BAD Internet Laws Heading Your Way

[mdlbear]

Originally posted by write_light at BAD Internet Laws Heading Your Way

From the flist: 



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Website Blocking

The government can order service providers to block websites for infringing links posted by any users.

Risk of Jail for Ordinary Users

It becomes a felony with a potential 5 year sentence to stream a copyrighted work that would cost more than $2,500 to license, even if you are a totally noncommercial user, e.g. singing a pop song on Facebook.

Chaos for the Internet

Thousands of sites that are legal under the DMCA would face new legal threats. People trying to keep the internet more secure wouldn't be able to rely on the integrity of the DNS system.

Read this analysis from boing-boing.net

Get on the phone and call your representative. Express your disapproval. Tell him or her exactly how you feel, and that you don't support this. Tell your friends to call their representatives, their Congressperson, and complain. Mention that you are a registered voter that takes your civic responsibility seriously and that you will use that vote to express your feelings about this.

http://www.rollcall.com/issues/57_60/Internet-Companies-Boost-Hill-Lobbying-210345-1.html?pos=olobh

“We support the bill’s stated goals — providing additional enforcement tools to combat foreign ‘rogue’ websites that are dedicated to copyright infringement or counterfeiting,” the Internet companies wrote in Tuesday’s letter. “Unfortunately, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities, private rights of action and technology mandates that would require monitoring of websites.”  The chamber-led coalition in support of the bill includes Walmart, Eli Lilly & Co. and Netflix.

Google and other opponents of the legislation argue that restricting the Internet in the U.S. sets a bad international precedent and that the language defines infringing too broadly.

Comments

[elf]

If this law passes, it will last approximately three days until someone gets a lawyer to send a C&D to Netflix's payment system. All it takes is one musician claiming that a soundtrack is infringing and Netflix fails to take measures to investigate that infringement before allowing movies to be downloaded to crash their whole industry.

That, or someone will go after Google for helping people find infringing material, and Google's response will be, "okay, we'll GO AWAY. Bring on your lawsuit... we'll wait."

Two days of internet-without-Google would get the whole law thrown out. Because while geeks & hackers can find other search engines, business execs can't.

[mdlbear]

I hope you're right. At this point I have zero confidence in the ability of our political system to self-correct.

[elf]

I have no faith in the political system. The business sector, however, is profit-driven, and this will slam holes in profit sources, because although Netflix etc believes that OF COURSE they are not infringing and therefore THEY ARE SAFE, they're not paying attention to the actual wording they're trying to get passed. They want to believe that "this law will only be used to go after BAD GUYS" and that the core argument is whether Megaupload's owners are "bad guys," not whether the law can be used to go after people & companies that are not infringing at all, except that some wacko *believes* there's infringement going on.

From what I can sort out, this law could shut down Amazon and Ebay just as fast as Twitter and Facebook. And while a lot of businesses consider Twitter & FB nuisances, they don't want Google, Amazon, Ebay, Barnes & Noble, and Wordpress to shut down because some person or group filed a claim that said they don't check all incoming content for infringement. I don't trust that politicians will be inspired to fix the law--but businesses will be inspired to push them to repealing it ASAP.

I pretty much figure any law that can be used to shut down Google is not going to be enacted. It might get passed--but it's not going to be enforced. Because if Google really is willing to put their weight against this, it can mean "law goes live: Google replaces all their pages with an an announcement that they'll be checking all links for infringement before allowing searches; please be patient while we read the internet."

[mdlbear]

This is encouraging: osewalrus: Citizen Pushback Against SOPA Is Working!

1% vs 99%

[idea-fairy.livejournal.com]

I haven't thought this through fully yet, but it feels to me like it ties into the whole "99% vs 1%" thing.

For example, making feature-length movies that look good on theater-size screens is pretty much inherently a "1%" type of undertaking.

And producing audio recordings on a commercial basis was inherently (due to such things as economies of scale in manufacturing) a "1%" thing in the days before tape cassettes, maybe even up until the writable CD came along.

The long tail of the distribution, the people who make a modest living from their music or supplement their day jobs or just do it for love, didn't have the kind of access to the market that they do now.

So could one aim of this legislation be to cut off that long tail?

Re: 1% vs 99%

[mdlbear]

In a sense. The publishing industries only make money on the top 1% of books, music, etc. But it's also because they're stuck in the world of atoms, where their product can be attached to something physical that can be controlled and isn't easy to copy.