House Panel Moving Forward With SOPA

itwbennett writes "The House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a debate and vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act for later this week. Representative Lamar Smith, the committee chairman and main sponsor of the bill, will offer an amendment that is meant to address some concerns with the bill. Smith's proposed amendment would clarify that the bill applies only to foreign websites, not U.S. sites, accused of aiding copyright infringement."

Comments

Fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

That.

DOH!

[Anonymous Coward]

"We will only censor foreign websites, we promise!" does not make the proposal any better. Their are no nationality of a website on the Internet, a website is a part of the Internet, no matter where it is hosted.

Re:DOH!

[somersault]

a website is a part of the Internet, no matter where it is hosted.

"A country is part of the world, no matter where it is situated". By your logic, different nations shouldn't exist. It's a nice idea of course, but reality kind of gets in the way.

If anything the fact that sites are not located in the US should be what makes it impossible for them to do anything - apart from create something akin to China's "Great Firewall". If they want to stop people using US owned domains then fine, but they'd better not try to start taking down .ru sites etc.

Note that I don't even agree with Copyright infringment, but neither do I agree with these clowns.

Exercise your right to complain

[Anonymous Coward]

You can only complain if you've tried to make your voice heard:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/fight-blacklist-toolkit-anti-sopa-activists

Re:How long before the Slashdot crowd...

[fedos]

How long before the majority of the Slashdot crowd ... stops supporting liberals

You fail. Lamar Smith, the sponsor of this bill is a conservative. The truth is that both liberal and conservative congressional members routinely support draconian copyright laws that give huge amounts of power to large corporations. Snap out of the "small government" brainwashing and realize that the real fight is between those who want to give unlimited power to corporations, who make up almost the entirety of the Republican party plus a good amount of the Democratic party, and those who support protecting consumers from predatory behavior.

Re:Just another provocation of war

[Dorkmaster Flek]

Who said anything about a judge? That's one of the major problems with this bill. It lets rights holders cut off funding to any site accused of copyright infringement without having to go through the courts. That's exactly what Hollywood wants to avoid. The legal system is actually starting to get wise to the sheer idiocy of their anti-piracy legal cases, so they're going around it.