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US Senate Committee Passes PROTECT IP Act
angry tapir writes "A US Senate committee has unanimously approved a controversial bill that would allow the US Department of Justice to seek court orders requiring search engines and Internet service providers to stop sending traffic to websites accused of infringing copyright."
Unlike the Nefarious 'Great Firewall of China', a hated symbol of communist repression, the "PROTECT-IP" act will be entirely in English, and promises to be a tool of crony-capitalist repression!
The sites merely have to be ACCUSED of being copyright infringers. Remember when Homeland Security yanked thousands of websites off the net, including several that were merely personal blogs or news sites?
This is no good. We have courts for a reason - to protect the citizenry from overzealous leaders assuming guilt and enacting punishment against innocent persons.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The internet was better off before the legal and judicial systems were even aware of it.
The boffins at DARPA came up with it, and for decades, all was well - from the 70's up until the mid 90's at least. It succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams *because* no one was in control of it. It was an anarchy. If you don't want to see something, don't look, and if you do, then do.
It will die in practice because of people who, for one reason or another, think they have the right to tell other people what they can and cannot do.
Well, this calls for decentralized DNS and some tor like network overlay...
Does the government not remember how well prohibition went? Have they not learned that by making something illegal they are only going to push more people to to figure out ways around it.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
It should require MORE than a court order. It should require a conviction in the traffic of copyrighted material in violation of the copyright act before a site can be black listed. Being accused of such should NOT be enough.
This may also explain why Google and Mozilla plan on removing the browser URL field. It prevents more people from being able to go anywhere where the mighty Google or it's countries junta doesn's point us to.
Search engine over HTTPS without logs of any kind (like Duckduckgo). This way they can't prove the search engine sent the user to the "worst of the worst" site... You still need alternate DNS and/or proxy/VPN to get to the site, but at least sites can still be found with search engines.
What surprises me here is that they want to block the "worst of the worst" and they haven't even mentioned the tired old kiddie porn angle... that is certainly worse than anything! The only way they could surprise me more is by being so honest as naming the future targets: all sites opposing corporations in any way and all sites that spread generic 'anti-american' messages (a.k.a. terrorists). Wikileaks will be one of the first of the sites we know that will be blocked like this... all such sites after that will not even be known to anyone when they are blocked, not listed in searches and not mentioned in media.
Doubleplus goodmove Minitrue!!!
Interesting? Really? The changes to Chrome's UI do remove the URL bar but do not remove the URL field. When the user highlights the tab they see the URL field, when they don't they get more screen real estate for content. By and large this is a great UI design change. I don't need to see the huge URL telling me Nth directory the site I am visiting stores their HTML in (look at Slashdot do you type in the link to this story?). But good on you for making it sound like some nefarious plan between Google and oppressive regimes to not let people browse to non approved sites, don't let reality stand in your way.
I'd love to see this happen. It would force real compromise and talks. You couldn't buy votes with promises to send some $$$ to the senator/representative's district via a rider. (Thus, less pork.) You also couldn't try to torpedo a bill by adding an unreasonable rider that you know nobody would vote for. Instead, you would need to craft a bill that enough people would vote for. You would need to work *WITH* the minority and the excesses of each party could be counter-balanced.
If we can't do this, I'd at least like to see the President have the ability to line item veto things. So he could approve Very-Important-Spending-Bill without approving Rider-That-Restricts-Freedom-Of-Speech. To provide counterbalance, the vetoed riders could be individually voted on by Congress to override the line item veto. (Of course, if the rider has that much support, it should be its own bill, not a rider.)
Of course, none of this will ever happen because it would actually reduce Congress' power. No longer would they be able to funnel money to their districts by holding their votes for ransom and no longer would they be able to just stick any old text to a bill and have it pass because the bill *HAD* to be approved.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Clearly the actions of a "Lone Wolf," that needs to be investigated.
--- Do you believe in the day?
Voting libertarian is not the answer. The libertarian party is only an experiment by the owning class to use the desire for freedom to disenfranchise the masses for personal gain. Government needs a certain amount of strength to protect people from economic predation and the return to a class based society where most people are virtual or actual slaves.
There are no parties that actually represent the people and seek to empower their freedom. We need a party that believes in personal liberty but also promotes policy to the benefit of the people instead of corporate entities that serve as the proxies of power for the elite ruling class. Democrats fail. Libertarians fail. Republicans OMG WTF fail. Greens fail just as hard as republicans, but in a different direction.