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How SOPA & PIPA Could Hurt Scientific Debate
mwolfam writes with this pointed excerpt from a piece at the Huffington Post by Los Alamos National Laboratories post-doc researcher Michael Ham, who makes a slightly different case than most for the reasons that SOPA and PIPA should be stopped: "Simply put, The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) currently under development in Congress will provide a rapid way to sentence websites to death without the need for pesky things like trials and juries. Much to the surprise of nobody who understands how the Internet works, these two Acts will have absolutely no effect on digital piracy, but they will create an environment where freedom of speech could be severely curtailed, large companies can execute competitors, and scientific data can be hidden from the public."
Thanks muchly, our economy needs a bit of a boost right now.
Would it shut them up if we just subjected Internet access to like a $3 per month fee? Put it into a pool and let the copyright holders fight over what share they think they deserve. But only, ONLY!, if they agree to never sue anyone using those ISPs agreeing to this fee.
The US is hellbent on the way to being a "nuclear damage zone", to be routed around. Inside, people will need a encrypted channel to a "neutral" server outside the US in a freer country to surf from.
Actually, those acts are a good thing. In reality they will only hurt American companies and consumers, not the rest of the world. They will however drive business and entrepreneurship away from USA, basically allowing the US economy to implode, and thus when the companies get hurt, their wellsponsored congresspuppets will vote in another act to stop this madness.
Good thing money equals speech in some areas, isn't it?
... it seems that the US is committed to bullying other countries into enacting these laws themselves . . . or else . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
This will probably reflect on my ignorance regarding DNS, but why can't we have a website similar to archive.org that resides on a static ip address that everyone knows and that can be used to check the latest archived DNS records.
I'm not proposing domain anarchy. Just something like ICANNBackup.org which resolves to x.x.x.x?
Let's apply the SOPA logic to other things to... if someone asks you for directions to a bank and they rob it then you should be liable. Farewell GPS and maps, we barely knew thee.
SOPA is a very silly piece of legislation but we already have the US attempting to extradite someone from the UK for hosting links. SOPA just codifies such gross stupidity in US law.
Because they understand it so well.
Take a look at "Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works" http://bit.ly/vOEEbt
Senator Ted Stevens described the internet as “a series of tubes;” Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina "seemed particularly comfortable about his own lack of understanding;" and Rep. Maxine Waters of California stated "any discussion of security concerns is 'wasting time' and that the bill should move forward without question."
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
Minister Kapil Sibal, the Communications Minster for India, provided a solution to this problem. Websites should hire people to manually review *all* user-submitted content prior to posting on the web. He just happens to know a country with a large and reasonably cheap workforce available for such things, ruled by a government using the Orwell playbook.
Just a thought - but if SOPA can be used to silence debate, this must apply just as much to the political as to the scientific process.
I think that if you were to target politician's private websites and any websites associated with congress using SOPA then you might quickly find the act repealed!
SOPA in greek means "shut up"
PIPA in greek means "pipe" or (slang) "blowjob"
when's it time to use it?
Could be, might be, possibly, if twisted and abused in the worst ways imaginable by warped and dogmatic minds.
I read the Huff often, but it's just a blog site. There is no fact checking required by their writers, so I take what they say with a HUGE grain of salt.
This article, for example, is a panic-inducing fluff piece with not a shred of evidence to support it.
We GOT our way on SOPA yesterday. Good enough for me.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"Simply put, ... they will create an environment where freedom of speech could be severely curtailed, large companies can execute competitors, and scientific data can be hidden from the public."
I keep hearing about these computer viruses. I hear they are a bad thing. Why doesn't Congress do anything about them? Why don't they pass a law to make them illegal? Call your Congresscritter now and ask him to sponsor a Stop Internet Viruses Act.
SIVA. Now *THAT* would make us safe!
The glass is half glass.
http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml.....Canada sucks I live here.
I'd like to know where that mythical country is that respects your Internet privacy and doesn't subject you to damage from arbitrary and invalid copyright claims. I haven't found it, but I'd sure like to move my server there.
Internet connections in Europe are subject to monitoring without a court order, you may end up having to pay fines for mere allegations of copyright infringement without due process, the government can place viruses on your computer to monitor it, and many forms of speech that are legal and protected in the US are illegal and subject to prosecution in Europe.
...but won't SOPA/PIPA work both ways? Won't MAFIAA online distribution channels be affected as well? I could place my copyrighted work somewhere in comment/review section of their sitesand then cite PIPA to take the online store offline.
I'm assuming that according to SOPA/PIPA, site owner is still accountable for what user posts.
I RTFA and thought it a little theatrical, but on point. So SOPA and PIPA may have or will have a serious impact upon social websites like FB, like Slashdot, like...all of them. I can see it also having an impact on search engines, consumer websites that allows reviews; So what are these companies doing?
Were I head of Amazon or Google or Microsoft or FaceBook or Slashdot I would perhaps be on the phone coordinating some Act to indicate ones lack of support for SOPA, show what the Internet would be like after its law. I read (once) that there was talk to shut down major sites one day to give example to a crippled Internet....Where did that go? Businesses may lose money? They will lose a lot more if SOPA shut them down. (or will "big sites" get special treatment...that would frost some folks)
So, you see, its hard for me to get upset, to rage against the machine, when the major operators of the machine don't really care. Changing a small section of this bill is not a win, getting it canceled is a win. This Ant can call his representatives all day and it will do nothing against the money in their pockets. What will get their notice is when the Web they and their constituents rely on is taken off line for a day.
When I read that the Google boys, Facebook King, Amazon God, Lord Bill et al speak out loudly and long; then I care, its their world, not mine. If the Web (note, not network) shuts down today I'd jones for a bit on missing gmail, not buying online, not posting to "friends". Quickly I'd re-discover letter writing, going to a local store, and actually attempting to talk face to face (no book) with my friends. It's not my web anymore, it is Google's and their ilk. They don't have a problem with SOPA? Neither do I. I'll read about their success in the local paper Newsprint.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
LOL goodbye, america. The rest of the world will happily carry on with the real Internet and just route around this defect as it always did.
The industry funding the laws, and the congress that are going to pass them, really cant see beyond their pocket book and feel that any industry ( or people ) that are harmed are just collateral damage, and really don't give a damn.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The Obama Administration has responded to the petitions for stopping SOPA, PIPA and E-PARASITE. The good news: They oppose DNS intervention and action against anyone covered by US law. The bad news: They did not address deep-packet inspection or payment processors. https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#/!/response/combating-online-piracy-while-protecting-open-and-innovative-internet
You owners are tired of your whining. It is interfering with their collection of all the economic resources in the USA. If you keep talking among yourselves you might get the erroneous archaic idea that as a citizen you have basic rights. You only have value as long as you can put money in the pockets of the economic royalists who now own the country. As soon as you cease to be a source of profit, you are expected to crawl off and die in a gutter. You are not allowed to die in the presence of you owners, it spoils their view. Why have you not figured this out yet?
Why is Snark Required?
"Much to the surprise of nobody who understands how the Internet works..."
My brain just threw a parse exception.
Well, I can see a LOT of sites moving to off-shore sites that are technology literate and friendly - Iceland, Brazil, Some-unnamed-island-in-the-pacific... The jobs that go there will help their economies, but will not be helpful to resurrecting the US economy.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
All IP addresses assigned to the U.S. government should be blocked by all of the major sites. Let them have no searches, webmail, webdocs, or video's, chat, or voip until they stop trying to break stuff they know nothing about.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
A few of my math colleges and I are a bit worried that arXiv, (a huge database where mathematicians put their results before sending them to journals), will be shut down. It is most probable that some material in that database coincide with material published in journals, and most journals have the requirement that you sign over the copyright to them, thus making the arxiv version an infringement. However, arxiv is the main source for mathematicians to quickly discover results that might be needed, or to avoid working on a problem which has already been solved. On a side note, there are a few extreme religious groups that oppose almost all form of science, so some might get tempted to shut down theoretical physics or other alternatives to "god did it all".
Does anyone else get the feeling that governments are no longer the issue? That's it corporations?
If anyone is interested this is the White House's response to the We The people petitions "Veto the SOPA bill" and "Stop the E-PARASITE Act" on the subject.
Time to offend someone
We need a rider on this bill to say that If you are a COP, Child of a Politician, then you are breaking the law in the public eye. Double Penalty. If your an idiot, and you tell your dad, and HE writes the law? 50 lashes...
The only reason that its a law anyway, is some COP was bragging and got caught.
Much easier to chase ghosts than actual KILLERS.
When the truth is less interesting than the story, the story usually wins.
Be that as it may, legally-enforced Internet filtering is still censorship. People want to be able to trade information with each other, and when an authority steps in to silence them, they rebel. This is just basic human nature (as the inclination for those with authority to step in and stop people from doing anything that might threaten said authority, whether it is just or not).
All of this has happened before and this will all happen again.
such a clear definition of the REAL goals of ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, an other such legisltion!
Does NO ONE in congress know what "WWW" stands for?
Oh so sad for the RIAA, the days are long gone for when they were able to rip you off for $15 on a cassette or CD by putting one or two of the best tracks on the radio or TV, and then after getting the whole album home for a listen you discovered the rest of album completely SUCKED! Also, there used to be no way to be able to hear anything from any other musicians out there who weren't actively being promoted by a label, and without major label backing there really was no chance of success, so we can thank the freedom of the internet for the success of a great many musicians who would have otherwise never had the opportunity to be heard by a wider audience.
Bottom line here is the RIAA and MPAA simply don't like you to be able to judge the worth of their product before them having your money in hand. The current environment of the internet independently allows artists to thrive equally, succeeding only upon an earned reputation for talent and not from a record companies promotion, which really is the point of what we're trying to get to, isn't it? SOPA and PIPA are the fruits of old greedy record company and movie execs who are trying to maintain their parasitic position over the true talent. It's been proven that the people will fairly compensate artists for a respectable product (see Radiohead, Louis CK), therefore, would it be such a bad thing if the RIAA and MPAA were forced to eat the crap they produce? and what do we have to lose? A future with less lady gagas, biebers and meet the focker movies would be just fine with me.
Consider, how else are the crooks controlling the american media (TV and newspaper) going to be able to maintain their control over public opinion when americans are able to speak and assemble freely via an unregulated internet? Free speech is terrifying to tyrants, and this (shamefully) is the true underlying force behind SOPA and PIPA.
You mean hurt scientific debate such as Global Warming or ?? So much energy has been spent to prevent scientists from voicing their opposition of said Global Warming and I see this article on SlashDot as if they support it...what a laugh.