Slashdot Mirror
Senate Panel Approves Website Shut-Down Bill
itwbennett writes "The Senate Judiciary Committee has voted 19-0 in favor of a bill that would allow the Department of Justice to seek court orders to shut down websites offering materials believed to infringe copyright. 'Rogue websites are essentially digital stores selling illegal and sometimes dangerous products,' Senator Patrick Leahy, the main sponsor of the bill, said in a statement. 'If they existed in the physical world, the store would be shuttered immediately and the proprietors would be arrested. We cannot excuse the behavior because it happens online and the owners operate overseas. The Internet needs to be free — not lawless.' However, the internet will likely remain 'lawless' for a while longer, as there are only a few working days left in the congressional session and the bill is unlikely to pass through the House of Representatives in that short amount of time."
The majority of the population does NOT want to see this pass, yet it made it through the Senate with NO opposition?
I thought the government was for the people by the people. What a fucking joke.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has voted 19-0 in favor of a bill that would allow the Department of Justice to seek court orders to shut down websites offering materials believed to infringe copyright.
The DOJ needed a senate bill to allow them to "seek court orders"? Getting a court order is usually where the process for this sort of thing STARTS.
We cannot excuse the behavior because it happens online and the owners operate overseas.
Why not? You can excuse the behavior if it happens offline and the owners operate overseas.
Or are there American law enforcement officials going and raiding shops in China that are selling pirated copies of Windows?
And I don't think letting the DoJ decide who gets shut down or not is entirely fair. You know that Google/Youtube ends up hosting copyrighted material every now and then - and then they get notified and they end up taking it down (or taking out the audio track). So if I host a little site for me and a few role players - and one of them posts a bit of a DnD Manual - am I at risk of my website being cut off from Americans without notice? Or worse - taken down entirely somehow?
Its very difficult to come up with an example of the legislative branch (or the judicial or the executive for that matter) doing a thorough, cogent job of dealing with technology and the law.
For the most part, their investors..er...campaign donors tell them what to believe and how to vote and that is as deep as it goes.
The sad thing is that over time, we'll end up with some legislators who get it, but by then, the current level of corruption will have been instiitutionalized and they will be so unacquainted with the Constitution and ethics and so beholden to the donations of their masters that it won't make much difference.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Just like a digital store, except that nothing is being sold.
So like a digital free box, or giving away a used DVD, or
letting your neighbor come over and watch the ballgame on you TV.
Sure, then all they need to do is find a friendly judge that will rubber-stamp these types of requests. I'm sure there are plenty of federal judges who have bought the **AA's propaganda enough to agree to shut down any website they're asked to in the name of protecting copyright.
A court order should not be enough to shut down someone's free speech rights. If they want to shut down a website they should have to actually bring charges against the website owner, and have the site shut down only following an actual conviction.
So what's this "or dangerous" bit? Ammunition? Websites promoting cults? Websites attacking cults? Websites selling material that promotes anything that senators don't like, like free thought, opposing political positions, naked bodies that they can't grope for themselves?
This ain't about piracy, people.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Love this part under Non-Domestic Domains, Required Actions... ... or other operator of a domain name system server shall take reasonable steps that will prevent a domain name from resolving to that domain name’s Internet protocol address;
(i) a service provider
So, we'll just refuse to resolve any domains that are outside the jurisdiction of the US, but that are deemed to offend the standards listed here? This, to me, sounds a bit like that whole filtering of information thing that Secretary Clinton said was a Bad Thing in China.
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
So other Internet stuff like FTP is still safe?
Which brings up an interesting point: How would a government org go about shutting down a rogue server? Lets pretend it is hosted in some remote country, so sending a CnD letter is probably ineffective. Blocking the DNS entries will just result in people putting up non-us filtered DNS servers, and you are playing whack a mole to try to find them and block them. You could put ip-filters on all the trunks going in and out of the country, but that's another game of whack a mole, since any proxy server outside the country can redirect.
I am not a networking expert, but even if you had the political will to do this, it seems to me it would be no more than an inconvenience for anyone determined enough.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Who PAYS for pirated material?
Anyone who has bought a copy of the film Song of the South on DVD-R at the flea market, sold by someone ignorant of copyright term extension acts who thinks U.S. copyright on works published under the Copyright Act of 1909 still lasts 56 years as it did when they were published.
Or anyone who bought a copy of the album All Things Must Pass by George Harrison. A court ruled that the song "My Sweet Lord", which appears on this album and accounted for the supermajority of this album's airplay, was an infringing copy of "He's So Fine" by Ronald Mack, which the Chiffons had popularized.
I imagine it'll be used in a similar way to DMCA requests are now as a means to silence criticisms. Imagine, just as a hypothetical example, the Church of Scientology seeking court orders to shut down sites that expose the very strange teachings of their higher level texts. Or a software company trying to surpress news of a security breach by shutting down any sites publishing it, on the grounds that the exploit requires the modification of copyrighted code, or a celebrity trying to stop the distribution of some embarassing video that escaped from a private party or a members-only invited speech. All things that the DMCA has been used for in the past - but this new measure is somewhat more effective, because if the recieving end doesn't comply you can just have their server unplugged or site blocked rather than having to spend weeks on civil action that would more likely than not just lead to the undesired embarassment being further publicised.
The talking pieces of shit in Washington seem to think they control the Internet.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Of course, the law will not apply to them, just like the labor laws, civil rights laws . . .
There just isn't a need for a perfect block.
yes there is if you want it to work.
Because information on the Internet is fast and free, if 1 person finds a way around your block 5 minutes after it is in place, 10 million people can know about it in under a day, and your little information embargo is a futile exercise. If you made the same comment about how 'security through obscurity works' in the context of OS security, you would be laughed off Slashdot. Why would general blocking of sites be any different?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I doubt that these senators have considered the possibly that being able to shut down an offending site (say Bing, Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, Youtube, ) wouldn't have significant collateral damage.
This is equivalent to shutting down an entire mall (which happens to include an office for the County Tax Assessor, small FBI field office, post office and police substation) on the account of one bad employee grossly (mis)representing the interests of the merchant renting space in said mall.
Bottom line:
Merely having such a kill switch is not a license use it indiscriminately and not face the consequences of its misuse.
(Notice that engineers are required to retain errors and omissions insurance for bad engineering decisions, but no legislator is required to retain insurance for passing of bad laws.)
The Roman Rule: The one who says it cannot be done shall not interrupt the one who is doing it.
"The poor people stealing a few fucking movies hurts NO ONE."
Don't you mean "the people copying data hurt no one"? Stealing implies that they've deprived someone of something, which is not something that 'pirates' do.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
There cannot be multiple root zones. That just is not feasible. But the US only controls the gTLDs and one ccTLD. The other TLDs are owned by their respective countries. The US cannot have them removed from the root without causing a major incident, the result of which would include the Internet Society appointing some other organization as IANA (and thus killing ICANN and US control of the DNS).
Explanation: ICANN exists solely to be a policy creating shell around the IANA. Legally the Internet Society (ISOC) is the only company in the world with any reasonable claim to being able to appoint an IANA. The organizations the ISOC consists of (IETF, IESG, IAB, RFC-EDITOR) had agreed to allow ICANN to have the role of IANA, but they could revoke that agreement.
If an RFC is published naming a new international entity as the IANA there is little reason to suspect the companies running the root servers would not use the root zone published by the new IANA, as long as they got similar say in policy making as they had with ICANN.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
We do plenty.
Us smart folks that have a clue though just get drowned out in the noise among the sheep that get hynotized by corporate run media that sponsors these egregious rights violations in the first place.
Not to mention that this is a lame duck session taking place after we've already given them notice to quit.
They already know damn well we can't do a thing.
What are they going to do? Get impeached by their buddies eating out of the same trough?
The "root zone" is in fact only the root zone for the root-servers.net roots. You can, and people have, created alternate root servers. You can do it in your house if you like. You can make your own root zone, own TLDs, etc. Nobody but you will probably use them, but you can do it.
So what the EU could do is make an organization, call it EUCANN (pronounced you can) because it is relevant and funny. Have that organization organization maintain a root file and setup a bunch of root servers that get their info from it. Initially, just mirror the ICANN root file. Once the system is up and running and stable, get popular DNS programs like BIND and the MS DNS server to include your roots too. Shouldn't be hard, just that much more stable for them. Heck maybe they'll prefer those roots in the EU zone. Once your system is running and useful, then contact ICANN and say "Hey, how about we split the root responsibility. We'll be responsible for all EU countries, you for everything else." So the root file isn't really split, but if the EU updates EU zone info, ICANN mirrors that, if ICANN updates other info, EUCANN mirrors that.
Normally, this has little effect other than that EUCANN could decide if a given company should get control of a given TLD instead of ICANN. However in the event ICANN flips their lid and does shit they shouldn't, well then EUCANN doesn't have to go along with it. Say ICANN decides that France if full of dirty liberals and terrorists and simply gets rid of .fr. EUCANN can refuse to mirror that. People can then use the EUCANN roots and not the effectively damaged ICANN ones.
It would provide resilience against any one country being a dick about things.