SOPA and PIPA, here we go again….

“Even a good decision if made for the wrong reasons can be a wrong decision”.

Pirates of the Caribbean.

Boy oh boy oh boy. Where can l even start with this one? As you all know I am all about the rights of the individual. As a strict Constitutional Originalist (I follow the original meaning and intent of the constitution), I will start with the first amendment. You know the one about our troubling right of freedom of speech. Here I am starting off by violating the new proposed SOPA law,

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The reason this is against the law is that I copied it from the internet and I will post it here now without proper attribution from its original source. Now if I used it as a line of a speech in front of live people then there is no problem. But using the narrowest definition of the SOPA law I am committing online piracy. First the FCC is a government agency that controls the airwaves. While the Constitution specifically prohibits their very existence none the less they will be the controlling agency here.

Brief side note here for my overseas friends, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and its little brother PIPA (Protect IP Act), here’s what the government can do to foreign websites under even the narrowest reading of SOPA section 102 and PIPA section 3:

1. Order internet service providers to alter their DNS servers from resolving the domain names of websites in foreign countries that host illegal copies of videos, songs, and photos.

2. Order search engines like Google to modify search results to exclude foreign websites that host illegally copied material.

3. Order payment providers like PayPal to shut down the payment accounts of foreign websites that host illegally copied material.

4. Order ad services like Google’s AdSense to refuse any ads or payment from foreign sites that host illegally copied content.

Now these rules don’t apply to domains that end in .com, .net, and .org, which fall under US law — the government has been seizing US domains used for piracy since 2010, and just seized 150 domains last month. Also as an added side benefit for the government, the next sections, SOPA section 103 and PIPA section 4 require payment processors and ad networks to shut down accounts if they receive the right kind of letter from a copyright owner — a system modeled on the heavily criticized notice-and-Takedown provisions of the current Digital Millennium Copyright Act that requires a service like YouTube to pull down infringing content after the copyright owner complains. That system has been abused on occasion, but it ultimately works because it allows YouTube to avoid direct responsibility for the actions of its users — it would have been otherwise sued out of existence.

I already covered the 1^st amendment on free speech BUT what the congress can do and are hiding behind IS found in Article 1, section 8 of the constitution under their enumerated powers.

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”.

So by this reasoning Congress is perfectly in its power to regulate ‘copyrighted’ materials (funny how they totally ignore the “for a limited time” part).

What I have a very big problem with is that SOPA section 104 offers legal immunity to ISPs that independently block websites that host illegally copied material without any prompting from the government. That’s a major conflict of interest for a huge ISP like Comcast, which also owns NBC — there would be nothing stopping Comcast from blocking a foreign video service that competes with NBC if it could claim it had a “reasonable belief” it was “dedicated to the theft of US property.” And indeed, Comcast is among the companies that support SOPA.

My official policy for this website is that I cannot tell you what to think but I hope to teach you how to think. With that being understood these totally insane rules at least theoretically restricted to foreign sites — defined by SOPA as sites with servers located outside the US. That’s important to know: at its simplest level, SOPA is a kneejerk reaction to the fundamental nature of the internet (I know from history you can’t legislate human nature) , which was explicitly designed to ignore outmoded and inconvenient concepts like the continuing existence of the United States. Because US copyright holders generally can’t drag a foreign web site into US courts to get them to stop stealing and distributing their work, SOPA allows them to go after the ISPs, ad networks, and payment processors that are in the United States. It is a law borne of the blind logic of revenge: the movie studios can’t punish the real pirates, so they are attacking the network instead.

Q & A’s about SOPA/PIPA

1. What’s the justification for SOPA and Protect IP?

Two words: rogue sites. (term for Web sites that happen to be located in a nation more hospitable to copyright infringement than the United States is).

2. Who’s opposed to SOPA?

Most of the Internet industry and a large percentage of Internet users.

Here’s a current list of opponents.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn

3. How would SOPA work?

It allows the U.S. attorney general to seek a court order against the targeted offshore Web site that would, in turn, be served on Internet providers in an effort to make the target virtually disappear. It’s kind of an Internet death penalty.

4. How does SOPA differ from the earlier Senate bill called the Protect IP Act?

Protect IP targeted only domain name system providers, financial companies, and ad networks–not companies that provide Internet connectivity. Because SOPA is broader, even some companies who liked, or at least weren’t vocally opposed to, the Senate bill aren’t exactly delighted with the House version.

5. What are the security-related implications of SOPA?

One big one is how it interacts with the domain name system and a set of security improvements to it known as DNSSEC. The idea of DNSSEC is to promote end-to-end encryption of domain names, meaning there’s no break in the chain between, say, Wellsfargo.com and its customer. Requiring Internet providers to redirect allegedly piratical domain names to, say, the FBI’s servers aren’t compatible with DNSSEC.

6.What will SOPA require Internet providers to do?

A little-noticed portion of the proposed law goes further than Protect IP and could require Internet providers to monitor customers’ traffic and block Web sites suspected of copyright infringement. Talk about monitoring internet movement, they would use “Deep packet inspection”, meaning forcing an Internet provider to intercept and analyze customers’ Web traffic, is the only way to block access to specific URLs.

7. Are there free speech implications to SOPA?

Oh yeah. Section 103 says that, to be blacklisted, a Web site must be “directed” at the U.S. and also that the owner “has promoted” acts that can infringe copyright.

Here’s how Section 101 of the original version of SOPA defines what a U.S.-directed Web site is:

(A) The Internet site is used to provide goods or services to users located in the United States;

(B) there is evidence that the Internet site or portion thereof is intended to offer or provide such goods and services (or) access to such goods and services (or) delivery of such goods and services to users located in the United States;

 (C) the Internet site or portion thereof does not contain reasonable measures to prevent such goods and services from being obtained in or delivered to the United States; and

 (D) Any prices for goods and services are indicated or billed in the currency of the United States.

Funny thing here is look at WikiLeaks which has posted internal documents not only from governments but also copyrighted documents from U.S. companies and has threatened to post more, it’s hard to see how it would not qualify for blacklisting.

8. Who supports SOPA?

The three organizations that have probably been the most vocal are the MPAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

9. Could SOPA block Tor? (Tor is a program I use that protects me by bouncing my communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching my Internet connection from learning what sites I visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the IC/TCP protocol. That’s why I cant be traced by my IP address)

It could. SOPA targets anyone who “knowingly and willfully provides or offers to provide a product or service designed or marketed by such entity…for the circumvention or bypassing” of a Justice Department-erected blockade.

 

Where it goes from here is an open question that depends on where the House Republican leadership stands. Because the House’s floor schedule is under the control of the majority party, the decision will largely lie in the hands of House Speaker John Boehner and his lieutenants. Another possibility is that there could be further House hearings on the security-related implications of SOPA, a move that would delay a final vote. An aide to House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith previously said that there’s no indication yet as to any further hearings, but after the committee debate in December, don’t be surprised if it happens.

Ouch, my readers really made me think on this one today (I got a headache now)

Till next time….