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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?
Dear U.S. Government,
Remember when the shit hit the fan over the U.S. Government's control over the root DNS servers a few years back?
Welcome to part 2.
Sincerely,
The Rest of the World
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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.
It is amazing how often people rail against the lack of democracy in the modern world, and how few are willing to do anything about it.
"What can we, mere peons, do?" you might ask. Well, you can start by working on the one and only hope you have: open sourcing governance.
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.
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!
There probably were folks who thought it was a bad bill, but voted for it anyway because it bought them leverage on (what they felt were) more important issues.
I'm a bit of a state house watcher, and I've heard politicians stand up and speak against bills five minutes before voting for them. Basically, if the chairman of the committee favors something and you don't, but it's going to pass anyway, you curry favor with the chairman by letting him submit the bill to the floor with 'unanimous approval', thereby increasing the chances of getting your own issue heard by the now appeased chairman in the future. In the end, you get the same result you would have if you opposed the thing, but the next time you need something, you're more likely to get it.
That or the HVAC might have been out. Our state legislature seems to decide completely on-the-fly that 'today is going to be the last day of session'. They typically suspend public hearings and pass 300 pieces of legislation that night. Why would you suspend public hearings and do 80% of your work on one coffee-fueled all-nighter? Well, the committee rooms don't have air conditioning, suits are really hot, and most of the legislature is a bit portly. Once the summer heat starts penetrating the marble walls, there's no stopping it until late October, so they 'go Nike' on democracy's ass and Just Do It.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
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.