[JohnBee]

...It's like holding your breath to punish someone else.

We should test this out.

You hold your breath, and I'll let you know how/if it affected me same time tomorrow. - ready?

[séamuis]

We should test this out.

You hold your breath, and I'll let you know how/if it affected me same time tomorrow. - ready?

best post of the day!

[arnie0674]

What will shutting down PF for a day accomplish?

There are many things accomplished:

1. Spreads the word. These bills affect everybody, and everybody should be doing all they can to protest it. When people see Google has blacked out their logo and Wikipedia blacks out their site, thats exposes many more people to the potential dangers of this bill.
2. Taking these actions shows that they didn't just write an open letter to congress, they walked the walk and actually took actions that show how serious this is.
3. As mentioned by Dark_Mist, it shows we are willing to fight for an internet free from censorship by the government or IP rights holders.
4. While i'm sure the movie and recording studios don't care, our senators and representatives sure do. The senate website was down today due to overwhelming traffic from people looking up the phone number to call their senator. I know my senator, Robert Menendez, was a co-sponsor and has now backtracked. You can be sure it wasnt because the movies stuidos asked him to reconsider.

It's like holding your breath to punish someone else.

Or like going on a hunger strike...

[séamuis]

Or like going on a hunger strike...

works, every. single. time.

[D4rknezz]

Awwww i should have blackened my fb page today!

[Jasvox]

We should test this out.

You hold your breath, and I'll let you know how/if it affected me same time tomorrow. - ready?

I see the humor, but you do realize I was pointing out the ridiculousness of holding ones breath.

Jason

[jolepp]

Eight US lawmakers have withdrawn their support for anti-piracy laws, after "blackout" protests on thousands of internet sites.

Two of the bill's co-sponsors, Marco Rubio from Florida and Roy Blunt from Missouri, are among those backing away.

Online encyclopaedia Wikipedia and blog service WordPress are among the highest profile sites to block their content.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has branded the protests as "irresponsible" and a "stunt".

The MPAA, Hollywood's primary advocate in Washington and a key supporter of the legislation, is led by former Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Dodd.
...

BBC News - Support wanes in US Congress for anti-piracy bill

It would seem that the protest(s) are having an effect (?).

---

Last edited by jolepp; 01-19-2012 at 04:00 AM.

[boriscleto]

BBC News - Support wanes in US Congress for anti-piracy bill

It would seem that the protest(s) are having an effect (?).

Only until after the election. Then both bills will be passed in the dead of night during the lame-duck session without any debate.

[newarts]

Here are the bills themselves...
SOPA: Bill Text - 112th Congress (2011-2012) - THOMAS (Library of Congress)
PIPA: Bill Text - 112th Congress (2011-2012) - THOMAS (Library of Congress)

My reading of these bills is that if a foreign server violates (or probably violates) US intellectual property law, the justice dept will require DNS providers to prevent that site's address from being resolved. Further any server that links to the offending server may also have its address removed from DNS resolution.

Please tell me if my interpretation is correct - I have a hard time reading such language.

I think in the extreme it means that if http://PiratedMovies.uk is a foreign server that delivers pirated materials, The Largest Pentax Camera Forum and Pentax Review Site - PentaxForums.com Home would disappear from the internet in the US because of the link earlier in this sentence.

Such actions and their enormous potential for collateral damage are ridiculous overkill to prevent the loss of royalty income to an already fat entertainment industry.

A different and more important issue is the government's authority in requiring the DNS system to do anything in the line of censoring its service. The internet is global in scope and should be immune from intervention by individual governments.

The internet is fundamentally a data delivery system that knows nothing about any higher level meaning of this bit or that byte; there should be no regulation of data delivery based on possible content.

[jolepp]

Megaupload, one of the internet's largest file-sharing sites, has been shut down by officials in the US.

The site's founders have been charged with violating piracy laws.
...
The US Justice Department said that Megaupload's two co-founders Kim Dotcom, formerly known as Kim Schmitz, and Mathias Ortmann were arrested in Auckland, New Zealand along with two other employees of the business at the request of US officials. It added that three other defendants were still at large.
...
The US Chamber of Commerce has defended the proposed laws saying that enforcement agencies "lack the tools" to effectively apply existing intellectual property laws to the digital world.

Industry watchers suggest this latest move may feed into the wider debate.

"Neither of the bills are close to being passed - they need further revision. But it appears that officials are able to use existing tools to go after a business alleged to be inducing piracy," said Gartner's media distribution expert Mike McGuire.

"It begs the question that if you can find and arrest people who are suspected to be involved in piracy using existing laws, then why introduce further regulations which are US-only and potentially damaging?"

BBC News - Megaupload file-sharing site shut down

[jolepp]

...
Please tell me if my interpretation is correct - I have a hard time reading such language.
...

BBC's attempt: BBC News - Sopa and Pipa anti-piracy bills controversy explained

(I would imagine these are hard to intepret and that what they'd mean in practice would be determined by the courts.)

edit:

From the side pane of another BBC article:

The US bills are designed to block access to sites containing unauthorised copyright material.

Content owners and the US government would be given the power to request court orders to shut down sites associated with piracy.

Advertisers, payment processors and internet service providers would be forbidden from doing business with infringers based overseas.

Sopa also requires search engines to remove foreign infringing sites from their results, a provision absent in Pipa.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16655272

[crewl1]

Has SOPA been pulled? House backer withdraws Web anti-piracy bill - Yahoo! News

[kenafein]

Has SOPA been pulled? House backer withdraws Web anti-piracy bill - Yahoo! News

For now. It was pretty much dead when Obama announced he would veto it in its current state. Then the Protest hit and the masses actually became aware of the threat. People withdrawing support after that were pretty much just trying to CYA.

After he announced his opposition, the big studios all decided to withhold campaign contributions to Obama.

This isn't the end, they're going to try to pass something else eventually, so stay vigilant.

[Nesster]

I still have an anti-notch button somewhere... remember when the record companies wanted to put a deep notch filter into all digital media, so's to be able to detect it and thus prevent copying? It's like a sensor maker putting in a scratch so's they'd be able to ensure you couldn't make a digital copy of your photo.

[jolepp]

Heh, a couple of years back I ran into a copy protected CD which my Philips player (apparently being strictly standards compliant) flat refused to play ('invalid disk' or somesuch on the display). On closer inspection I noticed that it did not have the usual 'compact disk' logo (I'd recall Philips denied the use of the trademark for for these) but had some protection scheme logo. The protection schemes were supposed to prevent ripping on computer CD-drives (by using non-standard format designed to confuse the computer drives). It turned out I could rip the disk without trouble though and then burn the resulting audio files back to CD to play on the Philips player .