Stop Online Piracy Act - ACTA, SOPA and PIPA - Internet censorship

Hmm... tricky. Online piracy is a MASSIVE problem and I think something has to be done about it, but this might not be the best solution...

Jez
 
Not saying I'm going to roll over and accept it, but chances are its going to happen regardless of what we try and do. Even if we all scream loudly at the same time.
Bye bye freedoms and choice.
 
There are already addons for firefox that are being made to bypass these restrictions
 
To be honest if it's just torrent sites that enable people to gain access to illegally downloaded material via torrents and such I ain't to bothered. There are legitimate torrent sites out there and I presume they will run as normal.
Also this bill can only affect the US, so it still will not be illegal here in the UK. Unless similar rules are implemented here, but as it hasn't come up yet, I won't speculate.
 
It's the one area where the 1% hasn't got full control yet so no great surprise.
It is certainly the thin edge of the wedge. If it wasn't piracy they would find another excuse to censor and control the web whether it be child protection or terrorism. China has plenty of experience in the field so all the tools are there and once in place many people will not even notice it.

Just about the only place where you can search out truth behind the media corporation headlines will slowly dissappear before your very eyes.

It seems to me the music and movie business are still making big bucks and live music hasn't been so healthy for a long long time. Maybe Lady Gaga, Madonna and Bono are running out of islands to buy. :devil:
 
I assume you are talking about SOPA in the US.
It would mean the web hosts and ISPs would have to shut down sites, corrupt DNS entries etc. if a content holder alleged there was copyright material around.
There would be no proof needed, no judicial review and no oversight.
I would point out that US senators spend a third of their time whilst in office continuing to raise fund for their party. Hmm...
 
It's the internet, whatever is put in place will be circumvented.

Seriously, I wish the rest of the entertainment industry cottoned on to the idea that people will pay, if the price is right. Look at the success of Steam. As long as they insist on charging exorbitant prices for digital downloads, piracy will remain rife.
 
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SOPA: Who's in and who's out? -- Engadget
 
It's the one area where the 1% hasn't got full control yet so no great surprise.
It is certainly the thin edge of the wedge. If it wasn't piracy they would find another excuse to censor and control the web whether it be child protection or terrorism. China has plenty of experience in the field so all the tools are there and once in place many people will not even notice it.

Just about the only place where you can search out truth behind the media corporation headlines will slowly dissappear before your very eyes.

It seems to me the music and movie business are still making big bucks and live music hasn't been so healthy for a long long time. Maybe Lady Gaga, Madonna and Bono are running out of islands to buy. :devil:

This is ridiculously cynical and on the whole rather nonsensical.

I will ignore your speculative claims in paragraph 1 (for obvious reasons), but do you really believe paragraph 2? I think censoring websites which give access to illegal content (music, games and other such copyrighted material) is quite a different kettle of fish to the totalitarian internet censorship seen in North Korea and China.

And as for paragraph 3, well, I heard John Lewis did rather well over Christmas this year so I felt no guilt whatsoever in pinching a couple of TVs from their stock room! Seriously? What has the success of the music industry go to do with the definitively illegal activity of sharing and downloading pirated material? It doesn't make the problem any smaller at all.

Jez

PS I should also add, the claim that this proposed bill 'infringes upon our freedom of speech' is similarly ludicrous. If I stood in the middle of town shouting racist remarks to passers by, no doubt I would be in trouble with the police. Can I claim that I was simply exercising my right to free speech? No, because what I was doing is illegal. The same applies to the matter at hand.
 
Yes I've heard of it and people need to relax and take their tin foil hats off.
 
Yes I've heard of it and people need to relax and take their tin foil hats off.

My idea of this thread was not to 'start revolution', but to spread the word. Not everybody heard about this.

There are no 'tin foil hats', witches or anything else weird here.
 
anti-terror legislation/laws is a good example how such things get deliberately used and abused above and beyond their original intention.
 
i dont like the idea of censorship i should be able to view any site out there.
 
shoestring25 said:
i dont like the idea of censorship i should be able to view any site out there.

Try going to the UAE on holiday, after a nice day out in the sun, the only thing that brings you down is the Internet censorship, from lottery results to FaceTime, no chance...
 
This is ridiculously cynical and on the whole rather nonsensical.

I will ignore your speculative claims in paragraph 1 (for obvious reasons), but do you really believe paragraph 2? I think censoring websites which give access to illegal content (music, games and other such copyrighted material) is quite a different kettle of fish to the totalitarian internet censorship seen in North Korea and China.



And as for paragraph 3, well, I heard John Lewis did rather well over Christmas this year so I felt no guilt whatsoever in pinching a couple of TVs from their stock room! Seriously? What has the success of the music industry go to do with the definitively illegal activity of sharing and downloading pirated material? It doesn't make the problem any smaller at all.

Jez

PS I should also add, the claim that this proposed bill 'infringes upon our freedom of speech' is similarly ludicrous. If I stood in the middle of town shouting racist remarks to passers by, no doubt I would be in trouble with the police. Can I claim that I was simply exercising my right to free speech? No, because what I was doing is illegal. The same applies to the matter at hand.

If the ISPs are asked to control access to certain sites I see that as no different to the Post office refusing to deliver or send my letters to certain addresses and if the Governments started monitoring you to make sure you don't use certain sites then surely this is tantermount to the post office reading all my mail. (Still it would give GCHQ some more work) If there is a site that is acting illegally according to the government then surely the government can act and close it down. The burden sholud be on the government to prove the site or yourself are acting illegally.

and yes I do believe that if we are not vigilent the Government will introduce Internet censorship by sleath in very much the same way 9/11 has been used to stifle civil liberties around the world.

If I felt that the music industry hadn't been ripping me off most of my life I might have a few tears for them. They said TV, home taping and video recorders were all going to ruin their business. None of them ever did. I've got over 1200 CD's and a vinyl collection and still go to gigs. I feel I do my fair share in supporting new music and if they got there act together and stopped charging more in most cases for legal downloads that actually buying a CD (including postage) then that would go along way to getting rid of the problem.

BBC News - Sweden recognises new file-sharing religion Kopimism
 
This is a nice summary from my server people (Dreamhost)
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SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, is what happens when people who don't use the Internet attempt to regulate it.

It's a well-intentioned piece of legislation that has been written so poorly that, should the bill pass, nearly anything online could be considered 'piracy' in some form or another.

SOPA would place ANY website that houses any form of user-generated content at immediate risk of shutdown and would effectively stifle innovation among web entrepreneurs.

If someone posted a link to copyrighted material in, say, the comments of your WordPress blog about cats and their sweater choices, we would have to shut down your ENTIRE domain as soon as we received a complaint about it - whether that complaint was valid or not! There would be no pre-shutdown courtesy letter, no friendly 'please remove this from your site'. Just BOOM! The end. Obliterated. Everything gone.
 
If you don't like it, don't buy it. But why do you feel you should be able to get it for free just because some people have worked hard to get where they are. You obviously want to watch some things, and I assume you enjoy them... why are you not happy to pay a few quid for something you enjoy just because someone else has a lot of money? :confused:

The fine isn't there just so they can get richer, it's to set and example and make a point, to make people think before doing things...

As for the police, your local bobby isn't going to be looking for people downloading material illegally so your argument about the police have better things to do is pretty flawed.
 
SOPA/PIPA are awful bills. It's open to abuse. Most of the internet has been campaign for a while against it now - bit odd that I haven't seen anything on AVF before this.

When GoDaddy announced they supported it (they actually helped write SOPA and conveniently wrote a clause that exclude them from it). The internet (well Reddit) went ape-****. What followed next was crazy. A crap ton of popular sites (Wikipedia, Imgur, Icanhazcheesburger etc) moved their domains off GoDaddy in direct respone. I think in the end GoDaddy lost a ton of customers.

Jan 18th is going to be blackout day. A lot sites (Wikipedia included hopefully) will be blacked out completely in protest of SOPA/PIPA.
 
Wikipedia will voluntarily shut down for 24 hours this week in a protest against internet piracy laws in the United States, leaving tens of millions of users worldwide cut off from one the web's most popular sources of information. The English version the website will be inaccessible from 5AM GMT on Wednesday until 5AM GMT on Thursday (...)

(...)The legislation has been backed by an intensive lobbying campaign by major media owners, including Rupert Murdoch, and opposed by the giants of Silicon Valley, including Google and Facebook.

On Friday the White House said it would not approve key parts of the bills, however, effectively sending them back to the drawing board. A statement from President Obama’s internet advisors said the provisions for blocking foreign websites “pose a real risk to cybersecurity”.

"Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small," a White House spokesman said.

Mr Murdoch complained on Twitter that President Obama “has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters”.(...)

Wikipedia to shut down for 24 hours in piracy protest - Telegraph
 

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