Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Can You Do About SOPA and PIPA?
Wednesday is here, and with it sites around the internet are going under temporary blackout to protest two pieces of legislation currently making their way through the U.S. Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA). Wikipedia, reddit, the Free Software Foundation, Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, imgur, Mozilla, and many others have all made major changes to their sites or shut down altogether in protest. These sites, as well as technology experts (PDF) around the world and everyone here at Slashdot, think SOPA and PIPA pose unacceptable risks to freedom of speech and the uncensored nature of the internet. The purpose of the protests is to educate people — to let them know this legislation will damage websites you use and enjoy every day, despite being unrelated to the stated purpose of both bills. So, we ask you: what can you do to stop SOPA and PIPA? You may have heard the House has shelved SOPA, and that President Obama has pledged not to pass it as-is, but the MPAA and SOPA-sponsor Lamar Smith (R-TX) are trying to brush off the protests as a stunt, and Smith has announced markup for the bill will resume in February. Meanwhile, PIPA is still present in the Senate, and it remains a threat. Read on for more about why these bills are bad news, and how to contact your representative to let them know it.
Note: This will be the last story we post today until 6pm EST in protest of SOPA. Why is it bad?
The Stop Online Piracy Act is H.R.3261, and the Protect-IP Act is S.968.
The intent of both pieces of legislation is to combat online piracy, giving the Attorney General and the Department of Justice power to block domain name services and demand that links be stripped from sites not involved in piracy. The problem is that the legislation, as written, is vague and overly-broad. For one thing, it classifies internet sites as "foreign" or "domestic" based entirely on their domain name. A site hosted abroad like Wikileaks.org could be classified as "domestic" because the .org TLD is registered through a U.S. authority. By defining it as "domestic," Wikileaks would then fall under the jurisdiction of U.S. laws. Other provisions are worded even more poorly: in Section 103, SOPA lays out the definition for a "foreign infringing site" as one where "the owner or operator of such Internet site is committing or facilitating the commission of criminal violations punishable under [provisions relating to counterfeiting and copyright infringement]." The problematic word is facilitating, as it opens the door to condemning sites that simply link to other sites.
The most obvious implication of this is that search engines would suddenly be responsible for monitoring and policing everything they index. Google indexed its trillionth concurrent URL in 2008. Can you imagine how many people it would take to double check all of them for infringing content? But the job wouldn't end at simply looking at them — Google would have to continually monitor them. Google would also have to somehow keep track of the billions of new sites that spring up daily, many of which would be trying to avoid close scrutiny. Of course, it's an impossible task, so there would need to be automated solutions. Automation being imperfect, it would leave us with false positives. Or perhaps sites would need to be "approved" to be listed. Either way, we'd then be dealing with censorship on a massive scale, and the infringing sites themselves would continue to pop up.
But the problems don't end there; in fact, SOPA defines "Internet search engine" as a service that "searches, crawls, categorizes, or indexes information or Web sites available elsewhere on the Internet" and links to them. That's pretty much what we do here at Slashdot. It's also something the fine folks at Wikipedia and reddit do on a regular basis. The strength of all three sites is that they're heavily dependent on user-generated content. Every day at Slashdot, readers deposit hundreds and hundreds of links into our submissions bin. Thousands of comments are made daily. We have a system to surface the good content, but the chaff still exists. If we suddenly had a mandate to retroactively filter out all the links to potentially copyright-infringing sites in our database, we wouldn't have many options. We're talking about reviewing hundreds of thousands of submissions, and every comment on 117,000+ stories. And we're far from the biggest site around — imagine social networks needing to police their content, and all the privacy issues that would raise.
Small sites and new sites would be hurt, too. A website isn't a single, discrete entity that exists on its own. A new company starting up a site would have to worry about its webhost, registrar, content provider, ISP, etc. The legislation would also raise significant financial obstacles. New companies need investments, and that would be much less likely (PDF) if the company could be held liable for content uploaded by users. On top of that, if the site was unable to live up to the vague standards set by the government and the entertainment industry, they could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit, which would be expensive to fight even if they won (and such laws would never, ever be abused). It's hard to conceptualize the internet without noting its unrivaled growth, and SOPA/PIPA would surely stifle it.
This legislation hits near and dear to the hearts of many Slashdotters; if SOPA/PIPA pass, IT staff for companies small and large are going to have their hands full making sure they aren't opening themselves to legal action or government intervention. Mailing lists, used commonly and extensively among open source software projects, would be endangered. Code repositories would need be scoured for infringing content; the bill allows for the strangling of revenue sources if its anti-infringement rules aren't being met. VPN and proxy services become only questionably legal. The very nature of the open source community — as the EFF puts it, "decentralized, voluntary, international" — is not compatible with the burdens placed on internet sites by SOPA and PIPA.
What can we do?
So, what can we do about it? There are two big things: contact your representative, and spread the word. Slashdot readers, on the whole, are more technically-minded than the average internet user, so you're all in a position to share your wisdom with the less internet-savvy people in your life, and get them to contact their representative, too. Here's some useful information for doing so:
Propublica has a list of all SOPA/PIPA supporters and opponents.
Here is the Senate contact list and the House contact list.
You can also use the EFF's form-letter, the Stop American Censorship form-letter, or sign Google's petition.
If you don't live in the U.S., you can petition the State Department. (And yes, you have a dog in this fight.)
SOPAStrike has a list of companies participating in the protest, and this crowd-sourced Google Doc tracks companies that support the legislation. Tell those companies what you think.
Further reading: Wikipedia has left their SOPA and PIPA pages up. The EFF has a series of articles explaining in more depth what is wrong with the bills. Here are some protest letters written to Congress from human rights groups, law professors, and internet companies.
Go forth and educate.
Note: This will be the last story we post today until 6pm EST in protest of SOPA. Why is it bad?
The Stop Online Piracy Act is H.R.3261, and the Protect-IP Act is S.968.
The intent of both pieces of legislation is to combat online piracy, giving the Attorney General and the Department of Justice power to block domain name services and demand that links be stripped from sites not involved in piracy. The problem is that the legislation, as written, is vague and overly-broad. For one thing, it classifies internet sites as "foreign" or "domestic" based entirely on their domain name. A site hosted abroad like Wikileaks.org could be classified as "domestic" because the .org TLD is registered through a U.S. authority. By defining it as "domestic," Wikileaks would then fall under the jurisdiction of U.S. laws. Other provisions are worded even more poorly: in Section 103, SOPA lays out the definition for a "foreign infringing site" as one where "the owner or operator of such Internet site is committing or facilitating the commission of criminal violations punishable under [provisions relating to counterfeiting and copyright infringement]." The problematic word is facilitating, as it opens the door to condemning sites that simply link to other sites.
The most obvious implication of this is that search engines would suddenly be responsible for monitoring and policing everything they index. Google indexed its trillionth concurrent URL in 2008. Can you imagine how many people it would take to double check all of them for infringing content? But the job wouldn't end at simply looking at them — Google would have to continually monitor them. Google would also have to somehow keep track of the billions of new sites that spring up daily, many of which would be trying to avoid close scrutiny. Of course, it's an impossible task, so there would need to be automated solutions. Automation being imperfect, it would leave us with false positives. Or perhaps sites would need to be "approved" to be listed. Either way, we'd then be dealing with censorship on a massive scale, and the infringing sites themselves would continue to pop up.
But the problems don't end there; in fact, SOPA defines "Internet search engine" as a service that "searches, crawls, categorizes, or indexes information or Web sites available elsewhere on the Internet" and links to them. That's pretty much what we do here at Slashdot. It's also something the fine folks at Wikipedia and reddit do on a regular basis. The strength of all three sites is that they're heavily dependent on user-generated content. Every day at Slashdot, readers deposit hundreds and hundreds of links into our submissions bin. Thousands of comments are made daily. We have a system to surface the good content, but the chaff still exists. If we suddenly had a mandate to retroactively filter out all the links to potentially copyright-infringing sites in our database, we wouldn't have many options. We're talking about reviewing hundreds of thousands of submissions, and every comment on 117,000+ stories. And we're far from the biggest site around — imagine social networks needing to police their content, and all the privacy issues that would raise.
Small sites and new sites would be hurt, too. A website isn't a single, discrete entity that exists on its own. A new company starting up a site would have to worry about its webhost, registrar, content provider, ISP, etc. The legislation would also raise significant financial obstacles. New companies need investments, and that would be much less likely (PDF) if the company could be held liable for content uploaded by users. On top of that, if the site was unable to live up to the vague standards set by the government and the entertainment industry, they could be on the receiving end of a lawsuit, which would be expensive to fight even if they won (and such laws would never, ever be abused). It's hard to conceptualize the internet without noting its unrivaled growth, and SOPA/PIPA would surely stifle it.
This legislation hits near and dear to the hearts of many Slashdotters; if SOPA/PIPA pass, IT staff for companies small and large are going to have their hands full making sure they aren't opening themselves to legal action or government intervention. Mailing lists, used commonly and extensively among open source software projects, would be endangered. Code repositories would need be scoured for infringing content; the bill allows for the strangling of revenue sources if its anti-infringement rules aren't being met. VPN and proxy services become only questionably legal. The very nature of the open source community — as the EFF puts it, "decentralized, voluntary, international" — is not compatible with the burdens placed on internet sites by SOPA and PIPA.
What can we do?
So, what can we do about it? There are two big things: contact your representative, and spread the word. Slashdot readers, on the whole, are more technically-minded than the average internet user, so you're all in a position to share your wisdom with the less internet-savvy people in your life, and get them to contact their representative, too. Here's some useful information for doing so:
Propublica has a list of all SOPA/PIPA supporters and opponents.
Here is the Senate contact list and the House contact list.
You can also use the EFF's form-letter, the Stop American Censorship form-letter, or sign Google's petition.
If you don't live in the U.S., you can petition the State Department. (And yes, you have a dog in this fight.)
SOPAStrike has a list of companies participating in the protest, and this crowd-sourced Google Doc tracks companies that support the legislation. Tell those companies what you think.
Further reading: Wikipedia has left their SOPA and PIPA pages up. The EFF has a series of articles explaining in more depth what is wrong with the bills. Here are some protest letters written to Congress from human rights groups, law professors, and internet companies.
Go forth and educate.
Making sure that everyone knows what is happening and what is at stake is probably the most useful thing anyone can do.
Palm trees and 8
Include a big campaign contribution with your letter if you want to make sure it's not just thrown in the trash or just added to the pile.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...work on ways to bypass SOPA and PIPA. Congress doesn't care that it will censor the internet, because they're the ones who will be doing the censoring. Censorship always makes perfect sense to the censors
Creating undetectable breaches of such unenforceable laws is the way out of this mess and those workarounds might just work in China too. So you'll be saving the internet and advancing human rights in China all at the same time.
http://xkcd.com/865/
Stop SOPA and PIPA now!!!
There was a time when Slashdot was at the forefront of such kind of fights against "the man" (e.g., Sony Rootkit fiasco).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I would have expected the tech-savvy slashdot to do something similar to what google and reddit have done in protest. Why not?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
That when the radio was talking about companies like Facebook, Google, and Wikipedia protesting legislation put to Congress by the Motion Picture Industry that there is nothing that I can do. US government isn't much about people anymore. I have no clue how SOPA got this far.
Vote for Ron Paul. Register Republican so you can vote for him in the primaries. You can unregister afterward if you want.
Ron Paul: Tells The Dangers Of SOPA And PIPA
Ron Paul on SOPA: They Want to Take Over the Internet!
Why's The Media Shafting Ron Paul, And Ignoring NDAA & SOPA Dangers?
Or just DuckDuckGo "Ron Paul SOPA" to get many, many more examples.
I am an advocate of copyright. I feel it is a very effective mechanism for channeling revenue to those who advance science and the useful arts.
We have overstepped the bounds of cost effective copyright grants and enforcement. We have exceeded the efficient level of enforcement, and I suspect we have exceeded the efficient level of revenue channeling. We have passed more copyright legislation in the past fifteen years than at any other time in our history. More than during the advent of the printing press, the radio, the cassette tape, or any other disruptive technology. We are not balancing the potential value of new technology against the perceived cost of adapting copyright to the new reality. Moreover, the legislation is not working. It is not significantly inhibiting copyright, but it is harming the progress of new business models and entrepreneurship. It is not rational to pass ever more extreme legislation when what has gone before is not working.
We are channeling a lot of revenue into copyright holders, and that money is coming back in lobbying. That cycle is self-catalyzing, and it has gone beyond what is cost effective. It is harming our ability to compete in the global marketplace, and is a cycle that is hostile to our national economic interests.
It is time to demand a moratorium on new copyright law, coupled with a serious research effort on the cost effectiveness of copyright enforcement. That research should have the explicit objective of answering the question: "How much can we reduce government interference in the market while still advancing the progress of science and the useful arts?"
Failure to do so should be seen as an act of aggression against our economy by those who are benefiting from this government fiat monopoly, and should be met with total opposition.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
They've done the right thing by carrying this story.
On my site, http://freeinternetpress.com/ , we've redirected our home page and every article to our SOPA page http://freeinternetpress.com/sopa.php.
It's up to the owners of each site to make their own decisions on how to support it. It could be a simple warning. Google chose to censor their logo and link to an information page. We chose to replace the site with a warning, and are carrying stories and links related to SOPA. Some may consider us "not blacked out", but as we've censored almost 9 years worth of articles, we are "blacked out".
Many sites need to support their users, and can't simply shut down. Unfortunately, if SOPA does become law, their users will find out the hard way that the blackout can become a reality.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The bills are massively unpopular on the internet but we are still losing the spin war on this. The blackouts are being covered on main stream media in droves (a good thing!), but every MSM reference that i have seen describes the bills as the 'anti-piracy' SOPA/PIPA bills. Lots of people, even many of us on this site, might support bills that are just anti-piracy... in the head of many, anti-piracy is a good thing.
We can lose hearts and minds if these bills are seen as anti-piracy. Get the word out that we don't object to these bills because they are anti-piracy, we object to these bills because they are anti-internet!
The internet breaks with these bills. Great firewall of America type broken. That is what we are against! Go spread the word.
He's assuming his colleagues will read it before voting on it. He should know better.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
The real question is, how many sales does piracy cost you compared to how many sales it gains you by spreading awareness of your existence?
I'm sure you're smart enough not to make the "pirated copy = lost sale" mistake, so think about it in this context; I typically "pirate" two classes of books, those which I already own as a physical copy and those which aren't available officially as a digital copy & that I need in that format for them to be practical (typically reference books). In neither case are there any lost sales involved - I won't re-buy books I already own on principle and there's no point in buying reference books that are never going to be used because they're too bulky to carry around with me - so even if you were able to magically take down all the links to pirated copies of them, it still wouldn't result in any additional sales. The same argument can be made for people who pirate because they genuinely can't afford to buy and people who pirate because they download *everything* they can get their hands on and then never look at it.
Ultimately, the only group who are causing losses are those who pirate because they don't want to pay for something, which I have no doubt is a fair number, but even then, while this is obviously a huge problem for the people whose works are being pirated, it still doesn't impact the economy in the way that the MPAA/RIAA always claim because oddly enough, the money they're not spending on movies, games, books and music gets spent on other things instead.
So, from what I can see of your book, it's Unavilable on Amazon and only available as a DRM'd PDF from your website in terms of digital formats; I don't trust Paypal as far as I can throw them, which means I can't buy a copy direct from you, so even if I wanted to I couldn't buy your book in a way that's convenient to me. That's when people get frustrated and think "sod it, I'll just download the damn thing" (For the record, that's not what I'm going to do).
The best way to get the attention of congress is to have one of the IP stooges lose an election.
Identify one of the prominent supporters of SOPA/PIPA who is weak in his district and support his challenger in the next primary and general election.
When a congressman loses a seat for taking on a third-rail issue, the surviving congressmen remember that for decades.
That's what AIPAC does. You don't see any congressmen criticizing Israel, do you?
Strategically, it would be best to attack somebody who is a jerk on other issues too; in other words, an all-around jerk.
The only problem is that it's hard in this country to defeat a well-financed incumbent, no matter how much he sells out the interests of his constituents.
But it does happen. I give democracy about 50% odds.
Or you could, you know, grow a set of balls and engage with the political system to make the country better.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
but I agree with the sentiment. Right now I'm waiting for my kid to finish getting ready to school, so I've got time to post to /. . After that it's off to my day job for 9 hours. Right now a lobbyist for SOPA is doing the same thing, but he's going to spend 9 hours fighting for it. Oh, at the end of my 9 hour shift I'm going to study programming in hopes of getting a better job.
If I'm going to fight SOPA, PIPA or any of the other horrid things the 1% has in store for me, then I need more leisure time. That's what the rich were talking about in the 1800s when they said 'Idle hands are the devil's plaything'. That said, the 1% are working hard to make sure I don't get it. They're busing Unions, dividing Americans against one another based on race, creed & sexual orientation. They're scaring us with terrorists. They're fighting on multiple fronts, and I can't get the time to fight on one. This, folks, is why I'm a socialist in favor of 'Basic Income' (google it when wikipedia comes back up).
I guess one of the really big problems is, SOPA is just a symptom of a larger, more complex problem. Americans are big on simple answers to complex problems. That's why George Bush jr resonated so well with them. How are we suppose to fight when we don't even know there's a war going on?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The irony being that SOPA/PIPA *doesn't* protect content providers from piracy any more than the DMCA did, DRM does or any other failed attempts to legislate their way out of this mess have done.
Ultimately, there is no technical or legal measure that will prevent piracy. The *only* way you will stop piracy from being a problem is to make it a more attractive proposition to buy a legitimate copy than to download a pirated one which requires Speed (Don't make me wait 6 weeks after the DVD is released to download the movie), Flexibility (Give me the option of several formats and let me move between platforms, don't time limit it), Choice (Old stuff, obscure stuff - it barely costs anything extra to have it available as well as the brand new shiny things) & Sensible Pricing (*LESS* than the physical copy).
to do that, he has to be rich. to be rich, he has to play along. noone can put on a lifelong masquerade to hide his/her true intentions of eventually fighting against the rich, whereas playing along with them. you have to be one of them in heart and soul to play along.
Read radical news here
Proponents of SOPA have a 10-word sound byte saying why SOPA is "great:" "this bill will stop online piracy." What we need is a 10-word statement of why the whole idea of SOPA, PIPA, and the like is disastrous. How about:
This bill gives law-enforcement powers to Big Media.
I am sure someone can improve on that. Please, do.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Why is slashdot ignoring the blackout?
Because blacking out sites like reddit and Slashdot, where 99.9% of the userbase is already aware and opposed to SOPA, is a completely useless waste of time, page views and bandwidth.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Please find another example. A lot of people don't agree with or support Wikileaks. I know Slashdot has an agenda, but please let it go for once if this issue is important enough.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
If you write your own book, do you want a big business to copy and selling your work without giving you a dime?
I hope that you just wanted to post quickly without thinking about what you said:
I totally believe that if you produce something you should be paid...
I just produced this post, pay me.
A lot of "art" is produced with claimed values without anybody at any time offering to pay any amount at all for it. Statue goes missing with a value in the hundred thousands because that is what the "artist" claimed so that is what the value must be...
In the real world the model is very different, you get paid, so you produce something. There is a direct link between labor and pay and it is not for person doing the labor to just do the labor and claim the pay they want. A plumber does not get to claim a magic number for his work that he did without someone asking him to do it.
A lot of MPAA/RIAA problem is that artist have gotten used to being payed insane amounts for not doing very much and they want more of it. Money for every blank CD found because some might contain their content. What about where I bought their CD and made a copy of it for my own use only as a back-up? I still got to pay extra?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
> SOPA and PIPA pose unacceptable risks to freedom of speech
The right to private property is more basic and more sanctosanct. SOPA would properly protect jews and jewish property from plundering by the antisemitic goyim people, who use P2P to steal the 99% jewish-created and jewish-financed literature, music, movies and TV programmes without ever paying for the entertainment value.
The US government duly recognizes that America owes its very existence to jewish wisemen, who gave the world masonic ideals of liberty (check the pyramid eye on the dollar bill) and specifically gave the USA those A-bombs to defeat Japan and Hitler. Furthermore, all we have in modern life, telecomm, IT, international business, higher education, financing, abundance of consumer produce and general human longevity, we owe all of that to the ingenuity of jewish people: investors, medical doctors, scientists, literary authors, teachers and merchants. There is nothing of significance that ever came from non-jewish minds, besides alcoholic drinks and linen pants.
It is only proper and right that other nations, the goyim, pay the jews what's due when enjoying or consuming jewish-generated tangible and intellectual goods. Do you steal matzeh from the booth? If not, then why do you steal from Hollywood? The jews who run the movie industry, well, their grandfather arriveds to american shore with a bag of carpets on their back, literally, then made their fortune starting from nil. Do you think they should not have that fortune? Come forward and say so loudly, don't be a coward of a thief!
P2P is not about piracy, it is about anti-semitism. That is why the scandinavian nazi party association is such an ardent supporter of the Piraty Bay torrent website. The Capitol Hill elite should not be shy to point out that SOPA is essentially about SHOAH not to happen ever, or as the isreali people use to say: "Massada must not fall again!"
Sen. Chuck Schumer's phone line is jammed. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's phone line is jammed, and her contact page is offline. On her Facebook page, the line of comments on the issue is endless and they're 100% opposed to PIPA/SOPA.
As somebody that's watched this country go off the rails the last 30 years in a row, though, in my heart I think the American people need to send a much stronger message to DC, like by burning that town to the ground and salting the earth afterward.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
The thing is, you have to go to court simply to RESTORE your access. Not to protect it in the first place.
In the mean time, you could be down for days or weeks.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It turns out eternal vigilance is actually pretty hard.
Round up some web billionaires and get them to lobby the hell out of congress. If you can't get the money out of politics then use money as a weapon the same way Hollywood and the Music Industry does. "Going Dark" is insufferably silly because it gives ordinary anonymous slackers the impression they are doing something while in fact it accomplishes nothing. You'd be better off selling ribbon magnets.
There is at least one other major presidential candidate who is against SOPA: Barack Obama.
I've burnt out my rage gland now... and have started thinking positively about what the post-SOPA Internet might look like.
It occurs to me that SOPA relies very heavily on the Domain Name system that the Internet uses so heavily - primarily so that we don't need to remember IP addresses - but also, to a lesser degree, so that we don't need to have fixed IPs.
Once SOPA is entrenched, and domains start getting blocked - either as legitimate takedowns, witch-hunts, or corporate espionage (I'll be expecting Samsung and Apple to be off the air within days of SOPA's activation) - a more dynamic website that doesn't rely on a DNS, and that has a flexible IP seems to be the logical approach.
Or perhaps some very powerful proxy servers based outside US soil... will SOPA have the ability to block them when they are transports and not hosts? Perhaps a combination of a proxy server with its own naming/IP translation table?
One thing I am sure of: People will get what they want from the Internet regardless of what the legislators say.
The first great cyber-civil war appears to be commencing... how does the right to bear arms relate to that?