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.
This morning on NPR's Marketplace Morning Report, there was a footnote similar to a few other mass media articles I've seen. They pointed out that if necessary, you could use Google's "cached copy" of a site like Wikipedia, if you are otherwise blocked by the SOPA front page. It's like a digital scab on the picket line.
Then it struck me: isn't this advice a sort of inducement to piracy, and therefore a strong statement about SOPA's odious nature? If a site blocks its own publication of data, say, Sony/EMG/WarnerBros takes down its own webpage, isn't relying on a third party copy to get that content without their authorization just another form of "stealing" in their eyes? Wikipedia content is under some copyleft premise, but I don't think that changes the point: there are times that everyday reasonable activities can be construed as piracy in ways that a law or a technology can never adequately distinguish.
[
I listened to a clip of senate hearings on NPR this morning. After a stream of warnings by PIPA opponents, Patrick Leahy (D) said something to the effect of "If this bill is as bad as you say, it won't get five votes. If it protects content providers from piracy, it will pass easily."
Way to ignore the point. He is admitting the rest of the country can burn as long as content industries are happy. That is the definition of special interest control.
What Can You Do About SOPA and PIPA?
Take SOPA/PIPA seriously. By that I mean if YOU, or a company is going to protest, then do more than have a small link at the bottom of your screen (like Google). Or do absolutely NOTHING, like Slashdot. Yes I know the majority of people who read Slashdot are aware of the issues, but to anybody who pays attention it looks as if (companies like) Slashdot don't care; because they don't even have a banner add voicing their opposition to aggressive Internet police states. I read Slashdot everyday and I haven't heard anything from Management about any opposition.
The power here lies not with businesses, but with the individual (i.e. People Power); if religious fanatics can get companies to stop advertising the reality TV show All American Muslim, then certainly the majority of normal people can get companies to stop supporting Internet censorship and an Internet police state.
People need to take this seriously. People usually panic after it is already too late. As a recent example; the crew of the Italian cruise liner that sank only told people to abandon ship after about an hour after it started sinking and after the ship already started to keel over. Of course I could point out Nazi Germany; most people didn't complain because most people weren't effected until the allies started bombing residential neighborhoods in Berlin. Sometimes it takes a kick in the ass to get people to realize that their government's policies are evil.
Ordinary people need to email their friends and families about this issue, and they need to include links to their representatives telling them to oppose these overwhelmingly evil measures. They need to use Facebook, instant messaging and anything else to communicate the urgency of the issue. Also as important people need to remind the public NOT TO BELIEVE WHAT GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY ARE SAYING. This is important. People are continually told that repressive measures are only for the good of the country. This is a lie and people need to be exposed to the fact that they are being lied to.
People need to be told that this is NOT a copyright issue, but an excuse where governments and large corporations can have unprecedented control over YOUR communications. They need to be told that this measure is used to enforce corporate power and greed, and that ordinary artists, like usual will not be the benefactors of "copyright" enforcement, but only the people who actually own and control the copyrights (which is usually a corporate entity) will benefit. These measures will further erode copyright by giving the companies with access to lawyers and politicians an unfair advantage over smaller companies and the consumer. They need to be told not to believe Rupert Murdock because he is not trustworthy. They need to be told not to believe Sony because they are not trustworthy. They need to be told not to believe the Big Lie that congress is being paid big money to support:
Reference:
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/ol56z/reddit_founder_alexis_ohanian_on_cnbc_why_is_it/
Last week my congresscritter held a public information session, which I attended. He is hard-core Tea Party. During the q&a I told him that SOPA was a mistake and should be stopped. He seemed to appreciate the problems with SOPA and gave a very similar reply to the one from the White House.
I think is is important that more people visibly communicate with their representatives that they are opposed to such laws, and that the people are closely watching Congress.
The really sad part was the reaction of the majority of the audience, average age estimated in the 60's. They either had no clue at all, or felt it was a good thing that the government was controlling the internet.
An elderly gentleman accosted me afterwards and said that he had been "hacked" and that if I were ever hacked I would support the government clamping down in the internet. I tried to explain SOPA to him, but it was a lost cause.
What's ridiculous is that Google only put it in small text on their homepage
That, and the giant black box over their name. Honestly, the Google link seems to be getting passed around people on Facebook like wildfire. And I'm loving it because the people I'm seeing spread it around are not my nerd friends, but the "average joes" who don't keep up on tech rights and such. Google's approach may not be as drastic as others, but it's definitely getting attention.
One of our morning talk show hosts -- who's about as conservative as they come -- devoted most of his program to SOPA and PIPA this morming. As a result, a lot of people who'd never heard of it are now very annoyed and are expressing their displeasure toward their Congress Critters. :)
Heh. Heh, heh.
I'm actually feeling pretty encouraged this morning. It has been a while since I felt that way.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Indeed. There were several people I was talking to, today about the wikipedia outage, who wanted to know what the big deal was (one even tried to defend SOPA). My general comparison was similar to the patriot act, but instead of dismantling checks and balance within the government some tenuous terrorism issues, it's dismantling checks on certain abusive businesses over piracy (which will be only minimally mitigated, at the cost of, probably billions, to other companies and individuals).
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Really?
Funny, almost as many people I talked to noticed Google as noticed Wikipedia. They all had the same questions - wtf is SOAP and why do I care. I helped inform them as to what and why they cared, if they valued a useable internet, amongst other potential financial issues from SOPA.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
You do now. Actually, I'll give you two.
The runner up story is Susan Boyle. When Wikipedia comes off blackout, go look her up and check the sales records - some such highest selling new artist in X years.
But let's do your story.
If you're gutsy, you'll post a link to your book and dedicate it "A gift to protest SOPA". Pick a CC license, I suggest "Attribution Only" (So that people can't replace your name, but all told, people are usually pretty good at keeping original artist names on their copies.) Put a rider in "Since this copy originated on a special post, please let me know if this copy inspires you to buy it". Give us an address to send checks/payments to, etc.
Or, if you are still a little squeamish, send *me* all that info which I won't re-share, but I'll report my results. My email is "not obfuscated" so send it along!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You don't make contributions when you want something done, it looks like bribery. You make your contributions when they are running for office. Then they look up who gave them money on sites like Open Secrets, and pay attention to those donors.
You don't just send a check to the politician. Everyone who complains about money in politics seems to not get this, or have a completely wrong understanding of how it works. You supported them in the past, and they do not want to lose support, so they go with the big money. A politician is not for sale on particular issues, he is for sale to the highest bidder. Then the highest bidder tells him what to do on the issues.
If you want to take a step back and say maybe they are only partly corrupt, then the lobbyist who represents big money gets to spend time educating the Congress Critter, while the opposition gets a handshake and a nod and a form letter.
The game has rules, if you want to play you have to understand them. "Send money with your letter" is not helpful advice unless you just want a population too jaded to even bother voting or contacting their Representative Rodent or Senatorial Snake.
To me, not censoring the free content is more important than all the copyrighted content in existence.
That is, if I had to choose between censorship and deleting all copyrighted content from existence, I would choose to delete the copyrighted material.
...
That's why this is a particularly good time (right now, not November) to strike back at the people who are most responsible for it, rather than just the bills. It'll only be about one third as effective in the Senate, but for the House, every one of them needs to lose their party's nomination and not be on the ballots in November (unless they want to run as independents). This is something Democrats and Republicans can work together on, as such a cleanup would effect both of them about equally and doesn't really have any sort of partisan ideological component.
If we establish a rule that pushing this kind of nonsense can only be done by sacrificing the next election, it'll help a lot. And eventually the revolving list of supporters will all be junior reps without important committee positions to make it happen. SOPA only got as far as it did, because its top dog has so much seniority (since 1987!!?! WTF is wrong with you, TX-21?).
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Do what the subject line says. Spread the word. No, you cannot influence it, but it WILL have an effect on you. A lot of the pages you ("you" being here the people you should inform, not you per se) use are hosted in the US, including Facebook, Twitter and so many other pages where you "have" a page that you WILL be fully responsible for. You think your government will not extradite you over petty crap like copyright? Think again! Richard O'Dwyer might tell you a different story.
Pages that you "own" but didn't check for years? Well, maybe you should check your guestbook again. Maybe someone posted a link that infringes on someone's copyright, and you will be held liable for it. Yes, you there in Sweden, Australia or South Africa.
But hey, let's look on the bright side, it's never been easier to get rid of a rival. Hack his page, or just fill his FB page with half the pirate bay links while he's on vacation. He'll win another one. All expenses paid.
This and so much more is in it for you, dear non-citizen of the US.
And yes, I find it highly ironic that a law like that comes from a country whose people started a revolution over having no say in the regulations and laws that affect them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Update: The gentleman did in fact email me a copy, so now it's my turn to decide what happens next.
A couple of notes:
A Legit issue underneath all the snow-job the **AA is churning out is that there is indeed a longer gestation period for "non-traditional sales" so on purpose I "won't pay today". (Otherwise that's just more of an inverted retail transaction.)
Also this situation is different because "the clock starts today" whereas the poster's point was that he couldn't figure out the "correlation - causation" link between unknown downloads vs. sales.
This feels like an important project for me and my stance on copyright, so everyone, watch for further posts later in other threads and we'll see where it all goes. Mr. Author, please pay extra care not to "get impatient" here. I have some ideas but the time passing is in fact part of the point, so that it doesn't just become astroturfing.
See you all In Another Thread!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine