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Showing posts tagged SOPA
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SOPA: Stop Grandstanding, Start Crafting An Alternative - Security - Government and vertical industry security - Informationweek
I’m not here to defend SOPA or PIPA. If, as their critics maintain, the bills effectively give ISPs, search engines, and payment services carte blanche to cut off foreign websites that U.S. movie, music, and other content creators merely claim are profiting from their stolen goods, then the legislation is an abomination.
But due process still exists in this country, so I have trouble believing that the courts will sit on their hands while a fundamental constitutional principle is violated. “Fair use” of copyrighted and trademarked material also still exists, so I have trouble believing that YouTube execs who let a 14-year-old post a video of herself singing “Sexy And I Know It” will get taken away in shackles. Still, if the SOPA and PIPA language is so broad as to invite such flagrant abuses, then the bills’ authors need to go back to square one.
….it’s up to the Internet industry stalwarts opposing SOPA/PIPA to rally support for a meaningful, 21st century alternative to stopping online content piracy. Most of them pay lip service to the notion that such piracy is a serious problem. It’s time for them to stop grandstanding—stop stomping their feet and holding their breath—and start showing the 20th century studios and record labels and media companies and their clueless lobbyists and Congressional supporters a much more effective way to address this issue.
To its credit Google, whose YouTube is a dumping ground for pirated material, is behind an alternative bill—The Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade, or OPEN, Act—and is seeking industry comment and collaboration. That collaboration must include movie, music, and media companies.
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“Over the last two months, the intense popular effort to stop SOPA and PIPA has defeated an effort that once looked unstoppable but lacked a fundamental understanding of how Internet technologies work,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), who has introduced narrower legislation favored by the Internet industry. (via SOPA sent back to the drawing board in wake of Internet protests - latimes.com)
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Forget SOPA, Europe is about to ratify its bigger brother ACTA - New Media - New Media | siliconrepublic.com - Ireland's Technology News Service
Just as the SOPA and PIPA debate winds down in the US, the European Union is later this week set to work on ratifying a global intellectual property enforcement treat: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
European countries, including Ireland, will later this week join the US, Australia, Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emerates and Canada in supporting ACTA.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), ostensibly the agreement deals primarily with counterfeit physical goods such as medicine.
However, it will in actual fact have broader scope an in particular will deal with new tools targeting “internet distribution and information technology.”
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One of the reasons ACTA is arousing suspicion and concern is so little is actually known about it.
According to the EFF it contains several features that raise concerns for consumers’ privacy and civil liberties, as well as legitimate commerce, innovation and the free flow of information.
ACTA, it argues, also limits developing countries’ ability to choose policy options that best suit their domestic priorities and levels of economic development.
Why is ACTA so mysterious?
The EFF said: “ACTA is being negotiated by a select group of industrialised countries outside of existing international multilateral venues for creating new IP norms such as the World Intellectual Property Organisation and the World Trade Organisation.“Both civil society and developing countries are intentionally being excluded from these negotiations. While the existing international fora provide (at least to some extent) room for a range of views to be heard and addressed no such checks and balances will influence the outcome of the ACTA negotiations,” the EFF warns.
Few countries that are about to ratify the agreement, including Ireland, have provided information to the public about the ACTA negotiations.
A document seen by the EFF, a sort of discussion paper, reveals that rightsholders are asking for new legal regimes to “encourage ISPs to cooperate with rights holders in the removal of infringing material.” In Ireland the Government is within days about to pass a statutory instrument that may give rights holders such as music labels and movie studios the right to seek injunctions against ISPs concerning illegal downloading on their networks.
The EFF says that rights holder groups that support the creation of ACTA have also called for mandatory network-level filtering by ISPs and three strikes-style graduated response practices.
The EFF warns that the kind of filtering methods that ACTA may usher in may include deep packet inspection of citizens’ internet communications, raising considerable concerns for civil liberties, privacy rights and internet innovation.
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