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No SOPA Vote Until 2012
jfruhlinger writes "A victory, or a just a breather? The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee has postponed further debate on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) until after Congress' holiday break. At the urging of some SOPA opponents, Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and committee chairman, said Friday he will consider a hearing or a classified briefing on the bill's impact on cybersecurity." Update: 12/17 04:28 GMT by T : "Or not," as an anonymous reader comments below. "Despite the fact that Congress was supposed to be out of session until the end of January, the Judiciary Committee has just announced plans to come back to continue the markup this coming Wednesday. This is rather unusual and totally unnecessary. But it shows just how desperate Hollywood is to pass this bill as quickly as possible, before the momentum of opposition builds up even further."
This lets us get our shit together and oppose them properly.
Or not. Despite the fact that Congress was supposed to be out of session until the end of January, the Judiciary Committee has just announced plans to come back to continue the markup this coming Wednesday. This is rather unusual and totally unnecessary. But it shows just how desperate Hollywood is to pass this bill as quickly as possible, before the momentum of opposition builds up even further.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111216/11102617108/sopa-markup-runs-out-time-likely-delayed-until-2012.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111216/11102617108/sopa-markup-runs-out-time-likely-delayed-until-2012.shtml
Update.... Or not. Despite the fact that Congress was supposed to be out of session until the end of January, the Judiciary Committee has just announced plans to come back to continue the markup this coming Wednesday. This is rather unusual and totally unnecessary. But it shows just how desperate Hollywood is to pass this bill as quickly as possible, before the momentum of opposition builds up even further.
Translation:
We're catching a lot of shit about this, and so we've told our campaign sponsors we have to table this until after the election. Once the election is over, we'll ram it down their throats, promise.
xoxoxo,
Your Elected Officials.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If you care about this issue and are a US citizen, then I strongly urge you to sign the a petition relating to the matter or start and promote a new one. The existing petition only has 2 days left. You can find it at:
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/amend-constitution-making-internet-unalienable-right/YJ3fXQcm
It might not fix the problem by itself, but it does get us a response and also gives the White House an idea of how many people are opposed to it.
As an aside, signing petitions at whitehouse.gov takes much less than voting and (given the 25,000 signature threshold) may actually have more of an impact than voting. I strongly urge you to do so.
(no sig)
The issue here is threefold. First, that money is allowed to influence politics. As long as that is true, those without money lose - and lose constantly. Second, the idea that ideas can be property. Creating artificial forms of property has repeatedly proven to widen wealth disparity and harm society at large. The very idea of property is a problem, but physical property is a necessary evil. "Intellectual property" is not. We need to not be creating and extending this "intellectual property," but rather we need to be rolling it back or abolishing it. Third, that censorship is seen as a reasonable way to deal with people in other countries doing things that are illegal here. We all criticized China and Iran for censoring communications which were illegal in their countries; why is it suddenly alright when it is for the sake of American profit? Because it is not, and if you believe so, it is only because you either stand to profit from said censorship, or are a fool being misled by those who do.
Great Intellect...
Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and committee chairman, said Friday he will consider a hearing or a classified briefing on the bill's impact on cybersecurity."
Consider a hearing or a classified briefing? I call bullshit. This is a PUBLIC issue!
if(!control) { cyberthreat_danger_ZOMG() } else { SOPA() }
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and committee chairman, said Friday he will consider a hearing or a classified briefing on the bill's impact on cybersecurity
He'll consider it? Gee thanks a lot, you corrupt piece of shit.
If freeddom of speech must be sacrificed to save the Ent.Industry, i guess the final option is to let the industry die.
I just posted this in the other thread, but I'll go ahead and repost it here too, that way I can feel like I didn't waste my time on it. I actually watched most of the judiciary hearing yesterday and while I was probably in the middle of a stroke for most of it the parts I remember paint a pretty clear picture.
On the one side you had a few (very few) congressmen/women, namely Mr. Issa, Mr. Polis, Mr. Chaffetz, Ms. Lofgren and Ms. Jackson. They spent the entire hearing pleading with the chairman and the rest of the committee to allow experts (nerds as they often said) to essentially come in and explain the internet to them, because it was obvious that 99% of the members of the committee had no idea what they were talking about. They made reasonable, logical arguments and put forth one amendment after the other trying to clarify some really vague areas of the bill, all of which were shot down by the rest of the committee usually by a vote of ~6 to 24.
On the other side you had 5 or 6 members of the committee who also admitted several times that they had zero understanding of the technical aspects of the bill, but that the bill was awesome anyway. This group was mainly the chairman of the committee Mr. Smith, Mr. Berman, Mr. Watt, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Goodlatte and Ms. Waters. They made no arguments beyond "We have to do something. This is something. Therefor we should do this". Unlike the first group they didn't care that they were ignorant on the subject, they just wanted to get the damn thing passed. I doubt anyone here would be surprised to learn they all received large campaign contributions from the TV/Music/Film industry. Check the contributions of the first group and you'll find the same industry conspicuously absent. It's also worth noting that more than half the committee never said a word during the entire session that wasn't "No" in response to an amendment vote. This third group cared so little they couldn't even be bothered to take part in the debate.
So when you're condemning this committee for being willfully ignorant just keep in mind that 5 or 6 of them don't deserve to be thrown in with the rest like that. I'll end with a quote from a frustrated Darrell Issa, speaking to the chairman of the committee half way through the second day:
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
"he will consider a hearing or a classified briefing on the bill's impact on cybersecurity."
I wonder what side will give that classified briefing.
Congress does this when they want time for two things to happen:
1. People to forget about it, and opposition to thus lose momentum.
2. Lobbyists to deliver more big bags of cash.
Both things are almost guaranteed to happen. This is going to pass.
Unless, people can give a rats arse for more than three months running about something, which, as desperately as I hope will happen, probably won't.
Check your premises.
Outlawing something pushes it underground. It does not make any perceived problem disappear, in fact it creates more. Some places have actually allowed controlled use of what would otherwise be completely illegal substances such as cocaine and hash because otherwise there would be so many problems the domestic security services would be overwhelmed.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I dislike SOPA with the burning fire of a thousand suns.
But amending the Constitution to claim the "internet is an unalienable right" strikes me as a really bad idea, and very vague.
Amusingly it would also seem to prevent Network Neutrality, which I would be in favor of - but again I think amending the constitution is a bad way to go about this, and pretty certainly requires way more votes than is possible to make happen.
Far better than signing this petition, call or write your house members and let them know you DO NOT WANT SOPA in any form. Not a "fixed" up bill. Nothing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Congress sees Christmas as a distraction for the public; it's a time for passing unpopular legislation while everyone is tied up with friends and family, too busy to call their congressman. It is a very good thing that it has been killed for the holiday season.
The traditional news outlets have given it very little coverage, but the internet will not let the fight die.
Our hopes for common sense and freedom reside on the decision of the guy from TEXAS? Man are we boned.
A delay! Just what all those whiners... err citizens wanted, right? Well, this will serve one purpose at least - to wait until the opposition's momentum has died down before going to a vote. They learned their lesson from the Occupy movement well: wait until people are sick of hearing about the issue, then move to squash it.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
Those of you who were following the hearing, what do you think was the best part?
Either +1 Insightful or +1 Funny. Or even -1 FUCKING WRONG
My favorite part was how Sheila Jackson Lee's tantrum over a tweet from a opponent lawmaker delayed things - but not the fact the person was tweeting about being bored and surfing the internet.
"We are debating the Stop Online Piracy Act and Shiela Jackson [sic] has so bored me that I'm killing time by surfing the Internet."
http://www.zdnet.com/news/sopa-votes-derailed-by-politicians-offensive-tweet/6334156
http://activepolitic.com:82/News/2011-12-16f/House_Judiciary_Committee_Scedules_Part_2_SOPA.html
They should change the name to something everyone likes, lik Stop Online Acts of Piracy (SOAP).
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
All this means is the issue will damage their chances of re-election. it will be passed once another term is locked in.
The reason for the delay is obvious, under the act Santa would be thrown in the slammer for allowing his elves to look up how to make toys online. No congressman wants to be responsible for arresting Santa the Christmas before an election year, even they aren't THAT evil.
Monstar L
Escalation of the Nazi Regime was the end of the Nazi Regime.
SOPA is just another escalation.
And besides. What is the worst that can happen? ICANN becoming worthless as DNS provider? International alternatives to ICANN will prosper? Will we be using a Chinese or South African DNS as fallback in future? Will TOR become the new Internet? Will Wikipedia go offline as Jimbo said?
Interesting times.
The cold war gave us the Internet. Maybe stuff like SOPA is needed to enforce TOR and PGP.
Quote of the day, from the Washington Post : "As a general rule, when the people saying that this will have a horrible, chilling impact on something are the ones who created that thing in the first place, and the people who are saying, “Oh, no, it’ll be fine, it only targets the bad actors” are members of the Motion Picture Association of America, it seems obvious whose opinion you should heed."
They are waiting till another disaster happens so they can vote on it while everyone is distracted. Mark my words.
Somehow I've missed this issue over the last couple of months (I read /. daily, my memory must be getting worse than I thought). At first look, the bill reads like a bad joke. The wording of this bill as it stands now will allow the take down of any website which provides user forums / comments. Simply visit the forum, post a link to download copy-written material or other 'illegal' data (which covers a tremendous amount of ground), and the owner of the website has committed a felony and immediately loses all advertising income.The owner is then guilty - you can't even say 'guilty until proven innocent' - you've likely lost your main income, their reputation among 'reputable' businesses is gone, and their opportunities for defense and damages seem pretty insignificant as stated in the bill.
The user forum example just scratches the surface of absurd possibilities.
Amazon selling a book which could facilitate access to whatever a corporation declares is 'illegal' data,e.g. computing book which touches on bit-torrents.
Services like Pandora (you can record it on your home PC) or Google Music (obviously)
Any data backup company (oops, had illegal data on my backed up hard drive - bye bye Carbonite).
Did I miss something? I don't see where in this bill that any line is drawn between a site like Pirate's Bay and the examples above.
and so should you. Remove these incompetent fools from power.
It's likely our complaints will fall on deaf ears. We don't need a political solution - we need a technical one.
There has to be some group of people looking at ways around SOPA... Alternate DNS systems, Tor, tunneling, encryption... all of these things should be able to defeat whatever measures they throw at us. The real way to defeat SOPA is to render it irrelevant.
We can do this now, before it's passed, or we can do it after, but we're going to do it regardless.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
It must be a priority to oust any moron who whole heartidly lends support to SOPA out of their respective jobs ASAP.
Not only is this bill completly dangerous it also shows us easily which people to brand them as McCarthyism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism in their fanatical ferver to stop piracy.
On October 26, 2011, Representative Lamar Smith introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261) ("SOPA"). Other sponsors of the Bill upon its introduction were Ranking Member John Conyers, IP Subcommittee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, Rep. Howard Berman, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Rep. Mary Bono-Mack, Rep. Steve Chabot, Rep. Ted Deutch, Rep. Elton Gallegly, Rep. Tim Griffin, Rep. Dennis Ross, and Rep. Lee Terry.
...is their laziness.
The shroud of the dark side has fallen. Begun, the SOPA War has.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IWantOut is your friend.
Just give me 6-12 months before this shit really goes down, and I'll be financially free and out of this place.
TO: Lamar Smith RE: SOPA 3261 I am the IT Director (in your district). I have 28 years IT experience. Please cease and desist with the SOPA H.R.3261. To me the bill reads like a bad joke. Thank you for your consideration.
they will let people forget and pass it in a sneaky way
This is exactly how it went down in Wisconsin. Not a peep was said about the real agenda until the Republicans got in, then jobs jobs jobs turned into bust the unions and mandate Voter ID to game the voting process. Guess the facts don't fit into some moderator's alternate reality, though.
SOPA in Swedish means (a piece of) GARBAGE.
Seriously.
This reminds of the Federal Reserve Act which was signed on December 23, 1913, 2 days before Christmas, so there would be literally no one on the floor to oppose it. They are hoping for exactly the same to happen to SOPA.
I'm trying to spread a meme... SOPA Clause... He knows when you've been naughty...
http://fixerdave.blogspot.com/2011/12/sopa-clause.html
If you think about it... this topic is just asking to be parodied, and SOPA Clause is certainly fitting for the season. Will it work? It might if it gets big enough... spread the word or, if you have a better idea, do that. Do something.
Here's my contribution to the cause: A script:
Background music is the Santa Claus song, "He knows when you've been naught, he knows when..." Words changed to Sopa Clause, etc. Fades in and out through whole video.
Scene 1: 8 year old girl on computer - Barbie-type site. Asks in forum (speaking as typing) "Where can I buy the Happy Girl song?. Up pops an answer from Tinkerbell.... "Here's a copy..."
Scene 2: Sopa Clause in his office, leafing through paychecks from RIAA et.all. Alarm goes off - horns, big red "copyright violation" flashing sign. Sopa whips his chair around, half second of frenzied typing, hits big red "Censored" button.
Scene 3: Little girl's site replaced by SOPA warning. She types/says "What's Sopa?"
Scene 4: Long-haired 60's style hacker-type dude. Short rant on evil Sopa... says "Download this to bypass the evil empire... but don't forget to hide your IP."
Scene 5: Little girl says "What's an IP?" Shrugs, goes back to original website, via Sopa bypass.
Scene 6: Sopa Clause office. Alarm goes off. Big red "Terrorism Alert" sign. He whips chair around and picks up the old-style rotary phone - yells distorted words.
Scene 7: Swat team burst into little girls room, throws Abu Ghraib hood on her, zip-ties hands, and carts her off past parents, cowering behind the pepper-spray cop. Parents ask "What did she do.... where are you taking her... how long before she can come home?" All questions answered with dead-pan "Classified... National Security."
fade to Scene 8: Wizard Of Oz stlye room with Sopa Clause sitting on throne. Array of pepper-spray cops, and all manner of "non-lethel" weapons on either side. Parents cowering on floor below, asking same questions. Sopa answers "Clasified, National security" to all. Protestors break in... big fight. Sopa loses.
Scene 9: Sopa Clause and pepper-spray cops being led to airplane. Route lined with protestors holding signs. Signs say stuff like "We the people are the nation. We're taking our security back!". Sopa is put on an exile-flight to North Pole.
Scene 10: Cut to hacker dude, with best "Uncle Sam Wants You" pose. Says "Hey Sopa, this is the Information Age. The kids know when you're being naughty too."
Theme song picks up... "We know when you've been naught, we know when..."
The end - now get it to someone that can animate. It it doesn't go viral by Tuesday, we all might be in for a rough ride.
Last summer they wanted us to know that Anonymous was terrorists, for interfering with internet traffic (their DDoS of some of the corporate overlords).
Now, the same corrupt bastards are interfering with the internet on a wholesale scale. I say we consider those politicians terrorists, and treat them as such. And consider this: This means their OWNERS are FINANCING TERRORISM.
I take issue with this point and find it frustrating that people muddy the water with this idea. If you just spent 2 million dollars of your own and investors money making a movie, the idea that you'd then let people just take it for free would seem ridiculous to you too [...]
Ah, that's the usual strawman. Note that most people here agree to (some form of) copyright, may be (some form of) patent rights and (some form of) trademark rights.
There is a big difference to property rights there. Those above expire at some point in time (which has been pushed further and further by some corrupt lobbying groups).
Throwing all of them into one pot and calling them "intellectual property" just reveals those people's wet dreams: that they be able to speculate with them, to buy, sell, hoard them, eternally, to the detriment of society. And the harm done will be more than what you witnessed with real estate, steel and pork.
So let's push for copyrights, etc as limited monopolies, granted for a reasonably short period of time, shall we?
Its Haley's Comet!
There's only so many times a person will fall for that one.
Have gnu, will travel.
" they can pass it on a day during the Retardican primary votes"
https://plus.google.com/113097276181543898574/posts/WduCuxwpTEv
Rep. Waters is a Democrat.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
so true
This fool is no brighter than that Ted Stevens jackass from Alaska. Let him F$%#$ it up and then wonder why his email takes to long to go through all those pipes. Only in America do we have fools who are uninformed but still qualified to pass judgement on things they don't understand. NO SLEEP TILL DOPA!!!!
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4009
It’s a bad bill, all right. It’s a terrible bill – awful from start to finish, idiotic to the core, corruptly pandering to a powerful special-interest group at the cost of everyone else’s liberty.
But I can’t help noticing that a lot of the righteous panic about it is being ginned up by people who were cheerfully on board for the last seventeen or so government power grabs – cap and trade, campaign finance “reform”, the incandescent lightbulb ban, Obamacare, you name it – and I have to wonder
Don’t these people ever learn? Anything? Do they even listen to themselves?
It’s bizarre and entertaining to hear people who yesterday were all about allegedly benign and intelligent government interventions suddenly discovering that in practice, what they get is stupid and vicious legislation that has been captured by a venal and evil interest group.
Yeah, no shit? Howhow do they avoid noticing that in reality it’s like this all the time?
I submitted this via the House website:
You can do the same. It may not make any difference at all, but this country has gotten been too apathetic about telling their government what t thinks. You probably send 100 emails or more a day, god knows how many texts, tweets, and web forms you fill out daily. Take 5-10 miinutes, fill this one out, send a coherent, non-ranting and obscene message, and *maybe*, your voice will be heard.
Issue: WEBTEL
Message Subject: Please do not support H.R.3261 (SOPA) as written
Message Text:
As it is currently written, the SOPA bill would both threaten free speech and stifle internet security. I am not some hacker opposed to protecting intellectual property, but as it is currently written, this bill would allow extrajudicial control over speech. All a company would have to do is say one was violating their intellectual property rights, whether true or not, to shut your speech down with no legislative or judicial oversight. This is akin, not to a newspaper not accepting your op-ed piece because it did not agree, but to a newspaper nailing your mailbox shut so you could not send your op-ed piece to anyone. I know the technical issues can be complex and hard to understand, but this bill has implications far beyond what the entertainment industry says. Again, please do not support this bill, at least until the DNS/IP blocking portions of the bill are completely studied, understood, revised, and/or removed.
The senate and house can come up with all the laws and other bull shit they want. But ultimately it should be up to the people not these bone heads to vote on them. I understand that in 1776 there was a need to have representatives in government due to the lack of speedy communication from constituents. However in this day and age, we have the technology to allow people to vote on all of these issues. There is no longer any need for electoral college, and obviously our senators no longer speak for their districts so there is no longer any need for them to have the power to vote on laws that apply to us. I know this is unlikely to ever happen, but I can dream cant I?
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-12-08/politics/politics_netherlands-clinton-internet-freedom_1_internet-freedom-internet-restrictions-online-activity?_s=PM:POLITICS
Citing secretary of State Hillary Clinton:Clinton told the audience Internet freedom should be considered a human right.
Of course that's only applicable to repressive regimes and not to RIAA, MPAA or the US DHS.......