company. AT&T even admitted such and it was covered on slashdot multiple times. You trolled that thread too so you are well aware of it.

The US government doesn't need a backdoor in any phones, the data is intercepted and logged at the phone company, and the government has retroactively indemnified them of any wrong doing.

So I'm supposed to say good job to Apple for standing up against the Indian government (which is really no concern of mine) while bowing to the slightest pressure of the US police state?

No you are supposed to say good job Apple for for not bowing to anything you have claimed. But you're too pissed off at their success to bother with pesky facts and the truth, as normal.

Here is the l7-filter rule:

# Tor - The Onion Router - used for anonymization - http://tor.eff.org/
# Pattern attributes: good notsofast notsofast
# Protocol groups: networking
# Wiki: http://protocolinfo.org/wiki/Tor
# Copyright (C) 2008 Matthew Strait, Ethan Sommer; See ../LICENSE
#
# This pattern has been tested and is believed to work well.
#
# It matches on the second packet. I have no idea how the protocol
# works, but this matches every stream I have made using Tor 0.1.0.16 as
# a client on Linux.
#
# It does NOT attempt to match the HTTP request that fetches the list of
# Tor servers.

tor
TOR1.*

US mobile phone backdoors are pretty well documented. Not hypothetical.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/surveillance-shocker-sprint-received-8-million-law

While it might not be exactly your situation, you can probably find 90% of what you need from the EFF. If you need more specific information, you will probably need to ask real counsel.

This simple act underscored a problem possibly bigger than SOPA: the fact that as with far too many of our elected officials, technology legislation isn't even on his radar.

I don't think you understand SOPA. SOPA isn't a problem with Technology. It's not going to physically break the backbone routers we need for the internet. It's not going to present technological challenges. What it's going to do that is a problem is rape free speech, make user-generated content (like what I'm doing right now) nearly impossible and on par with China's arcane policies as well as a number of other things. It threatens uploading content, it threatens internal networks, it threatens open source software, it threatens DNS, DNSSEC and internet security. And the worst part is that it's going to be completely ineffective at what it aims to do!

You don't need to understand technology to read the pieces on how this is a direct assault on free speech. Screw their understanding of technology, frame this piece of shit legislation as a direct assault on basic civil liberties! Let them chisel into stone memos about their dry cleaning, who cares if they don't use e-mail. Just make sure they understand that this is first and foremost diametrically opposed to free speech when you simply consider the internet as a means of communication and expression!

The best we can do for the short term is to throw everything we can behind legislation to reinstate the OTA (Office of Technology Assessment). From 1974 through 1995, this small group with a tiny budget served as an impartial, nonpartisan advisory to the U.S. Congress on all matters technological.

Another government office or agency? Man, don't we have enough of that bullshit as it is? I think you're deflecting and focusing on something that will sidetrack us from getting this crap shut down. Call your representative and senators and tell them that you feel that your First Amendment Rights are being threatened by H.R. 3261 and forget trying to lecture them about how DNSSEC works.

You want to effectively stop this? Here's a commercial I'd like to see Google air on national TV:

*woman sits behind bars with a look of remorse on her face*
Woman: I uploaded a video less than half a minute long of my toddler dancing to music on Youtube.
*clip of cute toddler jamming out to some pop music plays*
Woman: The video went viral. Then I received a letter in the mail from lawyers saying I owed them the cost of that song for every view. Instead of just taking it down, I'm now in a criminal lawsuit facing bankruptcy and jail time. Please call your representative to stop SOPA and prevent this from happening to thousands of people.

Fight fire with fire, 15 second ad. Let's see it, Google.

+1 for gandi.net. Just transferred my domains over to them as well. Their interface is clean, intuitive and their service is good (I used them in the past for hosting). Also, since I'm based in Europe, they are my preferred choice of European registrar compared to the others I checked.

They are also EFF's registrar: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/moveyourdomain-protest-internet-blacklist-bills

Due to the truly amazing amount of information in your post that is inaccurate, I assume that you are either
1) a troll, or
2) 13 years old ...nevertheless, I'll provide some answers. Maybe it will be helpful for the OP.

Did the guy mention that he copyrighted his work? If he put it out there with nothing indicating that, there's an argument that he put it into the public domain,

If you don't trust me, how about the US Copyright Office?

Q: Do I have to register with your office to be protected?
A: No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section “Copyright Registration.”

You go on...

If someone is violating the GPL license and selling a modified version of his work, I'd recommend he contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who can help defend him, most likely free of charge.

While the EFF are a bunch of hoopy froods who protect our rights in cyberspace, they are certainly not the first people I'd contact about a GPL infringement. They're not even the 4th or 5th on my list.

Here's my list:
1) GPL-Violations.org - Volunteers, knowledgeable folks who will answer your questions pretty quickly
2) The SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) - Volunteer lawyers (much slower to respond due to demand, but they know their stuff)
3) The Software Freedom Conservancy (if you want to align your FOSS project with a "non-profit home and infrastructure for FLOSS projects.")
4) The Free Software Foundation, if you have a specific question about some of their GPLed software
5) Bradley Kuhn, Harald Welte, etc..

Jesus... It's amazing what crap a first poster can say.

Have you even read the text of the GPL(v2) ?

No, you can not sell GPLed software you didn't write, though you may charge a distribution fee, and you must provide a way to access the source code you're distributing. If some a-hole is charging $50-ish bucks for your software, take him down.

Here's an exact quote from the on the FSF's website:

Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money? (#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney)

Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)

When you mention a "distribution fee," I believe that you're talking about clause 3(b) of the source requirement of the GPLv2 (relevant section italicized):

b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

Section 3(b) is talking about a requirement to provide source code to people you've already given binaries. You can still charge them a bunch of money up front for initial access to the program.

It's not always easy to understand parts of the GPL, and the GPLv3 made the whole darn thing a bunch

False. Why don't you read their reasoning itself rather than make up ideas?

(this from someone - me - thinks the whole bitcoin system is a worthless construct)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/eff-and-bitcoin

It's tax deductible.

To donate by sending a check: 454 Shotwell St, SF, CA 94110

Donate online.

Good things they've done.

Geez, you really haven't been paying much attention, have you?

An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress

Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively.

Blacklisting Provisions Remain in Stop Online Piracy Act

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) urged panelists to remove the DNS and firewall aspects of the bill.

Rep. Mel Watt (D-North Carolina) said he was not a technological “nerd,” but said he did not “believe” security experts who said that the internet would become less secure unless Issa’s amendment was adopted. “I’m not a person to argue about the technology of this,” Watt said before he voted against the amendment. Issa’s amendment failed 22-12.

Congressional SOPA hearings: no opponents of the bill allowed
Nov. 15

As the House of Representatives opens hearings on SOPA, the worst piece of Internet legislation in American history, it has rejected all submissions and testimony from public interest groups and others who oppose the bill.

        Irony Alert: The House is holding hearings on sweeping Internet censorship legislation this week -- and it's censoring the opposition! The bill is backed by Hollywood, Big Pharma, and the Chamber of Commerce, and all of them are going to get to testify at the hearing.

        But the bill's opponents -- tech companies, free speech and human rights activists, and hundreds of thousands of Internet users -- won't have a voice.

There is plenty of commentary by tech people out there on the detrimental effects to the internet by SOPA and PRO-IP. Just fucking google it.

The Electronic Frontiers Foundation has always pleased me. It doesn't give the sense of helping the underprivileged, admittedly, but they are working to improve the future for everyone. If we don't pull out of our rapid dive into censorship and authoritarianism, we will significantly hobble future generations from all economic castes.

There's a bit of mental gymnastics there, to be sure, but to me it is valid. JM2C

Exactly. If they weren't just yanking down whatever the fuck they wanted to with impunity then there would be no issue. There isn't even a human being involved in the process as it is used now, a computer program scans for matches, and if something hits, it's automatically pulled down, even when it is clearly Fair Use. They obviously are abusing their power to pull videos without considering whether it is legally infringing or not.

I understand your outrage, but you've overgeneralized it past any point of accuracy, let alone usefulness. What you're saying is simply incorrect. Don't believe me? Ask the Electronic Frontier Foundation for starters, which is a (gasp!) corporation.https://www.eff.org/about

Non-profit corporations are every bit as much corporations as are for-profit corporations. By definition, corporate charter, and law the overriding mission of these CORPORATIONS is to actively accomplish some sort public good. US nonprofit corps currently control ~1 trillion dollars, and last stats I saw indicated they disseminated about $50 billion in *direct* financial support annually (this doesn't include the public services they provide.) This isn't some uninformed romantic fantasy; it's reality. There isn't a lot of profit in public services, yet 501c(3) corps and related foundations do indeed "band together and fund" all sorts of efforts that, while financially unprofitable, serve some actual good.

Grandparent was both correct and informed: the corporate form *is* a powerful type of group organization, and it can be used for good or evil. It can be abused, and obviously is, has been before, and will in the future. It is also a form that can be used to diminish or even eradicate the influences of the worst of the for-profit corporations.

This is because, again, a corporation is a form of group organization to achieve a common goal, and that goal doesn't *have* to be profit.