(2011-11-02) Protectip And Sopa Bills

Stop SOPA!

The Protect Ip Act (short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011, also known as United States Senate Bill S.968) is a bill introduced on May 12, 2011 by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT)[1] and 11 original co-sponsors (later: 35 cosponsors!) aimed at disrupting the business model of "rogue" websites, especially those registered outside the U.S., which are "dedicated to infringing activities."[2] After having been passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Bill was placed on hold by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).[3] The legislation is a re-write of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) which failed to pass in 2010.[4] A similar and more recent House version of the bill, officially called the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) was proposed on October 26, 2011.

SOPA is HR-3261. Sponsor is Lamar Smith. Cosponsors: Howard Berman (CA), Marsha Blackburn (TN), Mary Bono Mac (CA), Steve Chabot (OH), JohnConyers (MI), Ted Deutch (FL), Elton Gallegly (CA), Bob Goodlatte (VA), Tim Griffin (AR), DennisRoss (FL), Adam Schiff (CA), Lee Terry (NE).

Both bills allow the Justice Department for the first time to obtain court orders demanding American ISP-s to stop rendering the DNS for a particular website — meaning the sites could still be accessible outside the United States. The House bill also allows the Justice Department to order search sites like Google to remove the allegedly infringing site from its search results... Furthermore, the newest proposal, (.pdf) introduced by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), grants the U.S. attorney general sweeping powers to block the distribution of workarounds that let users navigate to sites that have been blacklisted or had their domain name seized, such as the Mafiaa Fire plugin on the FireFox browser.

Dec29: ReddIt users, having been the focus of the Go Daddy Boycott, are now targeting Paul Ryan, supporting his opponent Rob Zerban in the next election.

• These kind of actions can be tricky, as the out-of-staters get seen as carpetbaggers.
• Zerban's opening line is I decided to run for Congress because Paul Ryan's plan to destroy Social Security and Medicare is the wrong path for our nation.

Dec31: Torrent Freak, using the You Have Downloaded.com tool, have matched up the IP addresses owned by the US House Of Representatives, and noticed that they're downloading plenty of material that's likely to be infringing. There are a lot of books, but also software like Microsoft Windows, and even some porn.

See SOPA page for ongoing details.