Slashdot Mirror
PROTECT-IP Makes Its Way To the Floors of Congress
New submitter trunicated writes "Everyone on Slashdot seems to know about PROTECT-IP Act — how it will push responsibility for the contents of the internet onto the search engines that index it, how it will give even more power to the *IAA industries, and, worst of all, how it will provide the U.S. government with a kill switch they can use at their discretion. However, this write up may provide you with a bit more information and help you explain the issues to those that won't be able to get around the poisoned DNS entries that this bill will allow."
How low can they go?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It was fun for a while. Too bad they've decided to kill it.
Complete control over everything is their goal.
I'm not young but I would not be surprised if, one day, my wife and I find ourselves living in a tent somewhere, eating what we can catch or forage.
Hebrews 11:8
Jeremiah 33:3
Nothing ever improves when corporations and the governments team up to screw the populace.
help you explain the issues to those that won't be able to get around the poisoned DNS entries that this bill will allow
When Pakistan screwed up, according to their own internal policies, and altered the routing (BGP) and effectively caused youtube.com to be /dev/null'd for a half a day, the rest of the world responded. They fixed the routes, and Pakistan lost a lot of credibility and respect from other IT people. Were Pakistan to continue affecting the rest of the world with its internal policies, the rest of the world would respond more and more stringently, to the point that Pakistan would not have access to such systems anymore.
This is no different. If the US decides to mess around with DNS in accordance with its own internal policies, the rest of the world will respond by taking that control away. Either through a EU sanctioned DNS infrastructure, or some sort of p2p infrastructure.
The alternative is the rest of the world dealing with clearly incorrect DNS entries and businesses having to deal with US control.
This problem does not need to be further explained, and the ones that do understand it, will work around it. This is a good thing. It will push DNS beyond US control, and might actually start a decentralized/fractured DNS system where those that care can resolve host names the way they see fit.
In short, this only provides more motivation to "solving" our problem of a monitored Internet. Create a secondary Internet on top of it that is not monitored and cannot be interfered with. Several projects in the works, and this only puts more fuel on the fire so to speak.
Please buy the media industries already. They have way too much power over your business in comparison to their economic weight.
It's now known as the E-PARASITE Act. Normally I wouldn't bother posting over something so trivial, but the new name is so poetically apt that I have to mention it.
Rob
Corporate America is spitting into the face of the occupywallstreet effort! It's beginning to look like the 99% are going to get screwed again. Max Weber was right, modernity is the end.
How long till they use this crap to take down the OWS related websites?
Why don't we just block the US IP space?
Enough of their threats and bullshit.
People who want access to the world-wide Internet can always figure out a way to get a tunnel, be it ssh, freenet, or some other way of getting out of the Public Democratic Republic of the US of A.
We don't need their rules imposed on us.
Thanks.
They can go really, really close to zero, but not quite since the money they make off passing this act is represented as 1 / (public support) . They can get the amount of public support to a number arbitrarily close to zero, but not zero.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
As I read about the poisoned DNS entries, I pause to edit /etc/hosts
The game.
Your congressman/senators are your lawmakers (unless they have been bought). Write to them and tell them not to vote for it. People always overstate the power of the executive branch and seem to try to understate the power of congress. https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
Even better. Somebody with more resources and experience than I should try to croudsource a bill to update the DCMA and Regan era internet regulations.
Does this even have much of a chance of passing? Considering how hard it's been lately to get IMPORTANT laws passed... do we even have to worry?
Our government can't seem to get much of anything done lately; how is this different?
I wrote to my senator (Mike Johanns, R-NE) to urge him to oppose the Hollywood Welfare Act [1] which helps a tiny (but vocal) cartel at the expense of everyone else. His office replied to say he agreed that it was crucial legislation to protect America's creative industries. So much for letter writing. :-/
In fairness, the last time I wrote him on a completely unrelated subject, he called me himself. I got home to an answering message: "Hi Kirk, this is Mike Johanns and I wanted to talk to you about your letter. Sorry I missed you! Give me a call back if you'd like." We never managed to meet up, but I respect that he personally went of out his way to address a constituent. I just hate that he's firmly on the wrong side (in my opinion) of this issue.
[1] I called it by its official name in my letter, but call it by its real name elsewhere.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
As much as I love ol' Ben, I'm having trouble finding a way to twist his quote to this situation.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. ~P.J. O'Rourke
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomas Jefferson
Looks like Jefferson didn't get his wish.
Throw away everything you've ever been taught about copyright, neighboring rights, moral rights, etc.
Treat copyright the same as patents: allow exclusive rights for a limited time to earn back investments made. Art in the mainstream is and has been treated as products/merchandise, so we might as well let the legislative side reflect that fact and forget about that small world of a few publishers and creators, and a huge world of consumers. The public are still consumers but at the same time are creators and publishers, too. Inventors that spend years to develop their inventions get 20 years of protection, why shouldn't suffice for creators?
Can you imagine a world where every work (including "orphaned works") published before 1990 is Public Domain and free for everyone to use, modify and do whatever they please? This will break the power of the RIAA/MPAA. Right now there is no Public Domain, other than some very old literature. Every commercially released DVD-Audio, SACD, CD-Audio, 33rpm vinyl LP, 45rpm single, and even a significant fraction of old 78 rpm recordings are still kept behind the Copyright Wall which is what gives the *AA their power.
President Obama, Tear Down That Wall!
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
It's only a matter of time until the corporate-government corruption begins passing some tipping points (like here, for example).
IANAL, but it seems to me the latest version of the bill gives this power only to the attorney general, and gives it only for "nondomestic" sites "dedicated" to infringing activities. Now I have no idea what the burden of proof is for "dedicated", but it seems like this is pretty squarely targeted at foreign video sharing sites that are outside of US laws. So they want to blackhole them.
I guess I'm not against that if the burden of proof is set high ( yes I know it probably won't be )
Maybe the MPAA should just start offering their own censored DNS service that if you use it, you get "movie points!"
*sigh* keep paddling upstream MPAA, maybe you'll get there someday and make us all go back to watching movies only in the theater.
As far as I can see this type of control was always going to come. If you look across the board with how corporate interests are crippling western society and so called democracy, it was only a matter of time before the last bastion of free speech was muffled and squeezed closed. Sadly Australia seems to follow the US in some of its more foolish endeavours i home this isnt one of them. Good luck USA, you're gonna need it! :(
Hello Onion Routing!
To be fair, so far this bill has only been referred to the Judiciary Committee; it is not yet on the floor of the House of Representatives as a whole. The vast majority of bills die in committee, so let's hope this one does as well. You can track the progress of the bill at http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-3261.
Is there a boilerplate letter that I could distribute to friends to e-mail to their senators and Representatives? I emailed one of my senators, Richard Blumenthal, and this is the response I got:
Thank you for your thoughtful message regarding S. 968, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property (“PROTECT IP”) Act of 2011. I appreciate hearing from you.
As you may know, I am a cosponsor of this bipartisan proposal to crack down on websites that sell counterfeit goods and illegally stream media content. The proposal includes a private right of action that would allow rights holders to enforce directly violations of their intellectual property rights — a key enforcement provision I championed.
The internet has revolutionized the way we do business, but our laws must keep up with the evolution of online commerce. American intellectual property is an engine of job creation and economic growth, and intellectual property infringement hurts our businesses and consumers, and costs American jobs.
In supporting this legislation, I have worked to strike a careful balance between protecting the freedoms afforded by the internet and protecting the legitimate commercial, economic, and safety considerations associated with stemming counterfeiting and other intellectual property infringement. Counterfeiters and thieves cannot be allowed to disobey copyright laws by distributing and selling copyrighted American works on the internet.
Thank you again for contacting me. I will be sure to keep your thoughts in mind as I continue to fight for the protection of intellectual property rights through my advocacy for the Protect IP Act and as I review other legislation that would enforce intellectual property laws. Please feel free to contact me with any other questions or concerns that you may have.
Sincerely,
Richard Blumenthal
United States Senate