Oh boy guys and gals those crazies in Hollywood are at it again.

http://americancensorship.org/

---- April 3rd ----

http://www.copyrightinformation.org/node/705

And hell's army marches onward today. For those not aware through a private agreement between hollywood and the major ISPs starting within the next few months your ISPs will in fact be monitoring your traffic watching for copyrighted material. The organization created by this collusion is the Center for Copyright Information and while taking on a gentle face, saying that they want to educate violators about copyright instead of punishing them, while choking their internet connection to nothing. Of course in the same breath they list half-truths and full lies and on their website.

http://www.copyrightinformation.org/facts

Most notably is that they keep up the myth about piracy costing obscene amounts of money and thus jobs (>implying that money would go job creation even if it existed). However a recent information coming from France, which has the strictest measures in place regarding copyright, shows that even with piracy down in that country sales are not going up with any significant effect.

https://torrentfreak.com/french-three-s ... es-120330/


And so let's shift again to the broader topics with this video I came across recently which seems like a realistic view of what we can expect in the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

Sucks.

Not much I can do about it though. And before anyone suggests, no I don't think those wacky facebook and tumblr stunts will have any influence on the voting.

If the hearings start today, how long should it, on average, take for the voting to take place?

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That I do not know, somethings rush through extremely quickly before anyone has a chance to cry foul and others get held up for months.

Ah, so passing a bill works the same way as here I guess. And I hear Obama supposedly supports this one, not good.

I just find it funny that to get people behind opposing this bill, it's being said "facebook and youtube might get taken down". Nah, Google is too powerful and facebook too popular atm. for the government to even attempt that, even if a law theoretically allowed it. They'll just get slightly more censored, and they're already blocking content based on country of viewer and taking down copyrighted material anyway.

This is clearly targeting torrent sites and that's what has me worried. Since torrenting my entertainment is what I mainly do on the Internet.

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Torrenting is used mainly for pirating and other downloads, and that stuff is currently illegal anyway. Still, somehow only a fraction of a percent of pirating sites are ever shut down, and only a tiny percentage of people who pirate media are caught. I think this law, if passed, would follow the same pattern.
Also, have you kept record of how many important laws have passed through Congress lately? Laws that were considered mutually beneficial to both parties have been routinely shot down by one party simply for being proposed by the other party. Nothing of importance is getting through that political lockdown until after the 2012 elections.

Under current law torrent sites often claim that they cannot be held responsible for what torrents their users upload, this bill is meant to address precisely that. Site owners will be held responsible for what's being uploaded to them.

I don't consider torrent sites undefeatable, back in 2004 when I was using Kazaa, I remember people saying Peer-to-peer file sharing networks would never die, yet eventually they did. Kazaa and Frostwire both got effectively killed via legal action, even though they had millions of users.

If the 2nd generation of P2P could get taken down, so can the 3rd.

Hell, Demonoid is reporting on this, so clearly this is a threat.


I doubt Congressmen consider this bill as important enough to shoot it down due to party rivalrly.

Unless this bill gets mainstream media attention, which I also doubt.

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And none of it will actually stop piracy, it will just lower our standard 'freedom' further.

Intellectual property, especially as far as entertainment goes, is completely bunk as far as I'm concerned. Any legitimacy it could have is completely overshadowed by the simple fact that rather than deal with 'why people pirate instead purchase' IP owners take the finger pointing approach.



Given that it's backed by media owners I wouldn't be surprised if the topic is blacklisted as far as the news is concerned, lack of public awareness (along with misinformation) is how most things get passed in the US.

It seems to me that bills like this come and go a lot. That may be because I once signed one of those petition things and now I get an email every week about the constant crisis that is Net Neutrality. So can someone tell me if this one is unique in some way?

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Hey, this place hasn't gotten traffic in a while... maybe you want to change that.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/1 ... 98255.html


Welp, been nice hearing from ya guys.

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...

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CAUTION: Would anyone tell me if I was getting stupider?

Too true... Well on the positive side, most porn is original or uncopyrighted material, so the primary use for the internet will be unaffected by this turn of events.

And my plans to wash my hands of this nation suffer even further advances to their time tables. I suppose I will be interested to see what happens when after the inevitable passage of the act (if not now then one of the next hundred million times it gets sponsored) hollywood sales don't go up by any significant percent. Though my experience with the general American populous, too addicted to entertain, has me fearing that things will go exactly as hollywood expects them to.

From what I have learned from antipiracy measures is that all this will do is fuck things up for everyone but the pirates.

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CAUTION: Would anyone tell me if I was getting stupider?

It's kind of sad when our only hope is a large, multi-billion dollar corporation that is only fighting the bill for its own finances.

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Don't call me stupid

This entire situation is a picture perfect model of the capitalist system at work. Namely, the part where the clash of interests between mega-corporations screws with the little guys.

Trying to stop the effect and not the cause. It's genius every time.

Do large lobbying corporations support legislation that doesn't actually solve the problem or does someone really think this will work?

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Hey, this place hasn't gotten traffic in a while... maybe you want to change that.

Nah that's completely normal, in business and politics everyone has an agenda. Been that way for centuries.






Though I find it funny that out of all people it's the Tea Party who is among the opponents. Guess I shouldn't criticize them as much.

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If you find a few good spots on a rotten apple, it's still a rotten apple.

List of stated supporters of the bill. McCain supports the bill too, so I guess no matter if Obama had lost or not, we'd be getting this:

S.968 - Protect IP Act

Sponsor: Sen. Patrick Leahy [D-VT]

Co Sponsors:
Lamar Alexander [R-TN]
Kelly Ayotte [R-NH]
Michael Bennet [D-CO]
Jeff Bingaman [D-NM]
Richard Blumenthal [D-CT]
Roy Blunt [R-MO]
John Boozman [R-AR]
Sherrod Brown [D-OH]
Benjamin Cardin [D-MD]
Robert Casey [D-PA]
Saxby Chambliss [R-GA]
Thad Cochran [R-MS]
Chris Coons [D-DE]
Bob Corker [R-TN]
Richard Durbin [D-IL]
Michael Enzi [R-WY]
Dianne Feinstein [D-CA]
Al Franken [D-MN]
Kirsten Gillibrand [D-NY]
Lindsey Graham [R-SC]
Charles Grassley [R-IA]
Kay Hagan [D-NC]
Orrin Hatch [R-UT]
John Isakson [R-GA]
Tim Johnson [D-SD]
Amy Klobuchar [D-MN]
Herbert Kohl [D-WI]
Mary Landrieu [D-LA]
Joseph Lieberman [I-CT]
John McCain [R-AZ]
Robert Menéndez [D-NJ]
Bill Nelson [D-FL]
James Risch [R-ID]
Marco Rubio [R-FL]
Charles Schumer [D-NY]
Jeanne Shaheen [D-NH]
Tom Udall [D-NM]
David Vitter [R-LA]
Sheldon Whitehouse [D-RI]



H.R. 3261.
Sponsor: Rep. Lamar Smith [R-TX21]

Mark Amodei [R-NV2]
John Barrow [D-GA12]
Karen Bass [D-CA33]
Howard Berman [D-CA28]
Marsha Blackburn [R-TN7]
Mary Bono Mack [R-CA45]
John Carter [R-TX31]
Steven Chabot [R-OH1]
John Conyers [D-MI14]
Ted Deutch [D-FL19]
Elton Gallegly [R-CA24]
Robert Goodlatte [R-VA6]
Tim Griffin [R-AR2]
Peter King [R-NY3]
Ben Luján [D-NM3]
Thomas Marino [R-PA10]
Alan Nunnelee [R-MS1]
William Owens [D-NY23]
Dennis Ross [R-FL12]
Steve Scalise [R-LA1]
Adam Schiff [D-CA29]
Lee Terry [R-NE2]
Debbie Wasserman Schultz [D-FL20]
Melvin Watt [D-NC12]

Anyway, just posting this in case, if any American on here cares about this matter enough to e-mail their representative.

Also saw this linked by some anon: https://wfc2.wiredforchange.com/o/9042/ ... n_KEY=8173

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None of us has enough money to buy out a politician.

Well Nancy Pelosi has openly opposed it, as has another prominent Republican.

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Escape will make me God.

Woot wrote my first email to a statesman. I figured I might as well. I couldn't find out if he supports the act or not. It doesn't seem to be a big deal on his radar. He's not on the previously posted list though.

Dear Representative [Name]

My name is [Name], emailing you to ask that you vote against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). I am a student at [Collage] University. As a physics major, critically examining a claim is a reflex. As a computer science major, the workings of technology are second nature to me. One of the core reasons that the internet is popular is that it gives just about anyone the freedom to express themselves to the largest pool of people on the planet. While not attacking this feature of the internet directly SOPA threatens to give corporations the power to censor many things that they feel they may be lousing a profit to. SOPA could evaporate the life blood of the internet, the YouTuber singing a rendition of a song, the upstart writer making a parody of a book, the DeviantArtist drawing a character off of a TV show. These aren't the big people in the world but they are playing in the big world anyway; however, if SOPA is enacted they might not be able too play anymore and then it won't be such a big world anymore. Thank you for taking the time to read this email.

Sincerely
[Name again]

Ooooo, love that last line. Little people playing in a big world. What a brave image. I also had a personal appeal afterwards, thinking he didn't have to be spend time on reasoning with no useful backing if he didn't want to.

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Hey, this place hasn't gotten traffic in a while... maybe you want to change that.

Usually it's aides that read them (especially if they aren't sent in in letter form), and usually they only care if you have some sort of power in the community, like being the leader of a group or something.