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

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?

[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.

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.

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.

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: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?

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

[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.

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.

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/

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