BleepingComputer.com: The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

What bothers me is that this would mean all forums go offline, because who exactly can control that none of their thousands users have used a copyrighted picture as avatar or signature, nor used a copyrighted nick as name.

There are even colors that are patented to certain companies.. I suggest we block all websites using colors for now and let them sue against that decision. I'm sure the righteous will prevail.

Well yeah, when lawmakers sign for a bill like this, they dont take into consideration how it may be abused. I've also heard that some dont even READ the bill in its entirety before even signing it! Example: A liquor law here in Indiana was passed. There was a clause in that law that required anyone selling alcohol check EVERYONE'S ID (no matter who!) before selling it to them. Some lawmakers here thought it was ridiculous and they repealed that particular provision later and wondered how they didnt notice it before. They did the same thing with the Patriot Act.

I dont see any problem with checking everyones ID. Ive seen some rather ummm unintelligent restaurants and waiters/waitresses out there. For example, funny story (off topic I know) but me and my wife were dining at our favorite restaurant-I ordered a glass of wine (yes the real stuff) my wife ordered a non-alcoholic (however you spell that) daquire, and you want to take a wild guess at who they IDed? It wasn't me, Ill tell you that much. Now, were both of age, but I thought it was funny theyd ask for the ID from the person ordering the non-alcholic drink and not the one who actually did.

Well no I dont see anything wrong with carding everyone. But it seems a bit to me like overkill when it's made into law under the penalty of losing your liquor license. Just because you didnt card that 80-year-old grandma buying some beer.

lol I guess when your 80, it really dont matter as long as they aint drivin, I can see where that might be a biiiit extreme but ya know, we live in an extreme world. I mean serious, we live in a world where Mcdonalds has to put CAUTION LIQUID IS HOT on their coffee mugs. I mean come on seriously?

Just getting back to the SOPA issue, it is obviously not possible to apply what the Act proposes I would think, as the Internet would kind of just implode.

They may as well say, 'No Internet for the U.S' , which in essence will be the sum of the Act.

Liquor laws: Here in Australia you can drink alcohol, or I should say, purchase legally from a licensed outlet, when you are 18 years old.
It's unfortunate that you also can go for your Driver's License at 18 too. Plus Vote ! ( How can Australia be a Democracy when it is illegal not to vote, and you get fined if you don't vote ? )

Anyhoo, to start drinking, and driving, at same age has some very sad consequences.

I might try to get onto a more cheerful topic, sorry

Hey Patriot....

You just gave me a "George Carlin" moment with that last post! They put a warning label on McDonald's hot coffee that it might burn you, but they dont put a warning label on their food saying that eating that crap everyday might cause you to keel over.

The internet shuts down tomorrow:

wikipedia, icanhazcheeseburger, mozilla, reddit and tucows will take their normal content offline tomorrow and replace it with an informational screen about the dangers of SOPA and PIPA.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/16/wikipedia_joins_sopa_blackout/

A question that I'd be interested in knowing is what would happen to services like openDNS and googleDNS? Would they not easily circumvent SOPA and PIPAs measures of "blocked sites" on a DNS level?

regards myrti

"
Conspiracist! well, actually the question is, if there really is a conspiracy, are we really conspiracy nuts?
"
If the government did not hold secrets then canspiracists would not exist. Which is quite entertaining to think about.

A major problem with this bill and just in general are copyrights. If companies were not allowed to hold strong copyrights then most of this bill would not impact peoples daily lives.

I will bring into example the farming company that copyrighted the reuse of seeds by not allowing seeds from crops treated with GMO to be replanted. Birds eat the seeds from one farm and poop them out on others. Thus almost NO farmers and replant their crops.

The main goal of this bill is profit. The seek to profit from it just as the creators of GMO profit from selling their seeds. Restrict the market to the point of control and profit will surely ensue.

Maybe so myrti. It's all a bit, 'up in the air' with the fairies at the moment

Seems Obama has put this on hold for security reasons, not that SOPA will just go away.
Fact is every site (U.S.) has to drop their security (Firewall's) so the government can peep around to see if there is any copyright material abuse, along with every hacker online; so ...

This sounds good:

SOPA Derailed

"Quote" U.S. House Judiciary Committee Member Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) opponent has announced that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has promised him that he will not bring the bill to the floor. That mean, for all practical intents and purposes, that SOPA is dead.

In a press release, Issa announced that he was canceling his Wednesday hearing on “the impact of Domain Name Service (DNS) and search engine blocking on the Internet, has been postponed following assurances that anti-piracy legislation will not move to the House floor this Congress without a consensus.”

Issa said, “Majority Leader Cantor has assured me that we will continue to work to address outstanding concerns and work to build consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote.” Without the Majority Leader’s support, SOPA won’t get to the House’s floor, it will not be voted on, and this makes it essentially dead.
"End quote"

And:

"Quote" Why did the House reverse its course? According to Issa on Twitter, first the Internet protests had a big impact."End quote"

Bold mine.

@ulur_u

The reason I ask is because this was what ultimately brought down a similar project here in Germany (only they weren't aiming at copyright infringement but pedophile materials). The rules were pretty similar: Anything can be blocked, without previous contemplation, the blacklist will not be made public, so no justification for blocking anyone or anything is really needed and it would solely rely on the ISPs blocking the DNS resolution of such sites.

It took a year to make the politicians understand that a) not everybody that uses openDNS is a pedophile (and many people took offense to that implication) and that this block takes all of 6 seconds to circumvent with detailed videos on how to do this for every OS available all over the net with openDNS for example.

I'm surprised that this, technical side, has gotten very little attention. A DNS non-resolution as a counter-measure is a laughable, it has no place in combatting internet crime (if you choose to the IP infringement as such). Not to speak off the dangers of everybody resolving DNS differently and the hijacking of DNS resolution..

This post has been edited by myrti: 18 January 2012 - 11:33 AM

Even though the measures may be temporarily stalled, it does not mean that Congress will not take up the issue again and make the same mistakes with a new bill, especially if they listen only to the vested interests able to help them win re-election. It is thus important that the legislators clearly understand that a significant number of voters are concerned about maintaining a free and open internet where companies are not forced to self-monitor all content to avoid legal and financial problems and always err on the side of caution.

@ myrti

I think you make the main point as to why this Act would never be feasible. The 'Technical' side of SOPA would essentially ruin the Internet.

This is a letter sent to the U.S. Government December 15, stating the Technical issues involved if SOPA was to be implemented as is:

An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress ( May be best to go to linked Article as the people who signed this are below the letter.)

Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively.

We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network called the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the standards and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented parts of it. We're just a little proud of the social and economic benefits that our project, the Internet, has brought with it.

Last year, many of us wrote to you and your colleagues to warn about the proposed "COICA" copyright and censorship legislation. Today, we are writing again to reiterate our concerns about the SOPA and PIPA derivatives of last year's bill, that are under consideration in the House and Senate. In many respects, these proposals are worse than the one we were alarmed to read last year.

If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties' right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.

All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but these bills are particularly egregious in that regard because they cause entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under these proposals. In fact, it seems that this has already begun to happen under the nascent DHS/ICE seizures program.

Censorship of Internet infrastructure will inevitably cause network errors and security problems. This is true in China, Iran and other countries that censor the network today; it will be just as true of American censorship. It is also true regardless of whether censorship is implemented via the DNS, proxies, firewalls, or any other method. Types of network errors and insecurity that we wrestle with today will become more widespread, and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.

The current bills -- SOPA explicitly and PIPA implicitly -- also threaten engineers who build Internet systems or offer services that are not readily and automatically compliant with censorship actions by the U.S. government. When we designed the Internet the first time, our priorities were reliability, robustness and minimizing central points of failure or control. We are alarmed that Congress is so close to mandating censorship-compliance as a design requirement for new Internet innovations. This can only damage the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read and publish.

The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open Internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a neutral bastion of free expression. If the US begins to use its central position in the network for censorship that advances its political and economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.

Senators, Congressmen, we believe the Internet is too important and too valuable to be endangered in this way, and implore you to put these bills aside.


Signed

@ myrti

I think you make the main point as to why this Act would never be feasible. The 'Technical' side of SOPA would essentially ruin the Internet.

This is a letter sent to the U.S. Government December 15, stating the Technical issues involved if SOPA was to be implemented as is:

An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress

"Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively."