Empire of the Iguanadons

So unless you've been living under a rock fo the last few months, you're probably aware of SOPA - the Stop Online Piracy Act. It's a bill that was winding its way through Congress which aimed to address the issue of overseas content piracy and counterfeit product sales. The legislation drew a slew of protests over part of its implementation method, which even if you're living in a cave, should be well known to you by now. It's the same kind of doomsaying nonsense that always comes up with internet legislation: The evil USA is stamping out my free speech!

Several websites have chosen today to "go dark" in opposition to the bill. Most of them are ill-informed morons though. They're almost universally putting forth a spew of propaganda about how it spells the end of the 1st Amendment on the internet, how "just anyone" can have an entire domain thrown offline never to be seen again, and how folks will be rotting in jail just like all those Iranian or Chinese dissidents. Which does a severe disservice to the actual plight of Iranian and Chinese dissidents by trivializing their situations for propaganda purposes.

What this does of course is make a gullible public who has no clue WTF is going on panic. They then flood their congressmen with thousands of emails with identical text from some ill conceived online petition about how they don't want their free speech curbed. Most folks you may talk to don't even know what the purpose of the legislation is, much less the process behind how it actually works to seek a site being taken offline.

There are even several sites involved in the "go dark" day that are using communist symbols to promote their agenda. That's just lovely. It has all the same hallmarks of the Occupy movement. Which isn't something to be proud of.

All of this should of course sound eerily familiar, unless your cave didn't have internet in 1998. I'm referring of course to the doomsday predictions for free speech and innovation that were raised over the DMCA back then. None of which have since been realized. The boy is crying wolf yet again.

The reality is, the legislation as proposed does not do any of the things people are scaring themselves silly over. It is specifically targeted toward foreign websites who are engaged in activity which is already criminal. It merely gives the content providers and product makers tools they don't currently have to enforce their copyright and trademark rights. There's even a rather extensive due process involved that's probably leagues ahead of how the DMCA operates.

Read along with the actual copy of the legislation. Specifically, Section 102, subsection b. The process by which a site can be taken to task is detailed there. The US Attorney General must initiate it, and they have to go through a notice and counter-notice procedure similar to how the DMCA works. Note that nowhere in there does it say that "just anyone" can file this notice. So already you actually have more protection against bogus claims than you do with the DMCA.

If notice is not acted upon, the AG still has to go to court and get an injunction against the site. Providers will not be required to do ANYTHING until a court order has been issued on the matter.

The rest of the proposed legislation deals with plenty of other things that also have similar high bars for action. So the only conclusion I can draw is that the majority of those opposed are either pirates or counterfeiters, or companies that directly benefit from the activities of both.

It is also worth mentioning, since every last article I have read to date utterly fails to mention it, ONLY a copyright holder has any legal standing to sue over infringement of their work. Similarly with trademark and patent issues. Facts like this are poison to those opposed though because it doesn't fit their agenda politics of "anyone can take any site down".

I am generally against the idea of passing new laws to deal with problems that existing laws can already address. This country has enough junk legislation on the books already that we're not paying attention to. In this case, however, the tools don't exist in the law to seek remedy against a site that's stealing your stuff overseas. There may be some implementation problems with the DNS portion of SOPA, but rather than protest like wild animals and whip up a public frenzy over an issue that never existed, one should instead seek to improve the bill to remove the objections.

Piracy and counterfeiting are not going away. The issue will come up in Congress again in the future. Tabling the bill they have now will only delay the inevitable. Hopefully by then the rabid and uninformed opposition will give way to reasoned analysis and FACTS. We wouldn't be in this situation at all if people would quit feeling as though they were entitled to their movies, music, and games, without having to pay for them.

As an aside, I posted some responses last night over at TES Nexus. For those who's caves didn't get the memo, that's a game modding site primarily focused on the Elder Scrolls series. My responses, save one, have all been deleted since last night. Which I consider rather ironic given the outcry against this bill. Censorship is only bad if you're censoring someone who agrees with you?
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"It is pointless to resist, my son." -- Darth Vader
"Resistance is futile." -- The Borg
"Mother's coming for me in the dragon ships. I don't like these itchy clothes, but I have to wear them or it frightens the fish." -- Thurindil

Well. I guess that's that then.

Indeed! Much more so with some things than others.

Hey guys, Might be the U.S. a lot greater off keeping Syria's Assad?

With the way that the Free Syrian Army is growing at the moment, its unlikely that the situation is going to improve for Assad and the matter may well have been taken out of the West's hands.

It can't be said for certain however whether there will/will not be a sectarian civil war following Assad's overthrow although its fairly certain that the new Syrian leaders won't be as pro-west as Libya's new leaders will be since they feel they've been abandoned.

But really, if they want to overthrow Assad then they have every right to.

Don't really know what Syria has to do with SOPA, but ok

No, I don't think the US would be better off keeping Assad. It's already been pretty clearly demonstrated that folks don't like it when we back ruthless dictators. There might be greater stability concerns which caused us to back these people. Just look at Egypt. Huge mess after the guy we backed was kicked out. That doesn't mean the people living there will understand that, or accept it as an excuse even if they do.

That said, the reason we're not getting involved in Syria is because the Arab League told us to back off. So we did. Libya was different because they asked for our help there. The problem is, the help they asked for wasn't what we ended up providing. Illegal war and all that. Ground troops where none were authorized, etc. So they didn't want us tricking them again in Syria. Plus the public here in the US wouldn't tolerate another illegal war.

Google has alaredy started censoring sites as rapidshare (file sharing sites) and torrents will not be returned in your search results if you have active search turned on.

That's Googles prerogative. They're a private company and can do as they please with their search engine. Perhaps they've come to their senses and realize that serving up links to pirated content is going to get them into trouble some day. If I were a shareholder in the company I'd be screaming for them to do exactly what they're now doing so that the value of my stock doesn't disintegrate should the Feds come knocking.

Just because they aren't returning hits with active search on hardly proves that they've censored those hits.. just saying.