New Legislation Would Crack Down On Online Piracy

GovTechGuy writes "Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee unveiled new legislation to combat online piracy on Monday that gives the Department of Justice more power to shut down websites trafficking in pirated movies, films or counterfeit goods. The new bill would give the government the authority to shut down the sites with a court order; the site owner would have to petition the court to have it lifted. The judge would have final say over whether a site should be shut down or not. Business groups including the US Chamber of Commerce hailed the legislation as a huge step forward."

Comments

Bye Bye EBAY

[vlm]

shut down websites trafficking in ... counterfeit goods

Bye Bye EBAY, and good riddance

Re:Bye Bye EBAY

[Anonymous Coward]

The government isnt going to shut down sites backed by the almighty $$$

But your movie blog is gone the first time you give a bad review.

Your political forum is shut down the first time some kid quotes 1984.

Etc, etc..

Re:Bye Bye EBAY

[houstonbofh]

No, they will just move overseas like everyone else. Get used to changing .com to .se or .es over the next few years...

Re:Bye Bye EBAY

[sarx]

But your movie blog is gone the first time you give a bad review.

Your political forum is shut down the first time some kid quotes 1984.

Etc, etc..

Do you have any evidence of this? I don't see how it follows from the article, so it sounds like paranoia, and I'll regard it as such until I have any evidence at all to back it up.

Re:Bye Bye EBAY

[EdIII]

Yes.......... but how?

When a website is "taken down" on a U.S based server that does not mean it is dead. Far from it. What happened was the hosting company shut it down due the court order. There are some hosting companies that will refuse based on principles.

Now let's say that the site owner is risking contempt of court if they move the website out of the U.S jurisdiction. Maybe they will get the site started up under somebody else? Sell all the corporate assets to a foreign company for $1.

I guess what I am getting at, is that shutting down a website has not been incredibly effective when the principles involved and hosting is not inside the U.S. Just how long will it take before the Justice Department can get a court order to interfere with the DNS records of allegedly infringing websites?

Manipulation and control over the DNS is what is ultimately required to do anything effective. This law will just drive all the businesses outside of the U.S, just like the DMCA has driven a lot of businesses outside as well.

It will be DNS too, since the Great Firewall of Freedom will be more expensive then the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined and even less effective.

Talk about a wonderful day for hosting providers huh?

Re:Bye Bye EBAY

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it's not even a law, obviously, there is no evidence to support any of the GP's claims. And yes, it's just paranoia. You can trust the government. It has never let you down, right? Any dissenters should be put in jail anyways.

Re:Bye Bye EBAY

[Anonymous Coward]

Different AC here...

Are you saying you can't envision a scenario where a law is used as carte blanche for censoring speech, shutting down competitors, and generally being a nuisance?

Become familiar with DMCA takedown notices, for starters.

Re:Bye Bye EBAY

[c6gunner]

Do you have any evidence of this?

You must be new here ....

Re:Bye Bye EBAY

[Lumpy]

sorry, you did not read the bill. It has a special section that exempts rich people and corporations that fund reelection campaigns.

If you make less than $250,000.00 a year you are one of the dirty disgusting thieves that needs a good water-boarding at gitmo to teach you your place. Everyone else is the holy ones that only make innocent mistakes.

Ebay will never be shut down even if they start trafficking stolen organs. They have enough money to pay the police to look the other way.

Re:Bye Bye EBAY

[Lumpy]

There are a large number of outright bought or party line judges. Texas is full of horrible evil judges. There are plenty elsewhere in the country as well.

Re:Bye Bye EBAY

[TooMuchToDo]

I own a small hosting company. We have operations in the US, Europe, and Asia. Each operation is owned by a seperate corporate entity. Chance favors the prepared.

Re:Bye Bye EBAY

[freedom_india]

Safe Harbor protects large corporates. Only.

Re:Bye Bye EBAY

[mpthompson]

Yeah, DNS is the lynchpin. And I gotta wonder to what extent DNSSEC consolidates lockstep control over DNS servers.

Well, according to this Wired article, court control of the DNS servers is just about here:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/justice-department-piracy/#ixzz10Aeo5Tmt

Quite frankly, I'm surprised this isn't bigger news here at SlashDot than the originally linked article.

Governmental Takeover?

[Sonny Yatsen]

Ever notice the same people who call Net Neutrality a government takeover of the internet are usually pretty quiet whenever somebody in Congress proposes a law that'd allow them to block or shut websites down?

Re:Governmental Takeover?

[spun]

Cool, so I can break into your website and deface it? Start a smear campaign against you claiming you are an ex Nazi who likes having sex with dead relatives? Break into your online bank account and steal your money? Admit it, you want at least some government regulation of the Internet. Unless, I don't know, maybe you want a lawless old west where groups like Anonymous can wreak havoc unmolested by evil government types.

Re:Governmental Takeover?

[jewishbaconzombies]

Just plant child porn. He'll be sharing a cell quicker than you can say "club fed".

Re:Governmental Takeover?

[causality]

Cool, so I can break into your website and deface it?

That's what securing your systems is for. The toughest possible law in the USA against unauthorized entry/access won't stop someone outside your jurisdiction doing this as the Internet is a global network. You take resonable steps to secure your systems or you're an irresponsible admin, it really is that simple. For better or for worse, no law is going to change that.

Start a smear campaign against you claiming you are an ex Nazi who likes having sex with dead relatives?

Supposing the person is within jurisdiction, existing libel laws would already cover this. The medium (newspaper, TV, Web site) should be irrelevant. If they are out of your jurisdiction, what were you going to do about that anyway?

Break into your online bank account and steal your money?

That's fraud and/or theft. The medium should be irrelevant.

Admit it, you want at least some government regulation of the Internet.

No discrimination on the basis of destination or origin sounds good to me. For the reactionary types out there who like to knee-jerk, traffic shaping that prioritizes traffic type such as VOIP does not need to consider the destination or origin.

Unless, I don't know, maybe you want a lawless old west where groups like Anonymous can wreak havoc unmolested by evil government types.

I like that better than excessive government control. I'm not going to say that such things are perfectly fine. They aren't. They just aren't as bad as the immense distrust the federal government has soundly earned.

Incidentally, if you refer to an attack Anonymous made against a certain "church" then it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people. While I don't agree with the methods used, some groups seem to think they're untouchable and an occasional reminder that they aren't isn't a completely bad thing.

Re:Governmental Takeover?

[causality]

I'm not arguing for this new law. I am arguing against the idea that all regulation is bad. Nobody actually thinks that, but they say it anyway. People just don't think of regulation they like as "regulation."

There's a seemingly small but significant difference. Usually "regulation" connotes guidelines for a practice that you do want to allow, but need to place boundaries on, like trading stocks or selling pharmaceuticals. Whereas standard law enforcement usually concerns practices you don't want to allow at all, like fraud and theft.

That's why there was only one item I actually filed under the heading of "regulation" in my previous post. That would be a simple law stating that ISPs and carriers may not discriminate on the basis of destination or origin. This would be a regulation, as we do want ISPs to transmit IP packets and this rule would set boundaries on how they may do so. Every other concern mentioned was either basic law enforcement or the difference between a responsible admin and an incompetent admin.

Speaking only for myself, I think that's a reasonable distinction that can be objectively applied. It neatly avoids any concerns about whether I happen to like something. You can have excessive law enforcement just as you can have excessive regulation. While I like to call things what they are, neither excess is desirable.

Re:Governmental Takeover?

[causality]

We may cheer when mob violence is turned against targets we think deserve it (and I certainly think Scientology deserves some sort of consequences for their actions), but there is a reason mob violence has been replaced by the rule of law in most parts of the world.

Sorry for the second reply but I think a good point can be made here.

First of all, I clearly stated I didn't agree with the actions of Anonymous. That hardly qualifies as "cheering". I merely find it predictable cause-and-effect and the only surprise I see in the whole situation is that such things haven't happened more frequently. Also, to the best of my knowledge, Anonymous performed a bunch of very irritating, costly, and time-wasting activities but did not use actual violence. So I will use the term "mob action".

The best way to cause mob action is to either do nothing at all or perform only slap-on-the-wrist sanctions against an entity with (in my opinion) a long track record of repeated abuses of one kind or another. That's what allows for the possibility of a mob to form that thinks the job was left undone and that they should do something about it since no one else is going to.

The whole point of a justice system is so that the people can see that justice was done by the proper officials, that the matter has been settled and needs no further response. Fail to achieve that and what you will find is that the difference between decent people and bad people is that decent people will wait longer before taking matters into their own hands. Right or wrong, this is quite predictable.

Re:Governmental Takeover?

[mr_mischief]

I think the point is that the Internet shouldn't necessarily get any more regulation simply for being the Internet. The sorts of things you're talking about wouldn't be allowed by law in meatspace. This new law is equivalent to pulling the business license and evicting a seller from a brick-and-mortar store for these offenses without a trial. why should they be doing this to web sites specifically when they wouldn't dream of passing a law to do it on Fifth Avenue if Saks was accused of it.

Re:Governmental Takeover?

[causality]

I think that the big problem is that, in democracies of any sort, the mob makes the laws. Force of law is a very big stick to be wielding when so many disagree with the policies being enforced. In other words, people who champion the "law" nowadays are often just applauding their mob.

In this case, it's the "mob" that doesn't want these new laws. They were not the result of popular public pressure. It's a small minority of powerful special interests that have a lot of political clout. This is neither democracy nor a functioning representative republic.

While most people who call themselves libertarians are just selfish asshats, they do have a good point that we can't regulate everything. If something isn't covered by a basic law such as "don't steal", we have to look more closely to decide whether it's something we should be regulating, or something we should allow to self-regulate.

The idea of libertarian (small 'l') thought is simplicity itself. Consenting adults should be free to do whatever they please with their property and their own body and should be free to believe whatever they want. They should be able to exercise those freedoms whether or not someone else doesn't like it; anyone who doesn't like their actions is free to provide a counter-example in the form of how they deal with their own body, property, and beliefs.

The selfish asshats are the ones who would use the force of law to tell you what you may not do with your own body or your own property. They typically do this out of some kind of Puritannical desire to enforce their morality on others. The people who want to be left alone by them so long as they don't violate anyone else's freedoms are not selfish in the slightest. They are reasonable.

This is so easy to understand that I must conclude the numerous attempts to portray libertarian thought as some kind of anarcho-capitalism are simple demagoguery conducted by people who either have an agenda or have been propagandized by those who do. You do need a government to enforce notions like private property and civil rights and I know of no libertarian who would argue otherwise.

And even if we decide that it would be nice to regulate that thing, we also need to ask if it's feasible, cost-effective, or paid for in a fair manner. When it comes to almost anything, and the perfect example here is copyright, if people aren't generally ashamed to be caught doing something, there's no way a law is going to be effective without huge costs both in money and unintended consequences.

Copyright has become out of control. If it returned to a 12-year term after which time the work became public domain, it would regain respectability. It would then fulfill its intended purpose of granting a temporary monopoly to creators in exchange for an enriched public domain.

Think about it; the original 12-year term was during a time when the printing press and paper was the most technologically advanced means of distribution. We can now distribute many more works in far less time yet copyright lasts much longer. People don't respect copyright today for the simple reason that it is not respectable. It is no wonder they feel no shame for violating it. This is also easy to understand unless you subscribe to such a strict "law-and-order" mentality that you have abandoned all concept of understanding human nature and wish to replace that understanding with harsher threats of penalty.

Checks and Balances are soooo 1900's

[RingDev]

What's wrong with getting a court order?

Every time we drop court orders out of the mix, we wind up with abusive crap (see FBI and National Security Letters).

Just suck it up, deal with the paper work, and live in a nation governed by three equal branches of government that each work to ensure the other branches are not overstepping their bounds.

-Rrick

Re:Checks and Balances are soooo 1900's

[nebaz]

The Justice department would still have to get a court order, as they do now. The issue is that they could do so for a civil infraction, as opposed to a criminal infraction. Why the government is involved at all in civil justice is beyond me? Isn't that the job of the plaintiff?

Re:Checks and Balances are soooo 1900's

[Alanbly]

The legislation still requires a court order...

The new bill would give the government the authority to shut down the sites with a court order; the site owner would have to petition the court to have it lifted.

Re:Checks and Balances are soooo 1900's

[Anonymous Coward]

"What's wrong with getting a court order?"

When the person requesting it is a government official acting on behalf of a 3rd party's interest when really it should be between the 1st and 3rd parties, not the government. Basically this is just another way that the **AA and member companies are going to foot taxpayers with the bill for propping up their outdated and inflexible business models. If their business model can't survive change, it should die. Isn't that the entire fucking point of capitalism? Compete or die.

Re:Checks and Balances are soooo 1900's

[mr_mischief]

Ask Steve Jackson how much protection that is. You don't want a court order standing between you and losing your livelihood. You want a trial.

Re:Checks and Balances are soooo 1900's

[Jane Q. Public]

What's wrong with getting a court order?

Every time we drop court orders out of the mix, we wind up with abusive crap (see FBI and National Security Letters).

It should also be pointed out that according to everything TFA said, this is aimed at sites that "traffic in" pirated goods. "Trafficking" = selling. This is not just about downloading files. Further, although it has been misused a lot lately, the actual definition of copyright "piracy" is distribution and sale of copyrighted goods, not just making personal copies.

No kidding

[Hatta]

Leahy said in a statement. "Protecting intellectual property is not uniquely a Democratic or Republican priority -- it is a bipartisan priority."

In other words, if you believe in Copyright reform, you have no choices at the polls.

Re:No kidding

[h4rr4r]

Of course, both US parties are Corporatist. Any differences are just to make it look like you have a choice.

Re:No kidding

[Darkness404]

Which is why it is important to either have a very limited government that wouldn't let these abuses happen or allow for party-list based proportional representation in order to get people involved in politics and generate good government. Our current electoral system is great with very limited government and an even more limited federal government, but it isn't the 1830s anymore, the federal government is huge and this duopoly of parties only encourages political apathy. Party-list proportional representation means that everyone at least has -someone- representing their beliefs in congress, rather than people simply voting for the "lesser evil".

Re:No kidding

[youngone]

Quite right, here's another word for Corporatist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism Have a look at the first couple of lines.

Re:No kidding

[Darkness404]

Corporate power is, by nature, less powerful than a tyrannical, omnipotent state. Without a powerful state to back it up, a corporation -has- no power not given to it by its citizens, and citizens can reduce the power of a corporation in a blink of an eye compared to power of a government.

A corporation requires money and resources, without that it dies. In a free market, no one is forced to pay for anything they don't want, this is in sharp contrast with a government where you -have- to pay for things, even if you don't want them. For example, if you disagree with Wal-Mart's hiring practices, you don't have to shop there, they don't get any of your money or support. On the other hand, if you oppose the war in Iraq, you still have to pay for the bullets or else go to prison.

Given a free enough market, corporations won't become tyrannical because of the fact that the market balances itself out. Even the "worst" monopoly was broken up in essence by market forces (the government breakup of Standard Oil was not needed because it no longer was even close to a monopoly at the time of its breakup). Anytime you see a monopoly, it either A) Is government imposed (postal service, utilities, etc), B) No need for competition (as in, if no one thought hamburgers would be profitable and therefore McDonalds was the only store selling hamburgers) or C) Is very temporary.

The problem is, our government is not free enough, when boiled down to a government whos only job is to protect against fraud and force both corporations and consumers win. Consumers win because they are free to screw the corporations, for example, no DMCA and most likely no (or very, very limited) copyright. Corporations win because they are free to innovate and expand beyond government constraints artificially limiting them. Consumers also have more choice, imagine if all the oil in the world was monopolized and there was incredibly high prices, a few things would have happened, either A) we'd find new sources of oil or more likely B) We'd develop things that didn't need oil thus pushing oil prices down further leading to a loss of that monopoly. Corporations also can provide infrastructure, if Company X needs to have an airport near Nowheresville, they will build an airport, because they can't utilize all of it 24/7, they rent it out to private airlines, therefore, suddenly Nowheresville has an airport and gets more trade without government waste.

I guarantee making voting more complicated is not the answer. You need an educated, informed electorate first. But if you have that, playing silly games with the ballot won't be necessary.

Look at countries with high voter turnout, almost all of them use the solution I'm proposing, for example, the US only has a 54% voter turnout, on the other hand, look at Sweden with 86% voter turnout because they use proportional voting.

Proportional representation is the easiest way to make sure that people's vote counts. Just because you don't agree with 50% of people, doesn't mean your voice shouldn't be heard. The idea that people vote politically based on the surrounding area is outdated, it worked before the civil war, where industries were tied to certain geographical areas. But they aren't.

Re:No kidding

[Luckyo]

Just because German version of fascist nazi government came with concentration camps, doesn't mean that every version does. This is very much the same for democracy, which was very different back in ancient Greece where it was born, or in revolutionary France where core beliefs of modern Western society were defined.

Nontheless it is beyond any shadow of doubt that elements of fascism in Western world have been on significant increase ever seen the end of Cold War, as power shifted from people-run government to corporation-run government.

Which is by definition, fascism. Your scare of concentration camps came from nazism and nazi ideals. WW2 Germany had both. Fascist part wasn't much prettier then nazi part mind you, just like our democratic fascism isn't pretty.

One step forward, two steps back

[Anonymous Coward]

Business groups including the US Chamber of Commerce hailed the legislation as a huge step forward.

Yeah, a step forward for keeping their business models from dying off, thus preventing them from having to actually work to come up with new ones.

Meanwhile, this COULD be used to stamp out any site the US Government or the MAFIAA dislike. WikiLeaks? "Piracy." BAM, blocked. YouTube? "Piracy." BAM, blocked.

A step forward for government protectionism of failing business models, two steps back for free speech on the Internet.

What ever happened to...

[Darkness404]

The new bill would give the government the authority to shut down the sites with a court order; the site owner would have to petition the court to have it lifted

What ever happened to being innocent before guilty? In a free society, courts have to prove -you- guilty, not you have to prove your innocence.

Isn't it time that we realized that property is not property unless it is limited and move on?

Re:What ever happened to...

[Tablizer]

"Assumed innocent until found guilty" is criminal law. Civil issues are different.

But what I worry about the most is its use for political censorship. Look what the church that rhymes with Pie Ontology has done using copyright laws. I hope there are added protections against that kind of abuse. The little guy can't afford boatloads of lawyers.

Re:What ever happened to...

[mbone]

What ever happened to being innocent before guilty? In a free society, courts have to prove -you- guilty, not you have to prove your innocence.

Ah, you haven't heard of the glories of civil law. It is, for example, how most drug law forfeitures are done - you have to prove your innocence to get the seized assets back. (I am not a lawyer, and if you have assets seized, you had better get one and not rely on /. for legal advice.)

Why the US Court system bought into this theory is beyond me; I think that they should be ashamed of themselves (but, then, they don't ask for my opinion).

Why the U.S. shouldn't control DNS

[Anonymous Coward]

The only point to having a new law for this, is to make it hard to access web servers that aren't in the U.S. by messing with DNS, regardless of whether the material was legally hosted where the servers were located. (If the problem was with U.S. hosted servers, existing law would be plenty good enough.)

What impact would this actually have?

[pyrocam]

Will this actually have an impact though? what piracy sites are run from the US? I assume this court order will only be effective for servers hosted in the states...

Another law makes the US less competitive

[mkawick]

The DCMA notoriously was touted as solving the online piracy problem. The cold reality is that almost ten thousand small companies have shuttered their doors in the last almost 15 years. New startups are forced to prove that they are not infringing and while waiting they must cease all development. This can take months and cost upwards of 100K meaning that most tech startups must simply shutter their doors. Microsoft alone has filed DCMA takedown notices almost 500 times and is successful at shuttering the company nearly every time.

Now, media sites can be shut down for being "copyright infringing" with very little evidence to the contrary. A small company cannot fight the likes of MS, IBM, Apple, Sun, or the host of other awful DCMA bastards and now they'll need to worry about Bartlesman, Dreamworks, Pixar, and the like. This simply makes it impossible to start a new media company because all that the media conglomerates have to do is claim that someone is stealing and without your company being informed, you can be shut down. The DCMA shuts down software and this new rule will shutdown new media.

The DCMA is one of the main reasons that more and more companies are successfully competing in software development overseas and why more and more software is coming from Russia, China, Norway, and so on. It is becoming impossible to create a new software startup. And now in the land of unintended consequences, we just shipped all of our movie, music, and game production overseas.

There have been no new Googles for over a decade and we wonder where all of the jobs are going.

Re:Another law makes the US less competitive

[theNAM666]

I personally think this is more idiocy, but do you mind citing one or two actual companies "shut down" by DMCA? Just to show you're not making this up *entirely* ?

Re:Another law makes the US less competitive

[ScrewMaster]

There have been no new Googles for over a decade and we wonder where all of the jobs are going.

Every empire throughout history (whether military or economic) has eventually failed. It's inevitable. Now, sometimes another empire with more on the ball rolls over them. That happens. In most cases, though, it's because they shot themselves in the foot. In other words, their own governments failed to perform their duties under the law, became corrupt, sold out their own citizens and caused the entire house of cards to collapse. Fact is, Uncle Sam's feet are stumps at this point. Yeah, it will suck to be an American when the lights finally go out, but that's the way it's going. I'm trying to decide if I should get out before it's too late. Where to, that's the question. I want good food and fast broadband. Cool smartphones would be a plus.

See, this is why the media cartels are so evil. It's not just because they want to protect their movies and music ... it's that they're willing to throw the entire country, all of us in fact, to the wolves, under the train, under the bus, into the fire, in order to get what they want. Worse, it's the naked corruption and malfeasance in office (if not outright treason) of Federal officials that is allowing to happen.

I hate them all.

Re:Another law makes the US less competitive

[mkawick]

In fact, the only important new software companies in the last 12 years have been Facebook and Twitter and they are often cited as a counter example to those who hate the DMCA.

Ignoring their insignificance, can you think of one other...?

These companies succeeded because MS, Sun, and their ilk ignored these startup companies until they were large largely because the conglomerates didn't understand them or their significance. Now, MS tries to pay attn to all startups and we haven't seen a single company in 5 years (Twitter is 2006) since.

On a positive note...shutdowns have slowed as the conglomerates are seeing that their efforts in DMCA notices are "killing the golden goose" that they can later buyout and remain competitive.

Re:Another law makes the US less competitive

[mkawick]

Try these... some are companies, some are blogs... but you get the idea

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/microsoft-cryptome/
http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/first-amendment-under-attack-feds-shut/
http://boingboing.net/2010/07/23/dmca.html
http://vigilant.tv/article/3328/blackboxvotingorg-shut-down-under-dmca-for-linking
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/09/intellectual-property-laws-abused-in-quest-to-shutdown-lowes-sucks-com.ars

There are hundreds... I simply googled: "companies shut down by DMCA"

This one is plain weird:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/_improper_use_of_copyright.php

You don't understand a thing.

[www.sorehands.com]

The MPAA, RIAA, and DMA have bought laws.

Don't you think that they have a right to expect a fair value for the legislators that they buy?

What good is buying a congressperson if you can't get the laws you want written the way you want?

Re:You don't understand a thing.

[siddesu]

Your question is rhetorical, but let me bite.

This is happening because enforcing civil law on behalf of the Hungry Artists is a costly and difficult exercise in the US.

Especially so since you have evil commies like our resident slashdotter lawyer, who is destroying business value by promoting socialist ideas like fair use, copyright limits and the like on his blog.

Dumping the enforcement on the government has benefits for all involved.

It is good for the companies -- they get to save some extra buck on prosecution and enforcement, and face significantly lower legal risks while protecting their valuable business model (which benefits the shareholders, and our great capitalist society).

It is good for the government -- with little cooperation from the interested parties, they get a nice tool for shooting things on the web they don't like.

It is good for the consumer -- for access to unapproved, and potentially dangerous and unlawful content is restricted.

Finally, since this will obviously help combat child porn and drug abuse, it is good for the future of this great nation. Why don't you think of the children?

No matter how I look at it, this is a beneficial measure for everyone except the few Communist slashdotters who abuse the internet to steal from our creative industry.

Why not death sentences then?

[erroneus]

This is completely circumventing the notion of due process and the ideal of innocent until proven guilty. So if this is okay, then let's just have the judges hand down an order for execution of suspected murderers and then make the defendant file a motion for a stay of execution pending a trial.

DAMN ANNOYING

[airfoobar]

The internet is such an amazing, useful and indispensable tool... yet I keep seeing a bunch of retards from a bygone age trying to subdue and control it using petty excuses such as copyright. This is seriously over "entertainment", like movies and music? Are we seriously expected to stand aside and let them take the the internet with such a lame excuse? Fuck the entertainment industries, they should either figure out a more consumer-friendly way to operate, or POAD because they are completely useless and their products are pure shite. Fuck the pirates who are giving those asshats an excuse to screw everyone over, and then don't have the balls to vote for the Pirate Parties to mitigate some of the damage. And most of all, fuck the douchebag politicians who are colluding with the "entertainers" to introduce anti-consumer, anti-democratic, anti-civil-rights laws like this, and who have no business being in office.

Lump much?

[StikyPad]

"online piracy and the sale of counterfeit goods costs American businesses billions of dollars, and result in hundreds of thousands of lost jobs"

Much the way national defense and senators' salaries cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars each year.

Color me surprised...

[JaredOfEuropa]

... that they actually mention piracy as the reason to implement this. Here in the Netherlands, similar legislation is being prepared, which by the way will require no court order whatsoever to have a site shut down, the public prosecutor can decide on a whim. The reason? You guessed it, "saving the children", or shutting down kiddie porn sites. As the minister stated: "Not to worry, but this is just for kiddie porn. Oh, and for other illegal stuff (like online piracy). Oh, and that includes hate speech too. Probably certain elements of a particular party we don't like much as well. But we'll exercise proper care" No checks, balances or even limits placed on this awesome power given to the prosecutors office... already famous for exercising proper care in sending a 10-man police force to do a nighttime raid on the home of an apparently extremely dangerous cartoonist making "hate-instigating" (i.e. subversive) cartoons. Or allowing cities to do door-to-door searches of homes looking for indoor weed plantations... but sending along municipal guys to check you're not claiming unemployment benefits while living it large, or having a dog without paying the tax. Oh and these are proper searches: fail to be home when they drop by a few times, and they will take a crowbar to your door.

Do not ever give in to pleas to relax controls to make life for the prosecutor a little easier "to catch more criminals". It's never about criminals nor child-molesters. We let them do it here, and allowed the government to thoroughly politicise the prosecutors' office, then took away the judiciary branch' power to check and balance. The result is not pretty... All these so called inconvenient controls exist for a reason.

Re:Have we...

[mbone]

Oh, no, we passed that point about a decade ago.

Regulate BANKS, not downloads!!

[purpleraison]

Seriously. The US government is 100% committed to spending a fortune regulating and enforcing use of the internet due to 'online piracy'. As a result the US government is directly providing law enforcement, judicial, and legislative staff to protect the video and music industry..... and yet they openly claim REGULATING BANKS and stock market (NOTE: the Republican party is almost 100% against regulating the banking industry) is bad???

Am I the only one who is concerned with this criminally insane paradox?

Good question

[spun]

Is it piracy if you NEVER would have bought it to begin with
If it is free i might download it but at $30 to $50 i would NEVER even think of buying it
If there was NO loss of cash is it piracy

Is it piracy if you board another ship at sea while hoisting the jolly roger, wearing a wooden leg, sporting a parrot on one shoulder and demanding chests full of gold doubloons?
Is it piracy if they don't have any doubloons?
Is it piracy if you then ravish their women? What if you don't exactly ravish them, but merely rip their bodices, accidentally exposing their heaving bosoms?
How fast must a bosom be moving in order to be considered "heaving?"

Is it just me

[KillaGouge]

Is it just me, or will this do nothing to stop downloading? After reading, it appears they will only go after sites selling things. I thought that downloading was the largest threat to "the industry", or are they just getting to the point they want to bring everything down that they don't make money off of?

Hooray!

[Teun]

Finally we'll again get good movies and music, just like it used to be before the market collapsed due to piracy.

Resistance is futile?

[Steeltoe]

All the more reason to move over to I2P, or other general darknets, which can provide application-agnostic anonymous networking with end-to-end encryption. Why wait for the inevitable when we can build a secure internet on top of the old one?

With I2P, there are no central DNS servers and, the ISP / IP-address of a specific service is ideally not knowable, neither are the ISP / IP-addresses of visitors to e.g. a political website. I2P being p2p, no authority has the power to shut down a site, prevent visitors using services in the I2P "darkcloud" or even snoop on the network activities (without using leaking honeypots, assimilating keys somehow or perform (D)DOS attacks). I2P uses random ports, so it's not as simple to block as blocking a portrange either. Being based on p2p coupled with encrypted tunnels, I2P resists most common attacks, even by formidable adversaries such as governments. You can run any website, any type of application, over I2P, however care must of course be taken to eliminate "identity leaks" in the application layer, even though the network-layer takes care of most anonymity, encryption and p2p.

So if you are to host "objectionable" content, whatever that may mean across the globe, I'd suggest taking a peek at I2P, as the "normal" internuts seems to be screwed in the short/mid-term. Heck, we should probably start using I2P for any and all purposes, so that I2P content is "legitimate" and equally protected from being censored and snooped upon in the first place.

I2P main site as a start. It's java and open source, so easily cross-platform and performs well (for a Java app anyway):
http://www.i2p2.de/

Re:Resistance is futile?

[Steeltoe]

I'd suggest you read up on I2P. It is not as simple as to block some ports, since I2P utilizes a random port per node. You'd have to do deep packet inspection on the encrypted traffic. I'm not sure how big the I2P-fingerprint is, but my guess is you could disguise the traffic as ssh, https or similar traffic easily, if not already done so.

I also countered the legitimate argument in the original post, suggesting we start using I2P for *any and all* content, also legitimate ones. Then the courts, which ideally represents the population, will have a hard time cracking down on I2P as a whole, unless you live in China or other human rights breakers..

If your ISP blocks incoming connections, I2P will still work automatically, as long as your tunnel is using at least 1 hop, which is default for new tunnels. Then other anonymous nodes will act as "incoming server" for you..

Please check out http://www.i2p2.de/how.html for more.

Point is: Internet is inherently insecure and untrustworthy. It is already heavily monitored, and Man-In-The-Middle attacks are possibly more rampant than we'd like to think it is.

I2P is already general-purpose enough to replace most features of internet v1, and already addresses most issues of anonymity and transparent encryption elegantly.

While politicians and the lawyers fight over the freedom of internet v1, it's not such a bad idea to stand on another leg in a more secure network, built on top of the old internets.

What are trying to shutdown?

[gmuslera]

Newspapers? Saying that there is a torrent from a movie is not so different from saying that i.e. John Doe robbed that bank.
Search engines? Directly or indirectly search engines links to movies and pirated material
Web 2.0? Everything with user participation have potential to be used to "exchange links"
Mail? Mailing lists?
At most they should be going against the people that put them online at the first place

Wonder how fast will be censored all post that names the Great Firewall of America, but probably that is what they really should do if they don't want that americans download so easily pirated movies.

three equal branches

[nurb432]

I disagree, in reality the supreme court holds more power, since they can pick and choose what cases/issues they take.

I agree the founders never meant for it to be that way however.

Why the government is involved

[nurb432]

So the plaintiff doesn't have to pony up the cash to do it, and can now accuse at will, without any regard to potential returns. However, keeping it in civil court keeps the accused at a disadvantage as they have to effectively prove their innocence, at their expense.

Buying laws is fun.

Wikilleaks

[ktetch-pirate]

If you look closely at the bill, it's actually usefull to shutdown sites that contain classified documents too, such as ooh Wikileaks... That, I think, is the real target. http://ktetch.blogspot.com/2010/09/us-senators-in-big-copyrights-pocket.html

Re:The Fools Never Learn

[Haeleth]

All this legislation would do is drive piracy more underground and more distributed and more encrypted.

That wouldn't necessarily be counter-productive.

Hard-core pirates are always going to find a way to pirate. But it's not the hard-core pirates that the media industry is scared of; it's casual pirates, pirates who might actually represent lost sales. It's Joe Average, who has just discovered this wonderful website with torrents of all his favorite TV shows on it, so he doesn't need to buy the DVDs any more.

If piracy is driven deeper underground, the hard-core pirates will still pirate stuff -- but Joe won't be able to simply stumble across a major distribution site any more, and even if he figures out where to look, he still probably manage to get that distributed encrypted download software to work. So maybe he'll decide it's more trouble than it's worth and just buy the damn DVDs after all, because he'd rather pay $14.99 than spend the entire weekend swearing at his computer.

That's what the media industry is hoping, anyway.

No Electronic Theft Act (1997)

[westlake]

The issue is that they could do so for a civil infraction, as opposed to a criminal infraction.

Copyright infringement can be prosecuted as a federal felony charge.

The United States No Electronic Theft Act (NET Act), a federal law passed in 1997, provides for criminal prosecution of individuals who engage in copyright infringement, even when there is no monetary profit or commercial benefit from the infringement. Maximum penalties can be five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines. The NET Act also raised statutory damages by 50%.
In addition, it added a threshold for criminal liability where the infringer neither obtained nor expected to obtain anything of value for the infringement. In response to the NET Act, the US Sentencing Commission stiffened sanctions for intellectual property theft offenses. NET Act

The federal government has the constitutional right to criminally prosecute violations of federally granted property rights.

Prosecuting economic crimes with an interstate or international dimension is primarily a federal responsibility.

In a service-based economy, the entertainment industry generates a lot of jobs and a lot of domestic and export dollars. Many of those jobs and many of those dollars going directly into the pockets of the American geek - and not to the Russian or the Swede in Pirate Bay.

Two Individuals Sentenced to Prison for Conspiring to Traffic in Counterfeit Slot Machines and Computer Programs [casino gambling software] [August 20]

Thibodaux Man Pleads Guilty To Violation Of Digital Millennium Copyright Act [XBox 360 mods and pirated games] [maximum exposure, 5 years and $500,000, sentencing in 2011] [August 11]

Manhattan Federal Court Orders Seizures Of Seven Websites For Criminal Copyright Infringement In Connection With Distribution Of Pirated Movies Over The Internet [June 30]

Texas Man Admits Involvement In Software Piracy Conspiracy [Warez] [August 10]

 

DONT host DNS in the usa

[Anonymous Coward]

then they can cost the hosting company money ...who cares
the usa is lost to innovation and is now akin to only greed cant wait for them to just cut off themselves form the rest of the world

no one wants or needs any americans

and i guess all the gun violence, murder rape and missing children the fbi aren't looking for are all solved and no more of that is happening.....GUESS if you can't solve the other stuff pick on kids sitting at home nice and safe...yup give them more reasons to wander off not the world and have the rest you can't solve get them....

GO OBAMA

To quote JFK

[Fnord666]

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
- John F. Kennedy

Yes, everyone should obey all laws

[h00manist]

We should start in government and business. All government and business should have their accounting books openly verifiable, online, live, for immediate inspections of transactions with indicted groups with involvement in money laundering, terrorism, tax evasion, drug and people trafficking, and child porn. "Business trade and accounting secrets and privacy" cannot remain an excuse for covering up endangering all of society. If only the police could track the money, they can track down all crime. What, you object? Do you have something to hide?

Re:Piercing the corporate veil

[TooMuchToDo]

Frankly sir, I'm not trying to disguise anything. I've simply followed the letter of the law in all the jurisdictions I operate in. Of course, it wouldn't protect me if I went all Wikileaks and countries started doing underhanded things to go after me, but you have to balance risk and reward.