Fantastic article by Chris Rawson, on TUAW:

TUAW on SOPA and PIPA: What they are and why we’re against them

by Chris Rawson Jan 18th 2012 at 9:00AM

By now, news about two bills making their way through the US legislative approval process, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), has spread like wildfire across the Internet, along with widespread criticism of both bills.

As part of that criticism, if you’re reading this on January 18, 2012 and you try to click on either of those links above, you may notice that neither of them work as expected. That’s because Wikipedia, one of the most-trafficked and most well-known sites on the Internet, has pledged to “go dark” for 24 hours in protest against both bills. If you hit Google for information on the two bills that same day, you’ll likely find that the Internet’s most popular website is also protesting the provisions in these controversial bills.

We briefly considered following suit and taking TUAW offline during the same period, but we decided that it would be better to take the opportunity to educate our readers on the implications of these two bills, and why we think they’re ill-advised.

SOPA is the US House of Representatives’ version of a bill intended to “promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.” PIPA is a broadly similar bill working its way through the US Senate, with the full title “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act.” Depending on how libertarian your mindset is, this type of phrasing either sounds perfectly innocuous or like the stamping of marching boots right outside your front window.

The intent of both bills is to crack down on illegal sharing of copyrighted media content, colloquially known as “piracy,” especially of films and music. Not coincidentally, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are the biggest supporters of both SOPA and PIPA; the MPAA in particular has issued a somewhat melodramatic response to the criticism of these bills.

PC World had a good overview of SOPA as far back as November — things move slowly in the US legislature — and Kirby Ferguson from the “Everything is a Remix” web series produced a short video, embedded below, which outlines the US Senate’s similar PROTECT-IP Act, criticizing it as a lashing out against the fundamental freedom Internet users have enjoyed since day one.

[continue reading…]

Today is a huge day, as Jeff Tucker noted in Tucker on the SOPA Protests: Blackout Wednesday: The Time Has Come. In an incredibly effective uprising against SOPA and PIPA by the tech savvy, the left, and libertarians, culminating in today’s widespread SOPA website blackouts/protests by tech and web giants, and many others, SOPA/PIPA has been at least slowed down. Mike Masnick lays out An Updated Analysis: Why SOPA & PIPA Are A Bad Idea, Dangerous & Unnecessary. And as he notes, some Congresscritters are now removing their names from PIPA and SOPA, including, Reps. Lee Terry and Ben Quayle from SOPA, and Sens. Marco Rubio, John Cornyn, John Boozman, Orrin Hatch, and Roy Blunt from PIPA. Other Congresscritters came out against it too [Update: see latest list here]. They are running scared. And many companies that were pro-SOPA or ambivalent, have shifted in a more anti-SOPA direction, like GoDaddy (when threatened by bad PR and customer outrage with possibly losing hundreds of thousands of domains) and Microsoft. Even the Obama Administration is shifting somewhat against SOPA.

Some sites are anti-SOPA but are not going dark, for well-articulated reasons. For example, TechDirt explains that its going dark would not do much good and they are instead focusing on providing anti-SOPA information, which makes perfect sense given the great anti-SOPA coverage and information they’ve been providing;¹ TUAW takes a similar approach; and AntiWar.com says it opposes SOPA but does not want to stop shining its light on the war issue.² The heroic EFF did not go dark but has tons of anti-SOPA information emblazoned on its home page, like Techdirt.  But many other sites are going dark, posting banners, etc. Following is just a smattering of them, with the big guys first:

• Wikipedia;
• Reddit;
• Google (blacked out its logo and urges we stop piracy, not liberty);
• Wired.com (with very creative redacting of words);
• Mozilla and Firefox;
• Greenpeace.org (which, like Campaign for Liberty, has a very cool blackout page);
• Mashable;
• Campaign for Liberty;
• Sites I’m affiliated with: C4SIF, StephanKinsella.com, and The Libertarian Standard;
• Mises.org;
• C4SS (Center for a Stateless Society–I’m an advisor);
• WendyMcElroy.com;
• iFeminists.com;
• QuestionCopyright;
• BoingBoing;
• Minecraft.net, whose splash page says “PIPA & SOPA? HOW ABOUT NOPA!”
• UK PC gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun;
• and many others.

Some have replaced their picture on Facebook with an anti-SOPA slogan, such as Jeff Tucker.

(BTW here’s a list of companies purportedly supporting SOPA.)

These protests are getting widespread attention, e.g. in the Washington Post (listing its five favorites), Salon and Slate.

Update: see A Gallery Of The SOPA Blackout Protest Screens

1. What We’re Doing On This PIPA/SOPA Day Of Protest: Keeping You Involved. [↩]
2. SOPA, and Why We’re Not Blacked Out. [↩]

Great post by Jeff Tucker at Laissez Faire Today (and, yes, C4SIF has joined the blackout, see Down Against SOPA: WordPress anti-SOPA plugin):

Blackout Wednesday: The Time Has Come

Jeffrey Tucker · January 17, 2012

Wikipedia, that ever-evolving monument to human collaboration in the cause of global enlightenment, goes completely black tomorrow, Wednesday, Jan. 18. The blackout is a choice, and a brilliant one, made by founder Jimmy Wales in consultation with the whole Wikipedia community. It is a protest, a statement, a symbolic warning to the world of what… read more

I just added this plugin to C4sif.org and stephankinsella.com. It will give an anti-SOPA splash page to visitors for specified upcoming days. Others are doing it, like Reddit and Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s heroic action:

English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout

To: English Wikipedia Readers and Community
From: Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director
Date: January 16, 2012

Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECTIP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate—that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.

This will be the first time the English Wikipedia has ever staged a public protest of this nature, and it’s a decision that wasn’t lightly made. Here’s how it’s been described by the three Wikipedia administrators who formally facilitated the community’s discussion. From the public statement, signed by User:NuclearWarfare, User:Risker and User:Billinghurst:

It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web.

Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a “blackout” of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.

On careful review of this discussion, the closing administrators note the broad-based support for action from Wikipedians around the world, not just from within the United States. The primary objection to a global blackout came from those who preferred that the blackout be limited to readers from the United States, with the rest of the world seeing a simple banner notice instead. We also noted that roughly 55% of those supporting a blackout preferred that it be a global one, with many pointing to concerns about similar legislation in other nations.

In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position. That’s a real, legitimate issue. We want people to trust Wikipedia, not worry that it is trying to propagandize them.

But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.

But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or, if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.

The decision to shut down the English Wikipedia wasn’t made by me; it was made by editors, through a consensus decision-making process. But I support it.

Like Kat and the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation Board, I have increasingly begun to think of Wikipedia’s public voice, and the goodwill people have for Wikipedia, as a resource that wants to be used for the benefit of the public. Readers trust Wikipedia because they know that despite its faults, Wikipedia’s heart is in the right place. It’s not aiming to monetize their eyeballs or make them believe some particular thing, or sell them a product. Wikipedia has no hidden agenda: it just wants to be helpful.

That’s less true of other sites. Most are commercially motivated: their purpose is to make money. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a desire to make the world a better place—many do!—but it does mean that their positions and actions need to be understood in the context of conflicting interests.

My hope is that when Wikipedia shuts down on January 18, people will understand that we’re doing it for our readers. We support everyone’s right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression. We think everyone should have access to educational material on a wide range of subjects, even if they can’t pay for it. We believe in a free and open Internet where information can be shared without impediment. We believe that new proposed laws like SOPA—and PIPA, and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States—don’t advance the interests of the general public. You can read a very good list of reasons to oppose SOPA and PIPA here, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Why is this a global action, rather than US-only? And why now, if some American legislators appear to be in tactical retreat on SOPA?

The reality is that we don’t think SOPA is going away, and PIPA is still quite active. Moreover, SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. All around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation seeking to regulate the Internet in other ways while hurting our online freedoms. Our concern extends beyond SOPA and PIPA: they are just part of the problem. We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone.

  Make your voice heard!

On January 18, we hope you’ll agree with us, and will do what you can to make your own voice heard.

Sue Gardner,
Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Comment on this post!

Great post from Whiskey and Gunpowder:

SOPA Dead On Arrival

Amid significant pressure from tens of thousands of Internet users and major Web behemoths like Google, Facebook and Reddit, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is, in its current form, dead on arrival:

“Misguided efforts to combat online privacy have been threatening to stifle innovation, suppress free speech and even, in some cases, undermine national security. As of yesterday, though, there’s a lot less to worry about.

“The first sign that the bills’ prospects were dwindling came Friday, when SOPA sponsors agreed to drop a key provision that would have required service providers to block access to international sites accused of piracy.

“The legislation ran into an even more significant problem yesterday when the White House announced its opposition to the bills. Though the administration’s chief technology officials acknowledged the problem of online privacy, the White House statement presented a fairly detailed critique of the measures and concluded, ‘We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.’ It added that any proposed legislation ‘must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet.’

“Though the administration did issue a formal veto threat, the White House’s opposition signaled the end of these bills, at least in their current form.

“A few hours later, Congress shelved SOPA, putting off action on the bill indefinitely.

“Sourced from Washington Monthly via The Daily Sheeple“

Sponsored primarily by purported free speech advocates that include Democrats and Republicans alike, the SOPA would have fundamentally transformed the Internet as we know it today. As Daisy Luther writes at Inalienably Yours, the bill was nothing short of a direct attack against the First Amendment and the right to free speech:

“On closer inspection, the legalese in the bill has the potential to eviscerate free speech…and like NDAA, without proof…only with suspicion of ‘wrongdoing.’ It’s all about copyright infringement. If you tick off the powers that be, and you’ve quoted someone, somewhere, saying something, you may have infringed on their copyright. As a defendant, you are not even present at the legal proceeding, allowing ‘them’ to shut you down until you prove yourself innocent.

“How do they shut you down? Search engines are required to remove you from their listings. Internet service providers can be ordered to block access to your site. Advertising networks and payment providers can also be forced to cease doing business with you. This continues until you are proven INNOCENT. Wait — I thought it was innocent until proven guilty…oh…that was ‘before’ the NDAA.

“Source: ‘The Internet: The Last Bastion of Free Speech’”

While this bill of goods was being sold to the American public as a way to reduce online piracy originating on foreign shores, in essence, the legislation would have made it possible for any organization (with the financial assets and access to attorneys to do so) to target websites (foreign or domestic) using excerpts, quotes and videos without express permission of the authors or producers of such content. Furthermore, any website linking to suspected copyrighted content would be guilty by association for facilitating the infringement.

By linking to and excerpting Daisy’s article above, for example, this particular website — and anyone who republishes this article, excerpts it or pulls a link from it — could be shut down on the service provider level until such time they prove their innocence. (*Note to DHS, et al.: Daisy has given us permission to reprint her article or portions of it, and the excerpt from Washington Monthly has been reprinted under fair use to advance understanding of this political and Constitutional issue.*)

The scariest part of the legislation, as Daisy points out above, is that due process would have been eliminated (just like in the NDAA), forcing Internet providers, search engines and ad networks to simply shut down a website(s) based on just the complainant’s accusations, leaving those website owners who were shut down to deal with the fallout with costly legal expenses and lengthy court battles.

You may recall that in 2010, the government shut down 73,000 websites in exactly this manner. Though the owners of the majority of the targeted sites were not technically infringing copyrights, some were linking to other sites that did, making them accessories.

Even more alarming is the ability, under legislation such as SOPA, of the government to control the flow of information across major Internet providers. Articles or videos criticizing political figures or policies could easily be targeted, as they were in October of this year, when the government moved to shut down rogue publishers of critical content .

As I’ve said before: “Make no mistake, this is a thinly veiled attack not on pirates (because laws for this kind of activity already exist, whether on the Internet or offline), but alternative news media and controversial online communities. When there existed only three ‘news’ channels and a handful of influential print newspapers, the message could be easily controlled and repeated to the masses. With the advent of alternative media in the last decade, those who would rule us no longer have the ability to control the message. And this scares them.”

What it boils down to is that SOPA was an attempt to put the power of information back in the hands of an elite few who are rapidly losing the ability to control what the masses are reading, hearing and seeing. Alternative news and “extremist” information were the targets (and still are).

While we applaud President Obama (yes, we agree with him on this move) for formally issuing a veto threat, we remain skeptical of his motivations. This being an election year, the last thing the President needs to be dealing with along with the economic crisis and tensions in the Middle East is the protests of millions of voters who would have undoubtedly taken to the streets when access to their favorite web sites like YouTube, Google, Facebook and Twitter was shut down because of alleged SOPA violations.

Moreover, we aren’t one bit convinced that this veto was done in the interests of free expression, as the administration may claim. In November, the president issued a similar veto threat about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows for the detention of American citizens determined to be threats to national security and public safety on the domestic (U.S.) battlefront. He flip-flopped on the issue just a couple of weeks later, and signed the bill into law over New Year’s weekend to complete silence from the mainstream media.

It is our view that SOPA, in one form or another, will return with a vengeance.

Regards,

Mac Slavo

SHTFPlan

Someone forwarded to me this speech by Manuel Barkhau, presented May 23, 2010 at the SIGINT 2010 Chaos Computer Club [CCC]. It’s in German so I can’t follow it, but it appears to be a criticism of natural law defenses of intellectual property, based on work by me and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Update: I contacted the Barkhau on facebook, and he said:

there is no English version, but the talk is based mostly on the argumentation ethics of Hoppe, followed by some examples to illustrate how wide ranging it is, including abortion, draft and of course your arguments against intellectual property.

Since this is a laymen audience as far as philosophy is concerned, I also spend some time on the difference between positive and natural rights and the purpose of rights as rules to avoid conflict.

The associated website is http://imaginäreseigentum.de/

Blogged here, from O’Reilly’s Google-plus post (h/t Geoff Plauche):

 

[Tim O’Reilly] I was pleased to see the measured tone of the White House response to the citizen petition about #SOPA and #PIPA

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#/!/response/combating-online-piracy-while-protecting-open-and-innovative-internet

and yet I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups. The offending paragraph is as follows:

“Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.”

In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?

In my experience at O’Reilly, the losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of the free flow of information, which makes the world richer, and develops new markets for legitimate content. Most of the people who are downloading unauthorized copies of O’Reilly books would never have paid us for them anyway; meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of others are buying content from us, many of them in countries that we were never able to do business with when our products were not available in digital form.

History shows us, again and again, that frontiers are lawless places, but that as they get richer and more settled, they join in the rule of law. American publishing, now the largest publishing industry in the world, began with piracy. (I have a post coming on that subject on Monday.)

Congress (and the White House) need to spend time thinking hard about how best to grow our economy – and that means being careful not to close off the frontier, or to harm those trying to settle it, in order to protect those who want to remain safe at home. British publishers could have come to America in the 19th century; they chose not to, and as a result, we grew our own indigenous publishing industry, which relied at first, in no small part, on pirating British and European works.

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.

P.S. If Congress and the White House really want to fight pirates who are hurting the economy, they should be working to rein in patent trolls. There, the evidence of economic harm is clear, in multi-billion dollar transfers of wealth from companies building real products to those who have learned how to work the patent system while producing no value for consumers.

P. P.S. See also my previous piece on the subject of doing an independent investigation of the facts rather than just listening to the appeals of lobbyists, https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/5Xd3VjFR8gx.

***

source: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/BEDukdz2B1r

Important agitation from WordPress:

You are an agent of change. Has anyone ever told you that? Well, I just did, and I meant it.

Normally we stay away from from politics here at the official WordPress project — having users from all over the globe that span the political spectrum is evidence that we are doing our job and democratizing publishing, and we don’t want to alienate any of our users no matter how much some of us may disagree with some of them personally. Today, I’m breaking our no-politics rule, because there’s something going on in U.S. politics right now that we need to make sure you know about and understand, because it affects us all.

Using WordPress to blog, to publish, to communicate things online that once upon a time would have been relegated to an unread private journal (or simply remained unspoken, uncreated, unshared) makes you a part of one of the biggest changes in modern history: the democratization of publishing and the independent web. Every time you click Publish, you are a part of that change, whether you are posting canny political insight or a cat that makes you LOL. How would you feel if the web stopped being so free and independent? I’m concerned freaked right the heck out about the bills that threaten to do this, and as a participant in one of the biggest changes in modern history, you should be, too.

You may have heard people talking/blogging/twittering about SOPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act. The recent SOPA-related boycott of GoDaddy was all over the news, with many people expressing their outrage over the possibilities of SOPA, but when I ask people about SOPA and its sister bill in the Senate, PIPA (Protect IP Act), many don’t really know what the bills propose, or what we stand to lose. If you are not freaked out by SOPA/PIPA, please: for the next four minutes, instead of checking Facebook statuses, seeing who mentioned you on Twitter, or watching the latest episode of Sherlock*, watch this video (by Fight for the Future).

Some thoughts:

• In the U.S. our legal system maintains that the burden of proof is on the accuser, and that people are innocent until proven guilty. This tenet seems to be on the chopping block when it comes to the web if these bills pass, as companies could shut down sites based on accusation alone.
• Laws are not like lines of PHP; they are not easily reverted if someone wakes up and realizes there is a better way to do things. We should not be so quick to codify something this far-reaching.
• The people writing these laws are not the people writing the independent web, and they are not out to protect it. We have to stand up for it ourselves.

Blogging is a form of activism. You can be an agent of change. Some people will tell you that taking action is useless, that online petitions, phone calls to representatives, and other actions won’t change a single mind, especially one that’s been convinced of something by lobbyist dollars. To those people, I repeat the words of Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

We are not a small group. More than 60 million people use WordPress — it’s said to power about 15% of the web. We can make an impact, and you can be an agent of change. Go to Stop American Censorship for more information and a bunch of ways you can take action quickly, easily, and painlessly. The Senate votes in two weeks, and we need to help at least 41 more senators see reason before then. Please. Make your voice heard.

*Yes, the latest episode of Sherlock is good. Stephen Moffatt + Russell Tovey = always good

Read more>>

Another example of why patent and copyright, and even trademark, are not the only bad types of IP: trade secret is also bad and should be abolished, along with the others, and newer and non-traditional forms of IP as well. (Other trademark and IP horror stories here.)

 Two cases of social media as trade secrets may affect one another

Do employees or employers own social media accounts?

By Julie Beck

January 12, 2012

There’s a case currently making the rounds that has drawn a lot of attention to the question of who social media accounts really belong to—employers or employees. The mobile phone website Phonedog.com is suing a former employee, Noah Kravitz, alleging that the 17,000 Twitter followers he gained while working there was the same as a customer list, and therefore did not belong to the employee.

From the Telegraph (h/t Skip Oliva):

Student Richard O’Dwyer can be extradited over TV website

A British student can be extradited to the United States for running a website that provided links to pirated films and television shows, a court ruled.

Read more>>

Outrageous. Expect this kind of thing to get worse if laws like SOPA pass… I’d have to say copyright/IP has risen a notch or so on the ranking list of the the most evil and dangerous state laws, institutions, and policies.

As Rob Wicks told me, “Evil as hell. After a while, it’s hard to consider some of these businesses to be anything but branches of government.”

Update/Related post: Where does IP Rank Among the Worst State Laws?

But then, aren’t we all?

See The Author of SOPA Is a Copyright Violator, from vice.com.

Cory Doctorow has a great speech up, The coming war on general computation, delivered at the the 28C3, the recent Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin. (He’s also written an article based on the transcript.) Doctorow explains that how the copyright interests want general purpose computers to be regulated, or hobbled, so that people cannot evade copyright restrictions and copyright circumvention prohibitions. (Why Doctorow is not yet a complete copyright abolitionists is a mystery to me.) He has an interesting point at around 45:00 about how the Internet and technology only provides an incremental benefit to the state, since they are already organized enough to be in charge, but can provide a more qualitative change–a “phase shift”–for the subjects of the state, in helping them to better organize and fight the state.

His summary of the talk:

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to “secure” anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

[TLS]