SOPA
A new thread has started over at emusic about this - see SOPA. I admit this is something I had never heard of until a few hours ago. I expressed a view that it is probably alarmist, which has now been contradicted. There are a few legal brains here - how likely is it to happen, what impact could it have on eg emusic or itunes, or even emusers or musicisgood? Will it indirectly have an impact upon those of us living with the European Union?
Comments
Certainly emusers, musicisgood (or any other blog or website) would be vulnerable. All that needs to happen is a charge of infringement to take down the whole site.
I don't really know about the overseas question. I imagine they'd love to be able to make EU-based "Sharing" sites like Rapidshare disappear, but unclear to me whether they'll be able to do that.
If someone wants to go to the effort of a take down notice with MiG (yet bypassing youtube for some inexplicable reason) more power to 'em.
Craig
The other thing is that the current law, which is actually part of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), has been very broadly interpreted by the courts, and those interpretations might not withstand much high-level scrutiny. To be specific, that law currently protects "service providers" from liability in most cases in which their customers are found to have used online services provided by them to break other laws. The CDA itself was meant primarily to discourage ISPs from making it difficult for end-users (i.e., parents of young children) to use website-filtering software on their PCs to prevent their kids from looking at online porn or being targeted by online pedophiles...
But since that's really the only legislation ever passed in the US that even attempts to define what an online service provider is, the courts have been using that definition for everything, and what's more, they've allowed publishers of individual websites to call themselves "service providers" in order to immunize themselves from liability over anything posted by their "users." The term "users" includes forum posters, blog commenters, subscribers, wiki editors, you name it - it only includes the site operator if the site operator also substantially participates in "content creation."
So in our case, if someone complains about a MiG post and the CDA takes priority, Dr. Mutex could simply claim that he didn't infringe, the poster did, and he'd be fine, and so would MiG. But if SOPA takes priority, then it doesn't matter who did the infringing - the site could be taken down almost immediately, and there'd be almost no chance of putting it back up without getting lawyers involved, even if the original complainers changed their minds about it.
Like I was saying on the eMu thread, this is really a recipe for legalized extortion more than anything else. People who really want to infringe on other peoples' copyrights will just go offshore; they probably won't even be slowed down. But US-based website operators and ISPs could very easily be driven out of business by the sort of behavior that, in the past, has normally been associated with organized-crime syndicates. Apparently that's what the Republicans want, so I'm afraid that as usual, our best hope is that people will wake up and vote them all out of office later this year.
Good luck to us all.
This is why I don't think the average Joe like me needs to worry too much about SOPA. When you make an enemy of Google, Facebook, et al. you're in trouble.
Craig
(Tired person in the audience, no particular fan of said politician)"What's he peddling this time?"
This could be MST. "Oh, backpedaling."
Gotta lead the weak minds more firmly, Craig.
Apparently there's some sort of matching software, so that if, say, you were to upload a song to the site with a generic photo attached because you wanted the option to stream it somewhere. Well, it comes back with a message that says the audio (or video, I suppose) matches something in their database. But they're not calling you a copyright violator or anything, because it may be an error or you may have permission or some other situation may exist that you haven't done anything wrong.
So what does that mean? Well, they tell you.
Your video can still be viewed like any other, but now, since it did hit that "matching" criteria, now advertisements may appear over your video. I know you've seen them, your basic horizontal row of Google-commerce residual ads. They now will show on your flagged video.
I don't know if this money is then sent to the suspected copyright holder or if youtube (who's owned by google) just holds onto it for a rainy day lawsuit, but there you go.
Of course, if all you're doing is embedding that video in a way so that the only thing visible is the audio bar, and the video screen is removed as part of the resizing adjustment, well, that doesn't seem to be an obstacle of any sort.
Anyways, just something weird I learned today.
The solution is not as simple as voting all the Republicans out. I'm not defending the Republicans by any means, but although the House legislation was introduced by a Republican congressman, the majority of cosponsors are Democrats - 7 Democrats, 5 Republicans. The Senate legislation was introduced by a Democrat with 23 Democrat cosponsors and 16 Republican cosponsors. Those numbers may not be entirely accurate right now, as a lot of legislators have flip-flopped on their position in the past few days after highly publicized opposition hit the fan. Maybe the better solution is to vote them all out of office. There's plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the party lines.
As always, the first step in choosing who to vote for is to eliminate all those who enjoy being fellated by big business. That usually thins the field somewhat.
The lines of demarcation are all out of sorts for this thing.
It's an odd thing to watch unfold.
The true reason the right hated Clinton so much; he preferred to be fellated by women.
I just can't manage to feel very concerned about SOPA. I think the net is too widespread, and there's too much money in it for it to shut down to the extent the doomsayers predict. At worst it will just decentralize a little more, and then go on with business, and piracy, as usual. Right now you can type in any album at all followed by "blogspot" and chances are good you'll find that album to download. It's illegal but you can't shutdown all those blogs. This law is just an attempt to shutdown blogspot and others itself, but it's first of all not likely to succeed, for the same reasons lawsuits against search engines have never been terribly successful, and second of all, even if they did succeed, the next crowdsourcing, un-shut-down-able thing is just around the corner. I can't imagine this thing causing more than a tiny blip on the radar to the general public.
I take the fact that wikipedia was still available on my phone yesterday, and Google's only blackout being a cute always, the first step in choosing who to vote for is to eliminate all those who enjoy being fellated by big business. That usually thins the field somewhat.black rectangle, that the big players aren't really as concerned as they let on. If it comes down to it, the Google side could probably outspend the dying record industry side and win the lobby war; the only reason they haven't yet is that it seems like a waste.
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should exchange physical addresses in case we need to start circulating stapled 'zines to each other.
Cynical, huh? Yet I still listen to candidates from all parties, look at the issues that are important to me, how each candidate does or does not address those issues, then make my decision. Sometimes I still don't know who will get my vote until a few hours before I vote.
Some people were surprised when Obama came out against the current SOPA bill. I am not. I expect someone pointed out to him that every one of his campaign sites could have been yanked from the internet if SOPA had been on the books when the AP discovered that Fairey had lifted an AP photo to make the "Hope" image.
To address the concern about MiG being shut down: I can have it back on the net at say, mig2.org in about 4 hours (if you review the Great Expectations thread you will note that MiG went from concept to running site in a day - this is one of the things that makes the Net worth protecting). If we had reason to suspect we'd be shut down (say, like if certain badly-conceived legislation passes) I could have everything ready to go and turn up the new site in about 30 seconds (see Disaster Recovery in Wikipedia). Now imagine how effective SOPA will be against the criminals it is supposedly intended to stop. It is also instructive to look at The Pirate Bay. The US media cartels succeeded in getting TPB's servers seized. The press were babbling about the end of an era - and then TPB came back up, thumbing their noses so hard they must have bruised themselves.
I'm sad to inform you that SOPA is only another few inches of the camel's nose in our tent. If SOPA passes it will do nothing to curb illegal activity, just as the previous few inches, the DMCA, did not. Then the Media Cartels will demand the power to require every ISP to block arbitrary IP ranges they specify, and we can go back to writing letters and mailing out 'zines. That's a bit of an exaggeration. What will happen is we'll get to experience the internet the way folks in China and Iran do.
@BigD-Blues: Control of the internet is the heart of the matter. If you put the tools to censor the internet in front of that dangerous portion of society who believe that they know what is best for society, they will use them.