Censoring the Internet
Jeanwah
Posts: 6,363
It almost happened.
Oregon Senator Wyden effectively kills Internet censorship bill
It's too early to say for sure, but Oregon Senator Ron Wyden could very well go down in the history books as the man who saved the Internet.
A bill that critics say would have given the government power to censor the Internet will not pass this year thanks to the Oregon Democrat, who announced his opposition during a recent committee hearing. Individual Senators can place holds on pending legislation, in this case meaning proponents of the bill will be forced to reintroduce the measure and will not be able to proceed until the next Congress convenes.
Even then, its passage is not certain.
The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) would have permitted a blanket takedown of any domain alleged to be assisting activities that violate copyright law, based upon the judgment of state attorneys general.
"Deploying this statute to combat online copyright infringement seems almost like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb, when what you need is a precision-guided missile," Wyden said.
The act was unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday.
"Few things are more important to the future of the American economy and job creation than protecting our intellectual property," said Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont who co-sponsored the bill.
"That is why the legislation is supported by both labor and industry, and Democrats and Republicans are standing together."
Opponents of the bill insist that many sites which contain allegedly infringing materials also traffic in legitimate data that's constitutionally protected. There's also a fear that whatever action the US takes, other countries will seek to emulate, and some to a much more zealous degree.
Activist group DemandProgress, which is running a petition against the bill, argued the powers in the bill could be used for political purposes. If the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks is found to be hosting copyrighted material, for instance, access to WikiLeaks could be blocked for all US Internet users, they suggested....
"The Act, if enacted into law, would fundamentally alter U.S. policy towards Internet speech, and would set a dangerous precedent with potentially serious consequences for free expression and global Internet freedom," Post wrote in the petition letter (PDF).
"Blacklisting entire sites out of the domain name system," explained the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), a privacy and digital rights advocate group, is a "reckless scheme that will undermine global Internet infrastructure and censor legitimate online speech."
The EFF has published a list of Web sites it believes are at highest risk of being shut down under the proposed law. Included in the list are file-hosting services such as Rapidshare and Mediafire, music mash-up sites like SoundCloud and MashupTown, as well as "sites that discuss and advocate for P2P technology or for piracy," such as pirate-party.us and P2PNet.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, often cited as the father of the world wide web, has called Internet disconnection laws in the name of copyright protection a "blight" on the net.
Oregon Senator Wyden effectively kills Internet censorship bill
It's too early to say for sure, but Oregon Senator Ron Wyden could very well go down in the history books as the man who saved the Internet.
A bill that critics say would have given the government power to censor the Internet will not pass this year thanks to the Oregon Democrat, who announced his opposition during a recent committee hearing. Individual Senators can place holds on pending legislation, in this case meaning proponents of the bill will be forced to reintroduce the measure and will not be able to proceed until the next Congress convenes.
Even then, its passage is not certain.
The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) would have permitted a blanket takedown of any domain alleged to be assisting activities that violate copyright law, based upon the judgment of state attorneys general.
"Deploying this statute to combat online copyright infringement seems almost like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb, when what you need is a precision-guided missile," Wyden said.
The act was unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday.
"Few things are more important to the future of the American economy and job creation than protecting our intellectual property," said Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont who co-sponsored the bill.
"That is why the legislation is supported by both labor and industry, and Democrats and Republicans are standing together."
Opponents of the bill insist that many sites which contain allegedly infringing materials also traffic in legitimate data that's constitutionally protected. There's also a fear that whatever action the US takes, other countries will seek to emulate, and some to a much more zealous degree.
Activist group DemandProgress, which is running a petition against the bill, argued the powers in the bill could be used for political purposes. If the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks is found to be hosting copyrighted material, for instance, access to WikiLeaks could be blocked for all US Internet users, they suggested....
"The Act, if enacted into law, would fundamentally alter U.S. policy towards Internet speech, and would set a dangerous precedent with potentially serious consequences for free expression and global Internet freedom," Post wrote in the petition letter (PDF).
"Blacklisting entire sites out of the domain name system," explained the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), a privacy and digital rights advocate group, is a "reckless scheme that will undermine global Internet infrastructure and censor legitimate online speech."
The EFF has published a list of Web sites it believes are at highest risk of being shut down under the proposed law. Included in the list are file-hosting services such as Rapidshare and Mediafire, music mash-up sites like SoundCloud and MashupTown, as well as "sites that discuss and advocate for P2P technology or for piracy," such as pirate-party.us and P2PNet.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, often cited as the father of the world wide web, has called Internet disconnection laws in the name of copyright protection a "blight" on the net.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201011 ... the-intern
This is hardly a surprise but, this morning (as previously announced), the lame duck Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously voted to move forward with censoring the internet via the COICA bill -- despite a bunch of law professors explaining to them how this law is a clear violation of the First Amendment. What's really amazing is that many of the same Senators have been speaking out against internet censorship in other countries, yet they happily vote to approve it here because it's seen as a way to make many of their largest campaign contributors happy. There's very little chance that the bill will actually get passed by the end of the term but, in the meantime, we figured it might be useful to highlight the 19 Senators who voted to censor the internet this morning:
* Patrick J. Leahy -- Vermont
* Herb Kohl -- Wisconsin
* Jeff Sessions -- Alabama
* Dianne Feinstein -- California
* Orrin G. Hatch -- Utah
* Russ Feingold -- Wisconsin
* Chuck Grassley -- Iowa
* Arlen Specter -- Pennsylvania
* Jon Kyl -- Arizona
* Chuck Schumer -- New York
* Lindsey Graham -- South Carolina
* Dick Durbin -- Illinois
* John Cornyn -- Texas
* Benjamin L. Cardin -- Maryland
* Tom Coburn -- Oklahoma
* Sheldon Whitehouse -- Rhode Island
* Amy Klobuchar -- Minnesota
* Al Franken -- Minnesota
* Chris Coons -- Delaware
This should be a list of shame. You would think that our own elected officials would understand the First Amendment but, apparently, they have no problem turning the US into one of the small list of authoritarian countries that censors internet content it does not like (in this case, content some of its largest campaign contributors do not like). We already have laws in place to deal with infringing content, so don't buy the excuse that this law is about stopping infringement. This law takes down entire websites based on the government's say-so. First Amendment protections make clear that if you are going to stop any specific speech, it has to be extremely specific speech. This law has no such restrictions. It's really quite unfortunate that these 19 US Senators are the first American politicians to publicly vote in favor of censoring speech in America.
http://demandprogress.org/blacklist/
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
If music piracy has shown us anything, government and HUGE industries are really powerless to stop anything online... As soon as one website (or file sharing technology) was shut down, something else jumped up to take their place. I remember the napster mess, and all of the lawsuits that have happened, yet it is easier to download and album or a movie than ever.
was like a picture
of a sunny day
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”
― Abraham Lincoln
I believe we are losing more freedoms every day.
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
Like Five said, both sides are the same... you can blame only dems and rhinos, the number #2 job of any legislator (after getting re-elected) is to give themselves more power...
was like a picture
of a sunny day
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”
― Abraham Lincoln
China Syndrome
Over the last couple weeks, there’s been a proposed law bouncing around Congress named the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which would authorize the federal Department of Justice to block any website that was determined to be “primarily designed” and “has no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use other than” to promote copyright and trademark infringement.
The bill would allow the feds to generate a blacklist of domain names and forbid your ISP from transmitting sites associated with that domain name to you. Mostly, this appears to be aimed at foreign sites that are now beyond the reach of U.S. law; operators of websites in the United States can be and are simply sued for infringement, so COICA is not about homegrown sites. Rather COICA would allow a block, at our borders, of websites that the feds convince a court is dedicated to infringement. Note that the law doesn’t target the operators of foreign sites or even the content of the sites that are out of U.S. jurisdiction—it just allows U.S. users’ access to those sites to be blocked.
I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to this because I’ve been insanely busy with other stuff, and because the reports I’d been reading indicated that COICA wasn’t likely to get through our profoundly-dysfunctional-and-getting-worse Congress.
But it was irksome. The law would give the government sweeping powers that would change the landscape of the Internet in the United States. You know how we all click our tongues dismissively when we learn that some Asian country has blocked YouTube or Facebook or Google? That’s the arena we’d be getting into. Take this COICA law, add a Christianista/Tea Party executive branch and a bunch of Federalist Society judges, and voila, you’ve got a sanitized Internet.
Looked at another way, if you consider a web domain to be like a newspaper, a television station, or any other media outlet, then this law condones outright censorship. Period.
Last week, COICA was passed unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee, after the MPAA, the RIAA, Nike, Nintendo, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, unions, media and everybody else in the business world landed on the members with a bunch of ginned-up statistics and horror stories. These fine American business interests also took special care to brand anyone opposing the bills as un-American coddlers of online thieves. So, which senators voted for the bill? Well, folks like Jeff Sessions, Tom Coburn and John Kyl. And folks like Al Franken, Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer.
Wha? Really? Still, most commentators were saying the bill would likely not get through the entire Senate and certainly wouldn’t make it through the House. So, OK, maybe all these senators were just quietly making sure that their corporate contributors were placated on a vote that ultimately was meaningless.
But Al Franken?
Anyway, on the heels of this vote came news late last week that the Department of Homeland Security had seized more than 80 domains that were suspected of infringing activity. This caused a huge WTF all over the blogosphere because nobody could figure out (1) how the hell DHS did it, and (2), since they did it, why we needed COICA. And then there’s the persistent question we’ve talked about here before: Just what the hell is Homeland Security doing chasing music-file sharers and handbag counterfeiters when there are people out there who really want to blow us up?
The dust hasn’t really settled yet, but this seems to be the story so far: DHS hired a private contractor to figure out a way to convince a judge to order the “seizure” of a bunch of domain names that pointed to a bunch of sites that appeared to have something to do with infringement. The sites that were seized were all .com and .net domains, and there was jurisdiction because the company that oversees .com and .net sites, Verisign, is a U.S. company. Verisign chose not to fight the court orders. Adios, domains! Many of the foreign companies that lost domains have already adopted .info sites and have continued operating, apparently out of the jurisdiction of the court order.
Questions remain, though, because some of the sites, particularly a couple of music sites, don’t appear to be primarily involved with infringement. In fact, two of them, the hip-hop blogs RapGodFathers and Onsmash, regularly post tracks and mix tapes at the request of artists and labels. I’m guessing DHS didn’t tell the judge that.
But the bottom line is that government is helping business by restricting speech. Where I come from, that’s a hallmark of fascism.
http://www.metroland.net/rapp_this.html
How strange is it to see his name next to Jeff Sessions?
This is weird on many levels. Genuinely weird.