[vox] Take action now against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act)

[timriley at appahost.com]

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [vox] Take action now against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act)
> From: <timriley at appahost.com>
> Date: Fri, December 02, 2011 5:14 pm
> To: "LUGOD's general discussion mailing list" <vox at lists.lugod.org>
> 
> 
> > -------- Original Message --------
> > Subject: [vox] Take action now against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act)
> > From: Brian Lavender <brian at brie.com>
> > Date: Tue, November 29, 2011 7:03 pm
> > To: LUGOD's general discussion mailing list <vox at lists.lugod.org>
> > 
> > 
> > Don't trust SOPA. Take action now
> > https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/11/protect-ip-act-very-real-very-bad-call-now-block-it
> 
> The ACLU doesn't consider SOPA so very really very bad,
> like the above EFF blogger feels. They just found a poison
> pill. Here is their letter to Congress:
> https://www.eff.org/document/aclu-letter-sopa
> 
> The union agrees with the bill's intention to "reduce the
> infringement of copyrighted material online." However,
> they say the bill casts a too-wide of a dragnet because it
> doesn't only include sites dedicated to piracy.
> Instead, it includes sites with only a trivial infringement.
> 
> They say, "By eliminating the concept of sites 'dedicated to infringing
> activity', SOPA enables law enforcement to target all sites that
> contain some infringing content -- no matter how trivial -- and
> those who 'facilitate' infringing content."

I found the poison pill: An Internet site is infringing even if
it just contains a hypertext link to a site that is actually
storing the copyrighted material. The bill says:
"(16) Internet Site.-- The term "Internet site" means the collection
of digital assets, including links, ..."

The bill needs to be modified to define a foreign infringing Internet
site as the site whose hard drive (permanent storage) actually
stores the copyrighted material, not an Internet site with
a hypertext link to the infringing site.

There's a new version of the bill:
http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/HR%203261%20Managers%20Amendment.pdf

It no longer requires the top-level domain name servers to obey a
blacklist. Instead, it requires the non-authoritative domain name
servers 
to obey a blacklist. What?!

The bill says:
"(ii) Safe Harbor.--The measures determined by a service provider to be
the
least burdensome, technically feasible, and reasonable means designed to
prevent a nonauthoritative domain name system server under the direct
control of the service provider from resolving the domain name of the
foreign infringing site to that domain name's Internet Protocol
address shall fully satisfy such service provider's obligation described
in clause (i)."

They're missing the point. Demoting the blacklist responsibility from
top-level DNS servers (of which there's just a handful) to
non-authoritative DNS servers (of which there's probably millions)
is ludicrous.

I believe forcing Verisign (the main top-level DNS server
company) to obey a Justice Dept. (and Court approved) blacklist
of infringing foreign Internet sites -- foreign sites dedicated
to storing copyrighted materials without permission -- will mitigate
intellectual property theft. But SOPA is not that simple.

<snip>