Internet Black Out January 18th

[AquaMan]

Not sure where to place this and maybe its already been discussed. It looks like a tremendous battle is about to boil over on internet rights. I know its always been contentious and it really seems to depend on who exerts the most control and can gain the most potential profit. Of course, that screams for big brother, the govt. to step in and lay down the rules. Great drama during an election year. It is culminating on the 18th when the pending legislation comes up for discussion again.

I found this link through Craigslist who opposes the regulations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

Any thoughts?

[Teatownclown]

https://www.eff.org/

one of my bros.

The U.S. Is trying to force Internet censorship on other countries too.
http://www.businessinsider.com/now-the-us-is-trying-to-cram-sopa-laws-down-other-countries-throats-2012-1?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Falleyinsider%2Fsilicon_alley_insider+%28Silicon+Alley+Insider%29&utm_content=FaceBook

Internet Access Is Not a Human Right
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/opinion/internet-access-is-not-a-human-right.html?_r=2&src=tp

It's not a human right....it's a civil right

[SXSW]

This should be in General Discussion.

[AquaMan]

https://www.eff.org/

one of my bros.

The U.S. Is trying to force Internet censorship on other countries too.
http://www.businessinsider.com/now-the-us-is-trying-to-cram-sopa-laws-down-other-countries-throats-2012-1?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Falleyinsider%2Fsilicon_alley_insider+%28Silicon+Alley+Insider%29&utm_content=FaceBook

Internet Access Is Not a Human Right
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/opinion/internet-access-is-not-a-human-right.html?_r=2&src=tp

It's not a human right....it's a civil right

Those were good. Thank you.

The drone thing (from EFF) is kind of scary. Combine it with the pressure to pass a SOPA type regulation and you start to realize this could be an effort to blunt or deny well organized change of any sort. Revolutions would cease. Good ones and bad ones.

[Teatownclown]

I'm somewhat secure knowing we have a level thinking President:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/13/obama-administration-responds-we-people-petitions-sopa-and-online-piracy

This blog makes good points: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/BEDukdz2B1r

"If the goal is really to support jobs and the American economy, internet "protectionism" is not the way to do it.

It is said (though I've not found the source) that Einstein once remarked that if given 60 minutes to save the world, he would spend 55 of them defining the problem. And defining the problem means collecting and studying real evidence, not the overblown claims of an industry that has fought the introduction of every new technology that has turned out, in the end, to grow their business rather than threaten it."

The internet better not turn into a better economic model for Hollywood!

[Ed W]

Do a search for "SOPA work around" and you quickly find this:

http://newyork.ibtimes.com/articles/270952/20111221/firefox-sopa-workaround-keeps-web-free-censorship.htm

The piece explains how SOPA would block access to 'prohibited' sites by blocking the lists of DNS server lookup tables.  Several add-ons for Firefox (and possibly Chrome) are available that easily defeat the SOPA restrictions.  Let's hope that our congressmen will defeat this piece of censorship legislation.  Still, given their limited knowledge about technology, that may be a reach.

Why do we condemn the censorship imposed by the tyrannical regimes of Iran and China, yet happily erect our own Great Wall to enhance the bottom lines of a bunch of media conglomerates?

[heironymouspasparagus]

Why do we condemn the censorship imposed by the tyrannical regimes of Iran and China, yet happily erect our own Great Wall to enhance the bottom lines of a bunch of media conglomerates?

Rhetorical question...right?


Goes to the 1984 doublespeak again.

[Ed W]

Rhetorical question...right?


Goes to the 1984 doublespeak again.

Yep.

In today's news, Rupert Murdoch lashed out at Google, saying the company fostered internet piracy.  He was apparently incensed by the White House coming out in opposition to SOPA.  Murdoch stands to gain an enormous amount of money and media power - even more than he has now - is SOPA is enacted.

But please remember...this is the guy who railed against Google previously, claiming that the small blurbs they insert in web searches constitute plagiarism.  He vociferously objected to Google linking to news stories on the media outlets he controls because he wasn't receiving any payments for those links.  In his world, a link to one of those stories here on the forum would require a payment.   

[sgrizzle]

Maybe TulsaNow should turn off for the day

[BKDotCom]

SOPA is already dead, but PIPA is still pending.
still, many sites (wikipedia is the "biggest") are still going to be blacking out to send a message.

[sgrizzle]

SOPA is already dead, but PIPA is still pending.
still, many sites (wikipedia is the "biggest") are still going to be blacking out to send a message.

Reddit also

[custosnox]

Maybe TulsaNow should turn off for the day

I could support that

[custosnox]

http://sopastrike.com/

[Teatownclown]

SOPA is already dead, but PIPA is still pending.
still, many sites (wikipedia is the "biggest") are still going to be blacking out to send a message.

The Content Cabal's Big Lie:
http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/how-much-do-music-and-movie-piracy-really-hurt-the-u-s-economy/
KAL RAUSTIALA AND CHRIS SPRIGMAN
01/12/2012 | 3:09 pm

Supporters of stronger intellectual property enforcement — such as those behind the proposed new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills in Congress — argue that online piracy is a huge problem, one which costs the U.S. economy between $200 and $250 billion per year, and is responsible for the loss of 750,000 American jobs.
These numbers seem truly dire: a $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs – that's twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010.
The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures "cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology," which is polite government-speak for "these figures were made up out of thin air."
More recently, a smaller estimate — $58 billion – was produced by the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI). But that IPI estimate, as both Sanchez and tech journalist Tim Lee have pointed out, is replete with methodological problems, including double- and triple-counting, that swell the estimate of piracy losses considerably.
So what's the real number? At this point, we simply don't know. And this leads us to a second problem: one which is not so much about data, as about actual economic effects.  There are certainly a lot of people who download music and movies without paying. It's clear that, at least in some cases, piracy substitutes for a legitimate transaction — for example, a person who would have bought the DVD of the new Kate Beckinsale vampire film (who is that, actually?) but instead downloads it for free on Bit Torrent. In other cases, the person pirating the movie or song would never have bought it. This is especially true if the consumer lives in a relatively poor country, like China, and is simply unable to afford to pay for the films and music he downloads. 
Do we count this latter category of downloads as "lost sales"?  Not if we're honest.
And there's another problem: even in the instances where Internet piracy results in a lost sale, how does that lost sale affect the job market? While jobs may be lost in the movie or music industry, they might be created in another. Money that a pirate doesn't spend on movies and songs is almost certain to be spent elsewhere. Let's say it gets spent on skateboards — the same dollar lost by Sony Pictures may be gained by Alien Workshop, a company that makes skateboards.
As Mark Twain once wrote, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. However true that may be in general, statistics can be particularly tricky when they are used to assess the effects of IP piracy. Unlike stealing a car, copying a song doesn't necessarily inflict a tangible loss on another. Estimating that loss requires counterfactual assumptions about what the world would have been like if the piracy had never happened — and, no surprise, those most affected tend to assume the worst.

GREED!!!!

[nathanm]

Do a search for "SOPA work around" and you quickly find this:

The problem is that there is no work around for websites like this one. Under SOPA and PIPA, TNF would be responsible for anything users post or even link to. This is true for every site that hosts user-generated content. As much as I hate the DMCA, this is a far, far worse law.

Also, those work arounds don't fix the real problem with the DNS blocking, namely that it turns every ISP into a government agent and makes it impossible to implement DNS security, which, granted, has been moving slowly, but is still in the early stages of implementation.

Possibly worse, depending on your perspective, posting a video that happens to include a copyrighted song playing in the background could net you 5 years in the clink. Even if the blocking provisions and the financial provisions were not the smile sandwiches they are, the punishments are draconian.

Moreover, I'm not quite sure why we should push billions of dollars worth of costs onto third parties to protect a group that already has the capacity to sue the smile out of anyone they think is infringing on their copyrights. The music labels and music studios are perfectly capable of protecting themselves on this. They already have the DMCA available to them. If other countries have different copyright laws, I don't see why that should be my problem to fix for them.