Community | November 03, 2011 | 11 comments

CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW. . . pending internet law may hinder freedom of speech

source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/government/new-house-of-representatives-bill-may-strangle-the-inte...

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2hellnwait
Summary: If you love your Internet, you must read this article. Congress is once again mucking around with our rights, and it ain’t good.

Let me be clear. If you love your Internet, you must read this article. Congress is once again mucking around with our rights, and it ain’t good.

To put it simply, the U.S. House of Representatives is trying to pass SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Now, we all know and accept that online piracy is bad. We all know and accept that it’s wrong to download music we haven’t paid for, and we all know it’s better to pay Netflix or iTunes for our movies than to steal them off Torrent sites.

Stealing is wrong and we accept that on faith. We all believe our artists and creative professionals (and the suits who follow them around with their hands out) deserve to get paid for their work. Heck, I make my living producing content. I like to be able to pay my bills as much as the next guy.

Unfortunately, our elected officials are once again allowing themselves to be led around by their collective noses by the lobbying organizations known as the RIAA and the MPAA. These lobbyists have no problem disrupting the Internet for their own gain, whether or not their efforts will damage our economy, cause jobs to be lost, or destroy one of America’s greatest assets.

It’s interesting when you think about it. The Internet was designed to route around nuclear warfare, but it’s almost defenseless against lawyers and lobbyists.

Here’s where SOPA goes wrong. . . [...]
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/government/new-house-of-representatives-bill-may-stran...
  1. groups:
    Community,   Business News & Analysis,   US Congress Watch
  2. tags:
    News and Information,  Internet Censorship,  Crony "Capitalsim"
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11 comments // CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW. . . pending internet law may hinder freedom of speech

  • cabinettags
    • +1
      cabinettags  

    • Just emailed my congressman. I urge all readers to do the same. This legislation is redundant. There are already laws in place that accomplish the same thing. Keep the government away from the internet. They screw up everything they get their hands on.

    • 7 months ago
  • 2hellnwait
  • jubal
  • ahiguy
  • Paratus
  • 2hellnwait
  • mitekillem
    • +1
      mitekillem  
    • Paratus:

      You talking about the same one's who ran on Job Creation, but has only cut jobs, and has yet to vote on any bills that actually create them?
      If this is you're idea of progress, then we're all fucked.

    • 7 months ago
  • letsliveinpeace
  • 2hellnwait
    • 0
      2hellnwait  
    • letsliveinpeace:

      Thanks. . . this is the 3rd time in the last year that I've posted articles alerting about this insidious intrusion into civil liberties of free enterprise!
      Call or write your congressperson and stop this, or we'll be witness to total regulatory chaos in the www.

    • 7 months ago
  • CitizenHill
    • 0
      CitizenHill  

    • In the past week, the larger Internet community has joined EFF in sounding the alarm about the new copyright bill, now known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), as it makes its way through the U.S. House. The bill threatens to transform copyright law, pushing Internet intermediaries—from Facebook to your ISP—to censor whole swaths of the Internet. SOPA could forever alter social networks, stifle innovation and creativity, and destroy jobs, which is why Rep. Zoe Lofgren wasn’t exaggerating when she said SOPA “would mean the end of the Internet as we know it."

      - - this bill could also have a huge impact on the work of human rights advocates and whistleblowers who depend on online tools to protect their anonymity and speak out against injustice. Platforms created to provide anonymity software to human rights activists across the world, as well as next generation WikiLeaks-style whistleblower sites, could be major casualties of this bill.

      Political and human rights video hosting sites like EngageMedia, which is committed to raising awareness about social justice and the environment in the Asian Pacific region, might also be under threat. If a single video on the site arguably contains infringing content (keep in mind that only a portion of a site has to be engaging in infringement), an IP rightsholder could reach out to Paypal and demand it shut down EngageMedia’s account.

      We’ve seen the effect of this kind of action before, in the recent attack on WikiLeaks. In December, WikiLeaks started publishing its cache of leaked State Department cables, which also exposed many human rights violations. The First Amendment barred the government from censoring WikiLeaks directly, but that didn’t stop Senator Joe Lieberman from pressuring private companies to stop doing business with WikiLeaks. The media organization lost its domain name and servers. Then Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal stopped processing their donations—cutting off 97% of the global payment processing market for Wikileaks. As Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler put it, - - “THIS…ALLOWED [THE GOVERNMENT] TO OBTAIN RESULTS (FOR THE STATE)THAT THE STATE IS PROHIBITED BY LAW FROME PURSUING DIRECTLY.”

      https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/11/proposed-copyright-bill-threatens-whistleb...

    • 7 months ago
  • MotherForTruth
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