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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."
1) How do we route around this damage?
2) How do we protect our natural rights from a majority that votes them away?
Let's stop focusing on the distractions of greed and corruption and the psychopaths in positions of power and get to finding real solutions to render all of that irrelevant.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
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 damage has been halted for now. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon put a hold on the bill, meaning that the Senate leadership is on notice that he will filibusterer it if the bill moves to full debate and vote.
I've said for a long time that a U.S. great firewall was coming. I'm frankly just surprised it took so long. Sadly, this will now begin a big chase game of "change our IP" "IP blocked, change it again" for all the torrent/controversial sites that the government doesn't like. No more typing "wikileaks.org" into our browsers' URL field. Now we have to find a (hopefully) updated IP address from some site that will probably itself be blocked shortly after it starts offering a list.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
Not really.. Both are grievous offenses against our rights, just in different areas. Resistance to both, and all the others that are on the books are equally important. The idea is to fight infringement by the authorities and make them ineffective.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
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
So if I hack the republicans website to host copyrighted material then the entire republican party gets banned from the internet?
What happened to innocent til proven guilty?
Who will be doing the accusing?
No I did not read the article, but this is a fair reaction to the OP
Rick B.
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.
Under DMCA, freenet and tor are probably "circumvention devices". So you are guilty of wanting free speech.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Sponsored by the Ministry of Truth (tm).
The bill would create a list of blocked Internet sites, added Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a tech trade group.
. Users who want content will find a way around this. There's already a firefox add-on to circumvent Department of Homeland Security seized domains like torrent-finder.com. Thanks to Streisand effect of government domain seizures I found some great torrent sites I never before knew existed.
http://www.geti2p.net/
I've been using it for over a year and it works very well. It has email, web sites, bittorrent, and emule among other things (they are working on bitcoin too). Your public key is the same as your address, and routing is highly decentralized (everyone internally routes for the network by default) so even blocking people by IP or their key address is not really possible.
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!!!
Here is what we have seen of the oil industry. We have seen the oil industry defended, protected, supported and subsidized in every way imaginable (including militarily) by the US government. We have known for a very long time that world oil supplies are not limitless and that the demand for it is still rising and the price of it is also ratcheting upwards. Although the efforts for alternatives to oil and other fossil fuels are only now seemingly becoming more aggressive (I'm not yet convinced that there is any effort that I would call a serious commitment on the part of the government) it is generally agreed that it is long over due and most would even say it is too late in coming as many actions have resulted in directly or indirectly suppressing any competing technologies to the use of fossil fuels for energy.
But the US recognizes that in a fairly short time [* in relative terms], the oil business will be dead. But how is this like intellectual property?
The US's shift in production economy has been shifting from agriculture to manufacturing to services and now to intellectual property. The US was a leader in each of these things in their day and over time, all of these have been reduced, minimalized and concentrated in ways that make these activities profitable for only a small group of companies and individuals where many of these things are actually sent over-seas. Intellectual property is just about the last thing the US has to export and in order to maintain its profitability, we have to ensure that all other world players honor our IP by adopting laws and policies which support the US desire to remain dominant.
Over the years, we have witnessed all sorts of measures and activities pushed by the US such as the DMCA, copyright police proposals, pressuring [bullying] other countries into creating draconian law [which doesn't yet exist here in the US because it would be amazingly unpopular] and even influencing other nations into violating their own laws and procedures to satisfy the agenda of the IP business interests here in the U.S. (You know, like the illegal seizure and take down of the piratebay.)
I expect to see much worse in the near future INCLUDING military action. Sure, it's hard to justify military action for copying music, music and more, but it's not hard to imagine... you know "funding terrorism," "being run by terrorists," or even "harboring known terrorists" as cause for sending in a SEAL team or something like that. But what is "wrong" with this?
Turns out that media wants to be free and increasingly, we are seeing independent artists and groups pushing their way to the front lines of popularity thanks to emerging technologies and media. This is resulting in "old media" and other IP industry struggling for ways to compete and they are resorting to bribing... err, I mean, influencing government into defending, protecting, supporting and subsidizing their business models in every way imaginable. In the end, it is easy to see how and why "old media" and other IP industry are going away and their their days are numbered. But since the rest of the US has essentially been sold out, it is the second to the last massive resource the US has going for it.
Yes, I said "second to the last." What's that last? In case you didn't guess, it's PEOPLE. Already we have seen massive privatization of the prison industry. It's not widely spoken of or even cared about because "criminals are bad people" and we don't care about them right? In these privatized prisons, there are massive labor and services being performed by prisoners at wages below "minimum wage" and under conditions which rival the sweatshops of the 18th and 19th century. And with the massive criminalization of just about everything imaginable, it's easy to see what's coming and for whom it comes... the non-citizens, ex-citizens and non-voting-felons of the US... a class of people which is accelerating and growing in ways that are simply being ignored by the media and others at the moment.
I kn
We can all sit and complain about it here, or we can contact the offices of our senators; and try to spread the word for others to do the same. (No, e-petitions don't count and form letters seem rarely to be effective. Take five minutes and at least compose an original email.) If you want this to get some more mainstream coverage that's in your power too - you will find that "letters to the editor" of your local newspaper still has a surprisingly high readership.