[vox] Regarding: "Stop Online Piracy Act" that everybody screams about...

[timriley at appahost.com]

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [vox] Regarding: "Stop Online Piracy Act" that everybody
> screams about...
> From: Bill Broadley <bill at broadley.org>
> Date: Tue, November 22, 2011 10:42 pm
> To: vox at lists.lugod.org
> 
> 
> On 11/22/2011 08:41 PM, Mikies Runs Baal wrote:
> > Heya Bill,
> > 
> > Besides me, has anyone bothered to d/l and read the actual bill to find 
> > out IF and WHAT the hubris is actually about.
> 
> I've not read it, care to summarize?  I found this link but no idea how
> biased it is:
> http://mashable.com/2011/11/16/sopa-infographic/

Well, this viewpoint is definitely biased against the bill. It admits,
"An activist group organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF),
Creative Commons, Mozilla, Public Knowledge, the Free Software
Foundation
and others who oppose the bill, created the infographic."

I would even go to say it's propaganda. The first sentence is,
"A new bill will allow the US Government to block Americans from
visiting websites." Following, it lists 3 totalitarian countries
(including China) using blocking technology. Then it says it's
going to summarize the bill: "As with any bill, it’s complicated,
but this infographic boils it down." But still, you have to press
a link to get any idea of what the proponents are saying.

However, that link doesn't "boil it down" either. The best
proponent information is, "While they support the bill’s goals
of preventing rogue sites from distributing copyrighted
materials, ..." Well, that seems prudent -- copyright
laws go back to colonial times, and they should be
enforced. If a rogue site is giving away an art that
the artist should otherwise receive a royalty, then
the government should try to prevent this theft.

I tracked down the actual bill:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr3261ih/pdf/BILLS-112hr3261ih.pdf

The key sentence is:
"In GENERAL -- A service provider shall take technically feasible and
reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers
located within the United States to the foreign infringing site
(or portion thereof) that is subject to the order, including measures
designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site
(or portion thereof) from resolving to that domain name's Internet
Protocol address."

The term "foreign infringing site" is not defined. But it can
technically
only mean an Internet site in a foreign country that infringes upon
a U.S. copyright law.

So probably, the top-level domain servers (.com, .net, etc.) will have
to obey a government-produced DNS blacklist. Every IP address
on that blacklist is supposed to be located outside the U.S.,
and the owner(s) of that server are alleged to have hosted
copyrighted material without the copyright owner's permission.

Opinion: This will succeed at mitigating copyright infringement.
(Of course, I can already feel your gears churning with
workarounds.) And it doesn't seem to violate the U.S
constitution. Maybe the devil is in the details.

<snip>