Judge "rejected all of the EFF's arguments" on P2P casesBy Nate Anderson | Last updated about 19 hours agoCan a law firm sue up to 5,000 accused P2P users from across the US at once, and in a single DC court? For now, at least, it can.In a 45-minute hearing yesterday before federal judge Rosemary Collyer of the Washington, DC District Court, lawyers from the ACLU, EFF, and Time Warner Cable squared off with Thomas Dunlap of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver, the firm behind the "US Copyright Group." US Copyright Group has spent the last year partnering with indie film producers like German video game auteur Uwe Boll and the producers of The Hurt Locker, offering to go after P2P downloaders of their films. Those who settle for $1,500-$2,500 can avoid a threatened court case that would seek $150,000 in damages.But the EFF and ACLU argued that it just wasn't proper to sue thousands of people this way, because the people have no real connection to one another (a question of "joinder"). They also complained about suing people from Hawaii in a DC court (an issue of "jurisdiction"). And Time Warner Cable objected that it couldn't possible process thousands of IP lookup requests in a timely manner (an issue of "burden").Judge Collyer was "very thoughtful about the issue" said EFF attorney Corynne McSherry when I spoke to her yesterday after the hearing. Collyer considered the concerns of everyone involved and eventually decided on a "creative solution," in McSherry's words: ISP subscribers will soon receive an additional notification letter agreed to by all parties. The letter will better explain their rights and the grounds on which they or their lawyers can object to the subpoena.McSherry admitted that there were "other things we would have preferred to happen"—EFF and ACLU had asked the joined cases to be "severed" and each one filed individually, while Time Warner wanted the whole subpoena limited to 28 requests a month or else be quashed altogether.While Collyer's order won't put an end to the subpoenas in process, it will call a halt to subscriber notifications in two of the main cases until all parties can agree on the notice text. Tom Dunlap tells Ars, "Until the court has approved the notice, in the two cases before Judge Collyer, the ISPs will not send notices to their subscribers." (The other cases are being heard before different judges in the same court.)And Dunlap argued that the ruling was a basic validation of his firm's P2P litigation. "I would note the court rejected all of the EFF's arguments, including the request to sever any defendant at this stage in the case," he told Ars.Those targeted by the lawsuits are still free to make their own arguments to the judge about issues like jurisdiction, but the litigation campaign is currently free to proceed.
Mediation in Thomas-Rasset case fails, RIAA hit with billBy Nate Anderson | Last updated about 6 hours agoMinnesota's top federal judge, Michael Davis, certainly seems like a man who just wants the (in)famous Jammie Thomas-Rasset peer-to-peer file-sharing case on his docket to just go away. And the recording industry, which has prosecuted Thomas-Rasset through one name change, two trials, and three years, appears to be under the distinct impression that it's getting picked on.Thomas-Rasset was the first P2P user in the US to take her copyright infringement case all the way to a federal trial, where she was found liable for $222,000 in damages. After the trial ended, Judge Davis tossed the verdict and granted Thomas-Rasset a new trial on the grounds that one of his jury instructions was flawed.That second trial again found Thomas-Rasset liable, and jurors upped the damages to a shocking $1.92 million for the 24 songs at issue in the case. This time, Davis ruled the amount "monstrous" and slashed it to $54,000. The RIAA could take that amount or it could choose a third trial, limited to the issue of damages.It chose a third trial. But instead of letting the case play out, Davis in June 2010 ordered the parties to meet with a Minneapolis arbiter to hash out their differences.This has all happened beforeThis would not necessarily be unusual—federal judges demand settlement talks all the time—except for the fact that Davis had already tried the same tactic several times. Both sides had failed to settle before going to trial. In the run-up to the first trial in 2007, Davis ordered them to try again, though he later rescinded that order.Before the second trial, Davis demanded another settlement conference; after a half day of mediated talks in 2009, this broke down.After the second trial, the parties again talked voluntarily and could reach no agreement. According to a both sides, they were "stymied by their substantially divergent views on the law and on this case."So when Davis ordered both sides into mediation again last month, lawyers on both sides must have practiced their eye-rolling skills. What was the point? But Davis also noted something specific and unusual in his June 18 order: the arbiter would be paid $400 per hour, and "the fees incurred for the settlement proceedings shall be paid by Plaintiff." That is, by the recording labels.Um, remember us? We won. Twice.Predictably, the talks broke down. In a joint motion filed with the court Monday, both sides agree that nothing will be gained by proceeding further with the mediation, and both were irritated at having to go through the process. "The appointment of the Special Master for settlement purposes can only be done with the consent of the parties and after the parties have been provided notice and an opportunity to be heard," they tell the judge. "In this instance, the parties neither consented nor were provided an opportunity to be heard."But the recording industry was even more upset by the issue of payment. The Plaintiffs, on their own, also object to that portion of the June 18, 2010 Order that obligates them to pay the Special Master’s fees. Plaintiffs brought this case alleging that they were the victims of Defendant’s copyright infringement. Twice, Plaintiffs have obtained verdicts by juries that Defendant willfully infringed their rights. Twice, the Court has set aside those verdicts and the case is now set for a retrial on the question of damages alone. The Defendant is an adjudged, willful infringer of Plaintiffs’ copyrights and, while Plaintiffs strongly subscribe to the Court’s desire to settle this case, Plaintiffs believe that the financial burdens associated with the appointment of a Special Master for purposes of pursuing a Special Master should not be placed upon them. The perception that Plaintiffs have greater resources to shoulder those financial burdens should not automatically dictate that they should bear those costs, especially given that they are the prevailing parties. Indeed, pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 505, Plaintiffs have the right to obtain costs from Defendant, including any costs associated with a Special Master. As such, Plaintiffs do not believe that they should bear the burden of compensating a Special Master.Judge Davis certainly isn't on Thomas-Rasset's "side" here; indeed, when slashing the second trial award, he trashed Thomas-Rasset for the moment when she "lied on the witness stand by denying responsibility for her infringing acts and, instead, blamed others, including her children, for her actions."But he certainly doesn't intend to let a huge damage award escape his courtroom. When reducing the $1.92 million award to $54,000, Davis arrived at this amount by awarding triple the $750 minimum for statutory damages. This amount is still "significant and harsh," he noted, but it's a "higher award than the Court might have chosen to impose in its sole discretion."After multiple settlement talks, two trials, and two judicial decisions to set the verdicts aside, Judge Davis still hasn't rid himself of the troublesome case. Come October 4, 2010, Jammie Thomas-Rasset and the RIAA lawyers will again appear in his 15th floor Minneapolis courtroom for a third trial on damages.
P2P plaintiffs to get just 28 Time Warner IPs each monthBy Nate Anderson | Last updated about 3 hours agoSuing tens of thousands of accused peer-to-peer movie file-swappers—it can be a lucrative business model, but it works well only when Internet service providers can turn huge lists of IP addresses into real names and addresses in a timely fashion. But what if a major ISP like Time Warner Cable only had to do 28 of these lookups a month? And might take three years to burn through its entire list?Time Warner Cable has pleaded with the federal judge overseeing several of the P2P cases brought this year by the US Copyright Group. The company averages 567 IP lookup requests per month, nearly all of them coming from law enforcement. These lookup requests involve everything from suicide threats to child abduction to terrorist activity, and the company says that such cases take "immediate priority." It says that, without a major staffing increase, it simply cannot turn around more than 1,000 requests in a timely fashion without compromising the much more important requests from law enforcement.TWC requested that the judge limit subpoena lookups for the US Copyright Group to 28 per month. In response, lawyer Tom Dunlap blasted TWC as a "good ISP for copyright infringers." He went on to threaten the company, saying, "To the extent TWC’s tactics are just that—letting the public know that TWC is a good ISP for copyright infringers because TWC will fight any subpoenas related to infringers’ activities—TWC exposes itself to a claim for contributory copyright infringement."Judge Rosemary Collyer, who is overseeing the Far Cry and The Steam Experiment cases, doesn't agree. In a recent ruling, she has modified TWC's subpoenas so that the company "shall provide identifying information for a minimum of 28 IP addresses per month." And that's not 28 per month, per case; it's 28 per month total for both cases combined.How long will it take to get through all these subpoenas? Several months ago, TWC faced 809 lookup requests related to the Far Cry case alone. Since that time, the plaintiffs have added several thousand more IP addresses to the case, and more requests have come from the Steam Experiment case.Assuming a lowball estimate of 1,000 IP addresses that belong to TWC, the company may take nearly three years to do all of its lookups.Collyer's ruling doesn't affect the other P2P cases brought by US Copyright Group that are being heard by other judges, and it doesn't affect other ISPs (TWC was the only one to object so strongly). But it does suggest that federal judges are sympathetic to the argument that law firms can't simply dump thousands upon thousands of IP addresses on ISPs and demand quick responses.In addition, Judge Collyer refused to "sever" the thousands of defendants in each case, as requested by the EFF and ACLU. "But they may be severed in the future," she wrote.
RIAA lobbyist becomes federal judge, rules on file-sharing casesBy Nate Anderson | Last updated a day ago Last week, Washington, DC federal judge Beryl Howell ruled on three mass file-sharing lawsuits. Judges in Texas, West Virginia, and Illinois had all ruled recently that such lawsuits were defective in various ways, but Howell gave her cases the green light; attorneys could use the federal courts to sue thousands of people at once and then issue mass subpoenas to Internet providers. Yes, issues of "joinder" and "jurisdiction" would no doubt arise later, but the initial mass unmasking of alleged file-swappers was legitimate.Howell isn't the only judge to believe this, but her important ruling is especially interesting because of Howell's previous work: lobbying for the recording industry during the time period when the RIAA was engaged in its own campaign of mass lawsuits against individuals.The news, first reported in a piece at TorrentFreak, nicely illustrates the revolving door between government and industry. And it reminds us just how complicated questions of influence can be.The door keeps revolving Howell has had a long career in law enforcement. She was an assistant US attorney in New York during the early 1990s and oversaw "numerous wiretap investigations and conducted lengthy grand jury investigations, including cases against the leadership of the Chinatown Flying Dragons gang, extortion cases resulting in the convictions of twenty-nine New York City building inspectors, and a money laundering case resulting in the seizure of $19 million in cash narcotics proceeds," according to her bio.Beryl HowellShe then moved to the Senate, where she served as general counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee under Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who has close ties to the copyright industries (Leahy is one of the big backers of the COICA Web censorship law that he guarantees will be passed later this year.) There, Howell helped to write CALEA (the law extending wiretap powers to the Internet) along with the No Electronic Theft Act (providing tougher penalties for online copyright crimes), the DMCA (making it illegal to break or bypass DRM, even if you want to rip a movie from a DVD you own to your iPod), and the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Deterrence Act.She then moved into private life at Stroz Friedberg, where she began lobbying for the RIAA, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Between 2004-2009, Howell was the only listed lobbyist at the firm; the RIAA was her exclusive lobbying client for most of that time. A lobbyist disclosure form describes her as working on "legislation concerning copyright laws as applied to digital music"—which she would be well-placed to do, having previously helped to write such laws.
After botched child porn raid, judge sees the light on IP addressesBy Nate Anderson | Last updated about an hour agoSeveral recent government raids on computer users suspected of sharing child porn online hit the wrong targets. Instead of getting the perpetrators, some of the raids nabbed a neighbor with an open WiFi network instead. One obvious takeaway: letting total strangers use your Internet connection for any purpose comes with some risk. But there's another lesson: IP addresses simply don't identify the people behind the computers.One federal judge in Illinois has already taken the lesson to heart and applied it to the P2P file-sharing case before him. John Steele, the main lawyer in Illinois who has brought such cases, recently came up before judge Harold Baker and tried his standard tactic: requesting expedited discovery so that he could turn his list of allegedly infringing IP addresses into names. (Steele has also attempted to lodge the case as a "reverse class action" in which unknown copyright infringers of a pornographic film are named as a "class" to avoid problems of jurisdiction.)Judge Baker was having none of it, rejecting Steele's request on two occasions. Steele then sought leave to take the matter to an appeals court; Baker last week rebuffed him once more (PDF), saying it was totally improper to do expedited discovery against anonymous individuals with no representation of their own before the court."Could expedited discovery be used to wrest quick settlement, even from people who have done nothing wrong?" asked Baker. "The embarrassment of public exposure might be too great, the legal system too daunting and expensive, for some to ask whether [plaintiff porn company] VPR has competent evidence to prove its case."Baker then went on to cite a recent mistaken child porn raid, where an IP address was turned into a name—but the named person hadn't committed the crime. "The list of IP addresses attached to VPR's complaint suggests, in at least some instances, a similar disconnect between IP subscriber and copyright infringer… The infringer might be the subscriber, someone in the subscriber's household, a visitor with her laptop, a neighbor, or someone parked on the street at any given moment."Steele's request was denied until he can name at least one specific person in the case over whom the court has personal jurisdiction—though it's not clear he can do this at all without going to the ISPs for help. But the judge doesn't care about Steele's problems."The imprimatur of this court will not be used to advance a 'fishing expedition by means of a perversion of the purpose and intent' of class actions," Judge Baker concluded.
Phenomenon"By Nate Anderson | Last updated: about 20 hours agoAlki DavidAlki David, the wealthy film producer and entrepreneur behind sites like FilmOn, announced last year in a YouTube video that he intended to sue CNET and its owner, CBS, for providing hundreds of millions of downloads of LimeWire P2P software over the last decade. Today, he made good on his threat, rounding up some rap and R&B musicians to join his case.The plaintiffs argue that CNET had "direct participation in massive copyright infringement on peer-to-peer systems, such as LimeWire, that are used to copy and distribute songs, films and other artistic works," and that CNET's Download.com was the "main distributor" of the software. P2P software isn't illegal, though companies that use it to induce or encourage copyright infringement can be held liable. The principle, most famously articulated by the US Supreme Court in the Grokster shutdown, was extended to LimeWire last year when a federal judge shut down most of the company's activity."CNET provided the guns"The plaintiffs contend that CNET encouraged people to use LimeWire to violate copyright. One of the plaintiffs, Mike Mozart, has spent the last year collecting alleged examples of this; it's an odd mix of material that spans a decade and multiple sites from ZDNET to CNET. He complains, for instance, that in 2007 CNET editors printed a "spyware horror story" from a woman who had downloaded a cracked copy of Dreamweaver using P2P software. The woman ends her note by explaining that she has now turned to legal software, and the editorial response says, "We're glad you've gone legit, Emily. Many freeware alternatives are available to satisfy the software sweet tooth, and they are almost all a safer bet than poached serial codes and keygens." Other comments, especially those from a decade ago, more clearly imply that the P2P software being recommended is used largely to share copyrighted music.Alki David in a 2010 video rant against CBS and CNET"ANY Criticism of my research by CNET must answer this following question: Did CNET earn ANY income from any of these sales of P2P File Sharing Software Downloads?" asks Mozart, who has an affinity for capital letters and exclamation points that might well need treatment. "My Conclusion? The Internet Piracy Phenomenon was fueled in large part, by the distribution of the P2P software by CNET."He continues:Would gun sellers enjoy "Freedom of Press" protections if they offered catalogs demonstrating the ease of use of the Handguns being Sold for engaging in criminal activities such as robbing stores or banks. Then offering Solutions to specifically cover up your crime.CNET provided the "Guns", the P2P Software, and the encouragement to commit "Robbery", here, the online file sharing of known copyrighted works.As for Alki David, he's just as agitated. Last year, when he announced his CBSYouSuck campaign, he said that the "duplicity of CBS beggars belief." CBS, as a major media company, "finds itself publicly exposed as an irresponsible hypocrite, that has ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the creative community and created copyright infringement damages into the trillions of dollars."Today, David announced that he would seek more artists for his lawsuit, pledging that "it will become the most significant copyright infringement lawsuit in history."The entire case is bizarre mishmash of conflicting loyalties. David, for instance, is outraged at the rampant copyright infringement over P2P software—even as he started FilmOn, which rebroadcast over-the-air TV signals on the Internet and was shut down by a federal judge's injunction. And CBS, the alleged home of P2P piracy, is one of the world's great media companies, producing TV shows, books, and more.As for LimeWire, a judge ordered its website shut down last year and the company will soon face a trial on damages for copyright infringement. LimeWire is also a defendant in the case along with CBS/CNET.LimeWire is no longer available from Download.com, and an editor's note says, "Using P2P and file-sharing software to distribute copyrighted material without authorization is illegal in the United States and many other countries. CBS Interactive does not encourage or condone the illegal duplication or distribution of copyrighted content."
Republicans, Democrats, Google, and Church of Sweden unite to halt HollywoodBy Matthew Lasar | Published about 12 hours agoRepublicans, Democrats, Google, and Church of Sweden unite to halt HollywoodAs the House Judiciary Committee prepares to launch hearings on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) tomorrow, a bi-partisan coalition of activists, advocates, and politicians warn that the proposed law will harm innovators, censor Americans, and disrupt the Internet. They held a press conference on Tuesday with two West Coast members of the House. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) charged that SOPA threatens the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, putting a wide variety of websites and platforms at risk of being strategically hobbled by well-funded rightsholders."A basic tenet is that the platforms and the pipes don't have responsibility for the content that others put in them," explained Lofgren. "Once there's a notice of a problem, then you have an obligation to act. That important principle would be put at risk if this bill were adopted. The implications for our economy would be dire."11/15/11 SOPA Press Conference: Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)SOPA is ostensibly designed to squelch pirate content sites by allowing the US Attorney General to get a court order forcing ISPs to block access, and by denying sites financial services like credit card or Paypal access. But critics charge that it is full of vague language, defining an infringing venue as "dedicated to theft of US property" if "it is taking, or has taken, deliberate actions to avoid confirming a high probability of the use of the US-directed site to carry out acts that constitute a violation" of US copyright laws. The bill could thus allow rightsholders to end run the DMCA's notice and takedown procedures—harming legitimate search engines and sharing sites alike.Ed Black of the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) followed Lofgren. "One of the key elements of the industry that has allowed it to flourish is that it is the messenger," Black explained. "We believe in the concept of 'don't kill the messenger.'"The financial life bloodA slew of advocacy groups also spelled the threat out to Judiciary Committee top brass Lamar Smith (R-TX) and John Conyers (D-MI) in a letter. SOPA creates a "private right of action of breathtaking scope," their statement warns: Any rightsholder could cut off the financial lifeblood of services such as search engines, user-generated content platforms, social media, and cloud-based storage unless those services actively monitor and police user activity to the rightsholder's satisfaction. A mere accusation by any rightsholder would be sufficient to require payment systems and ad networks to terminate doing business with the service; the accused service's only recourse would be to send a counter-notice, at which point it would be at the networks' discretion whether to reinstate the service's access to payments and advertising. This would bypass and effectively overturn the basic framework of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), by pushing user-driven sites like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to implement ever-more elaborate monitoring systems to 'confirm,' to the satisfaction of the most aggressive and litigious rightsholder, whether individual users are exchanging infringing content.Signed—groups who often disagree with each other, among them TechFreedom, Public Knowledge, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Demand Progress, and the Center for Democracy and Technology.Meanwhile, the Brookings Institution has published a position paper that carefully spells out what technology experts have been saying for months, that the DNS filtering/redirecting provisions in both the Senate's IP PROTECT Act and SOPA are the wrong way to defend copyrights.They'll make the 'Net less secure, the study warns, as sites deploy rogue DNS servers to evade SOPA and as consumers get in on the act themselves. "It is easy to imagine a teenager altering the family PC to access a foreign infringing domain, but leaving the computer compromised for the family's other uses, including banking, accessing government websites and even work," the Brookings paper observes.One of the few bright spotsHow big is the opposition to SOPA and IP Protect? Just count the number of signers to statements released on Monday. A petition by technology companies to the House Judiciary Committee includes Facebook, eBay, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Google. A letter from human rights groups includes international groups from India's Center for Internet and Society to the Church of Sweden. The three major US consumer groups have sent in an opposition statement.So have have eleven members of the House, among them Mike Doyle (D-PA), Ron Paul (R-TX), and Lloyd Doggett (D-TX)."At a time of continued economic uncertainty, this legislation will result in fewer new businesses, fewer new investments, and fewer new jobs," they contend. SOPA would "cause serious and long term damage to the technology industry, one of the few bright spots in our economy."Wednesday's Judiciary hearing will include representatives from the Motion Picture Association of America, MasterCard, Google, and the US Copyright Office. Stay tuned for our coverage.
looks like the industry heavy weights have that issue well in hand.not worried but +1 for the heads up.
Internet community locked out of SOPA hearingsInternet censorship hearings closed to open advocatesBy Dave NealThu Nov 17 2011, 09:58THE WIDER INTERNET community is unable to participate in testimony to Congress about American plans to thwart 'piracy', according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups.Hearings being held in the US about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, could result in a law that brings down a curtain on local internet services. Unfortunately the hearings, which include discussions of whether it is fair and right to ban people and web sites from the internet, are something of a closed shop, according to watchers.Although the House Judiciary Committee streamed the proceedings, that was of poor quality and the hearings shut out everyone in opposition to the proposals, according to the EFF."Unfortunately, we were confronted with an incredibly poor webcast stream for much of the hearing," said the EFF in a statement. "We find it ironic and deeply concerning that Congress is unable to successfully stream video of an event this important to all Internet users, even as they are debating a dangerous plan to change the Internet in fundamental ways and deputize Internet intermediaries to act like content police."This message was mirrored elsewhere and Loz Kaye, head of the UK Pirate Party also expressed his frustrations at the event. "Frankly @mpaa, you can't even make decent movies any more, let alone write policy. #SOPA #Newzbin," he tweeted as the hearing started.Mozilla has added its weight to the campaign, and like other web sites gave its front page over to the campaign. "Protect the Internet," said a splash page on its web site, "Help us stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation". Mozilla has also sent Congressional leaders a joint letter, together with AOL, Ebay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo! and Zynga, in opposition to the bill.Avaaz, a global civil and civic rights organisation, claims that over 200,000 people have signed its petition to stop the bill, while the EFF has revealed that Tumblr is generating 3.6 calls per second to Congress in opposition. µ
At Web censorship hearing, Congress guns for "pro-pirate" GoogleBy Nate Anderson | Published about 22 hours agoAt Web censorship hearing, Congress guns for "pro-pirate" GoogleGoogle policy counsel Katherine Oyama testifying before the House Judiciary CommitteeThe House Judiciary Committee today held an important hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act with a hugely stacked deck of witnesses—Google's lawyer was the only one of the six to object to the bill in a meaningful way. And it wasn't hard to see why. This wasn't a hearing designed to elicit complex thoughts about complex issues of free speech, censorship, and online piracy; despite the objections of the ACLU, dozens of foreign civil rights groups, tech giants like Google and eBay, the Consumer Electronics Association, China scholar Rebecca MacKinnon, hundreds of law professors and lawyers, the hearing was designed to shove the legislation forward and to brand companies who object as siding with "the pirates."How low was the level of debate? The hearing actually descended to statements like "the First Amendment does not protect stealing goods off trucks" (courtesy of the AFL-CIO's Paul Almeida).Right from the start, the knives were out for Google. Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) made it only halfway through his opening statement before asserting that "one of the companies represented here today has sought to obstruct the Committee’s consideration of bipartisan legislation. Perhaps this should come as no surprise given that Google just settled a federal criminal investigation into the company’s active promotion of rogue websites that pushed illegal prescription and counterfeit drugs on American consumers."SOPA would require search engines, payment processors, ISPs, and ad networks to block access to "rogue websites" on a judge's order. While critics have raised serious concerns about how this could affect the Internet's domain name system, affect free speech, and sweep in a host of legal sites, the bill's backers suggested that it was really just about money. Google didn't want to stop piracy because it made so much money from it."Given Google’s record, their objection to authorizing a court to order a search engine to not steer consumers to foreign rogue sites is more easily understood," Smith said. (Much later in the hearing, a fired-up Zoe Lofgren [D-CA] said that "impugning the motives of the critics rather than engaging in the substance is a mistake" and that she was troubled by the panel's makeup.)As for the panelists, most portrayed SOPA as eminently reasonable. And hey, if SOPA breaks something as important as the move to the more secure DNSSEC protocol, no problem—we can just rewrite the protocol."This argument [that SOPA will harm DNSSEC deployment] conveniently ignores not only the history of the creation of DNSSEC but also the very nature of Internet protocols, which is simply this: when new developments or circumstances require changes to these codes, the codes change," said MPAA's Michael O'Leary. Putting Hollywood in charge of setting Internet protocol standards: what could possibly go wrong?It was up to Google alone to make the argument that SOPA's definition of "rogue sites" is poor, that its remedies are extreme, and that plenty of legitimate sites could be targeted. One has only to think of YouTube, which even without SOPA is being sued by Viacom for $1 billion and would certainly have been hammered years ago under SOPA's crazy language (sites can be dismantled under SOPA if they take "deliberate actions to avoid confirming a high probability of the use of the US-directed site to carry out acts" of infringement. What does that even mean? And how does it fit with existing robust safe harbors for user-uploaded content sites?)O'Leary of the MPAA smirkingly took on his (largely absent) opponents by saying that SOPA critics were engaged in hypocritical hyperbole and were pro-piracy—as though the long history of the US content industries had just disappeared down the memory hole (Jack Valenti, anyone? The VCR as Boston Strangler? The reason "Hollywood" is in California at all? Rampant 18th and 19th century book piracy? Attacks on HDTV? Attacks on the DVR? Attacks on MP3 players?)Not every penalty fits every crimeGroups that weren't invited to speak at the hearing vented afterwards. "This lack of speaking and listening has been a continued frustration and led to such a flawed bill," said CCIA chairman Ed Black. "I’d liken it to killing mosquitoes with an uzi, but at least the uzi hits its target. This bill will fail to actually stop traffic to infringing sites and will Balkanize Internet traffic, sending the real pirates to foreign DNS servers that can’t easily be monitored."The Consumer Electronics Association, which was apparently denied a chance to participate in the hearing, also pulled no punches. "The bill attempts a radical restructuring of the laws governing the Internet," said CEO Gary Shapiro. "It would undo the legal safe harbors that have allowed a world-leading Internet industry to flourish over the last decade. It would expose legitimate American businesses and innovators to broad and open-ended liability. The result will be more lawsuits, decreased venture capital investment, and fewer new jobs. The significant potential harms of this bill are reflected by the extraordinary coalition arrayed against it. Concerns about SOPA have been raised by Tea Partiers, progressives, computer scientists, human rights advocates, venture capitalists, law professors, independent musicians, and many more. Unfortunately, these voices were not heard at today's hearing."Over in the Senate, people like Ron Wyden (D-OR) watched the "not entirely fair and balanced" hearing with horror. Wyden, who helped author the key Internet safe harbors that have keep sites like Google, Yahoo, and eBay from being sued out of oblivion for the actions of others, submitted a statement of his own. "We took the opportunity to pass a law that said that neutral parties on the net are not liable for the actions of bad actors," he wrote. "So now, as we again debate Web censorship, let's ask ourselves: what next generation of innovations won't be realized if we backtrack on that principal now? Yes, the Internet needs reasonable laws and bad actors need to be pursued, but the freedoms of billions of individual Internet users should not be sacrificed in the interest of easing that pursuit."Perhaps the irony in all this is that Hollywood itself emerged from a world of piratical behavior to become a dominant American industry—but draconian IP enforcement could have stagnated the industry for decades. In the same way, today's piracy problems can certainly be dealt with in a much more measured fashion; protecting Hollywood now simply can't be worth killing off the next YouTube. As for the truly bad actors, even Google supports measures to go after their sources of revenue with a court order.
Holy shit.....that would be VERY gay. And to think I've been seeing this thread here all the time and just ignoring it had it not been for Win's post in the shoutbox.
