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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...
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.
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.
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
Basically, at several points during the hearing some congressmen (usually Mr. Chaffetz and a couple others) pushed the committee to bring in some high level tech experts from various branches of the government to talk about the possible implications to DNSSec and general cyber security that SOPA might have, hence the classified briefing. They also pushed for more public hearings over and over again. It got to the point where Mr. Chaffetz offered to withdraw an amendment he made if the chairman would consider holding the classified briefing and, ideally, at least one other public briefing with "internet experts". He said he would consider it, but he didn't sound very sincere about it ("Oh, yeah ok, sure I'll consider it. Are you withdrawing your amendment now? Good, lets move on.").
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
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."
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.
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/