PCA Forums

anyone else hear anything about a possible shut down of goggle ,twitter and others over some bull. the recording industry is wanting to make them liable for piracy of material over the net .
it was talked about on the local news here but not able to find a link to the story yet .I was watching wxyz tv 11 pm news cast when they brought this information up.they said there is a shut down plan in the works .but no plans to do it yet .
wonder if others have heard of this !

SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, is another one of those bills that sounds like it's going to do something mildly positive but, in reality, has serious potential to negatively change the internet as we know it. It puts power in the hands of the entertainment industry to censor sites that allegedly "engage in, enable or facilitate" copyright infringement. This language vague enough to encompass sites you use every day, like Twitter and Facebook, making SOPA a serious problem. Here's how it works and what you can do about it.
SOPA's coming to a vote very soon. In fact, it was supposed to come to a vote today but was delayed, likely because of all the pushback. Reddit users have already started compiling a list of the IP addresses of popular sites in case SOPA passes and access will be restricted within the United States. A decision is going to be made soon, so if you still don't know what SOPA is or haven't done anything to stop it, read on to learn how you can help beat the bill.
How Does SOPA Work, and Why Should I Care?

The idea behind SOPA sounds reasonable. It came about in order to try to snuff out piracy online, as the entertainment industry is obviously not excited about the many people downloading their product without their permission. The issue is, however, that it doesn't really matter whether you're in support of piracy, against it, or just don't care. SOPA makes it possible for companies to block the domain names of web sites that are simple capable of, or seem to encourage copyright infringement.
This means that if Lifehacker happened to have an article or two that could be interpreted as piracy-friendly, our domain could be blocked so it's unaccessible by visiting lifehacker.com. What the bill can't do is block numeric IP addresses, so you could still access Lifehacker, or any other site that could be censored, if you knew that address. This is important because it means this bill can't do much to stop downloaders of pirated content. If a domain name is blocked, everything will still work via the numeric IP address. Basically, the bill will be no good at stopping piracy—what it was apparently designed to do—but excellent at censoring any web site capable of providing its users with the means of promoting pirated content or allowing the process. This includes sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, and many more. If it's possible to post pirated content on the site, or information that could further online piracy, a claim can be brought against it. This can be something as minor as you posting a copyrighted image to your Facebook page, or piracy-friendly information in the comments of a post such as this one. The vague, sweeping language in this bill is what makes it so troubling.

In the event of SOPA-based censorship, any site can submit an appeal so long as they do so within five days. This isn't a lot of time to handle a legal matter, and if you've ever dealt with a copyright infringement takedown notice you know how ineffective an appeal can be. When a threat of legal action is posed, a company is generally going to prefer to err on the side of caution and remove infringing content indefinitely. It's far cheaper to run the risk of removing perfectly legal content than to battle the issue in court. If your web host censors your site because of a SOPA-based claim, you can expect the same sorts of problems.
http://lifehacker.com/5860205/all-about ... r-internet

There are several huge companies supporting the bill*. Sony, Comcast, Viacom, and other large media giants among them. That alone should set off alarms that this is a bad bill. We do not need corporations controlling the internet. We also don't need a bunch of politicians who can probably barely use the internet deciding its fate. I've read that President Obama will veto this. I hope this holds true. While I doubt we'll see 2/3's vote to overturn the veto, this will not go away. Look to see it attached to some other piece of legislation.

*Here is a list of supporters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_that_support_the_Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

I wouldn't worry about it. There are so many alternatives on the WWW that if a few opt to shut down, others somewhere will just pick up the slack.
Look at the porn industry for example, it's not like anyone anywhere can control it or that would have been done already.

all this will do is set the WWW back to the old days where you have to know the IP of everything. I bet that if it happens there will be "root" sites that will act as DNS servers to point you to other locations.

Hell you could probably download the list of all the good sites from TPB

And I bet we will see underground DNA servers as well.

I'd hope with so much public outcry on the bill that it wouldn't go through.

normalicy wrote:I'd hope with so much public outcry on the bill that it wouldn't go through.

Obamacare.

Kaworu wrote:Obamacare.

Oh crap, we're doomed!

If you or your friends don't understand what SOPA and PIPA are about, here's some good info designed for non-techies:

http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html

I'm using a spare old laptop at work now as our ROs and tech info is all online but to do that, their IT guy had to add a bunch of SW to it and as a result, lots of sites are blocked, sucks IMO. So, if I want to be online elsewhere at work, I have to use my ipad2 via 3G.
Let's hope they don't pass that bill.

DNS provision pulled from SOPA, victory for opponents:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57358 ... opponents/

In a move the technology sector will surely see as a victory, a controversial antipiracy bill being debated in Congress will no longer include a provision that would require Internet service providers to block access to overseas Web sites accused of piracy.

That's a step in the right direction.