I've censored the following, in protest of a bill that gives any corporation and the US government the power to censor the internet--a bill that could pass THIS WEEK. To see the uncensored text, and to stop internet censorship, visit: http://americancensorship.org/posts/19738/uncensor
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FROM WASHINGTON POST NATIONAL BLOG POST:
SOPA denounced by newspaper journalists, too
By Elizabeth Flock
As the Stop Online Piracy Act heads to a vote in the House Judiciary Committee tomorrow morning, its opponents are lining up to stop it. The bill’s newest foe? Journalists.
People who work on the Internet launched a visual petition to stop SOPA. Journalists are among their ranks. ( I Work for the Internet ) First came the critiques of civil liberties and human rights groups. Then came the slams from Internet engineers and Web giants, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Wednesday, the American Newspaper Editors Association (ASNE) piled on by sending Congress a letter to ask that it stop the bill.
If passed, SOPA would expand the ability of law enforcement and copyright holders to shut down any site that hosts pirated content. But as the American Censorship group voiced on the blog Boing Boing on Wednesday, many believe “SOPA would not only hurt free speech, it will choke off the Internet workforce and its readers by taking down entire Web sites.”
Yesterday, the Post’s Maura Judkis reported that a group of people who work on the Internet launched a visual petition so Congress could see the faces of those who would be hurt by SOPA. Journalists are among their ranks.
Last month, Jennifer Martinez of Politico wrote that SOPA will be a “shootout at the digital corral,” between lobbyists in the entertainment industry and Internet giants. She can now add journalists to that list. From ASNE’s letter to Congress:
Our members use the Internet in ways that could be construed to violate SOPA, and that’s not acceptable. Whether utilizing content contributed by third parties, stepping outside the direct reporter-source interaction to acquire and use information from Web sites around the world, or augmenting our stories through the use of multimedia previously unavailable to print-only publications, ASNE members continue to change the way news is presented. We fear that SOPA will restrict our ability to engage in these activities and stifle our capacity to innovate when we most sorely need the freedom to do so.
ASNE is not specific about what it is worried SOPA would consider copyright infringement on a news site.
But BlogPost can take a guess. Bloggers at the Post every day use content from Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, among other third-party social Web sites. We often aggregate information from other news sites and augment it with our own. And how we report is changing every day. Would all of that work be threatened by SOPA? ASNE seems to think so.
Dan Gillmor, a professor of digital media entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, shared the ASNE letter on his Google+ page Wednesday, writing: “Finally, journalists see the threat from SOPA and . . . this runaway train.”
FROM: TECH TALK CBSNEWS.COM:(CBS) - YouTube videos of your kids dancing to Katy Perry songs could land you in jail, or at the very least, cost you a hefty fine. Sounds like a Big Brother-inspired vision of the future? It's actually only a few steps way from a reality. If a House committee votes to support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) today, you could be committing a felony.The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee meeting today to determine if a slightly, though still controversial, version of SOPA will move onto the House for a vote.
Resistance from Internet Giants
A wide range of opponents of the bill are speaking out. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales threatened a temporary shutdown of Wikipedia pages to protest the bill."One possible view is that because the law would seriously impact the functioning of Wikipedia for everyone, a global strike of at least the English Wikipedia would put the maximum pressure on the US government," that Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt "called the bill 'draconian' during a speech in Boston." SOPA has obvious consequences for a site like Google, which indexes the entire web.
"Unfortunately, the theft of America's intellectual property costs the U.S. economy more than $100 billion annually and results in the loss of thousands of American jobs. Under current law, rogue sites that profit from selling pirated goods are often out of the reach of U.S. law enforcement agencies and operate without consequences. The Stop Online Piracy Act helps stop the flow of revenue to rogue websites and ensures that the profits from American innovations go to American innovators.Google's copyright counsel Katherine Oyama testified before the panel. underline's the search engine giant's concerns"Unfortunately, we cannot support the bill as written, as it would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities, private rights of action, and technology mandates that could require monitoring of web sites and social media. Moreover, we are concerned that the bill sets a precedent in favor of Internet censorship and could jeopardize our nation's cybersecurity. In short, we believe the bill, as introduced, poses a serious threat to our industry's continued track record of innovation and job-creation.Other sites like Reddit, BoingBoing, Tumblr and Mozilla put the issue on the front page of their websites and encouraging users to . The social link-sharing site Reddit relies heavily on a community of users, who have the freedom to post whatever they want, regardless of copyright infringement.
Lawmakers and Professors Join the Opposition
281/google-facebook-zynga-oppose-new-sopa-copyright-bill/?tag=mncol;posts" CNET reports opponents of the bill include members of Congress, like Rep. Zoe Lofgren and Rep. Ron Paul (.
Professors from dozens of law schools, including Stanford, Berkeley and Harvard have also submitted letters of opposition (). International organizations have also written in to state their concerns Forum for Growth & Innovation fellow James Allworth the bill "contains provisions that will chill innovation. It contains provisions that will tinker with the fundamental fabric of the internet. It gives private corporations the power to censor. And best of all, it bypasses due legal process to do much of it.SOPA is intended to curb the illegal download of copyrighted materials from foreign "rogue" sites, like The Pirate Bay. There is already legislation that provides some protection for copyrighted material, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which requires companies to remove copyrighted content "in good faith.Worst-case scenarios are being debated. The Electronic Frontier Foundation speculates, "Instead of complying with the DMCA, a copyright owner may now be able to use these new provisions to effectively shut down a site by cutting off access to its domain name, its search engine hits, its ads, and its other financing even if the safe harbors would apply."
FROM MOTHER JONES:
Netizens beware: Depending on a house committee's debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act today, you could face felony charges instead of a fine the next time you illegally grab a song or movie off the Internet. The website that served up your digital pirate's booty could be shut down, blocked from Google and other search engines, and have its US bank accounts closed. Uploading is on the hot seat, too. If the bill passes and your next YouTube upload includes copyrighted music or video, you could be committing a felony. Even Facebook and YouTube, sites that exist to share user-generated content, could be held liable if just a few copyright-infringing links are discovered among the millions their users share daily.
The act, also known as SOPA, has set off a battle between major Internet players—Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia among them—and big media and entertainment companies that stand to benefit from SOPA's proposed copyright protections.
Advertise on MotherJones.com
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder, has threatened a temporary shutdown of English-language Wikipedia pages to protest the law if it passes. In November, the front pages of Mozilla, Reddit, and Tumblr urged users to "stop Internet censorship" by signing an anti-SOPA petition and contacting local lawmakers to demand that they vote against the bill.
Not to be outdone, a broad group of entertainment companies, including Time Warner, Disney, and the Motion Picture Association of America, have been lobbying Washington in support of SOPA. They released a joint letter to Congress this week, emphasizing that without SOPA, websites with pirated content will continue "destroying American jobs and causing billions in lost revenue."
SOPA's rules and enforcement methods are much harsher than the US's current copyright infringement law, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The DMCA gives site owners a chance to remove infringing content before a copyright holder can sue. But under SOPA, if a website is registered in the US, a copyright owner could immediately sue the offending site and order search engines to stop linking to the site in question. If a website is foreign but directed at US users, the US Department of Justice could file a court order against the site owner without first warning them to take down the offending content.
So if SOPA is just a copyright infringement law, why are Google and Wikipedia so bothered by it? Their concern is that SOPA—and its cousin Protect IP Act, the Senate's very similar version of the bill—won't just crack down on Internet piracy. Internet freedom activists and big net companies say SOPA will squelch Internet freedom and entrepreneurship.
In a letter to the US congress, Google, Facebook, and seven other Internet companies warned that the laws would subject their companies to lengthy legal battles and needless technology-monitoring rules. "We are concerned that these measures pose a serious risk to our industry's continued track record of innovation and job-creation, as well as to our Nation's cybersecurity," they wrote.
Nonsense, says Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment expert and entertainment industry lawyer. In a Washington Post op-ed on SOPA, he wrote, "The proposition that efforts to enforce the Copyright Act on the Internet amount to some sort of censorship, let alone Chinese-level censorship, is not merely fanciful. It trivializes the pain inflicted by actual censorship that occurs in repressive states throughout the world."
But according to Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, the risks SOPA poses to Internet freedom are grave: Online entrepreneurship would be stifled, suppressive web-monitoring technology would flourish and spread to repressive regimes across the world, and legal uncertainties would plague web companies and users, he says.
"If you think it's worthwhile to solve this problem of foreign pirate sites—which, admittedly, is a bad thing—it's a question of how much of the Internet infrastructure you should risk to get rid of this one bad thing," Benkler says. "So you're not getting a 100 percent profit—so what? At least you're not destroying the Internet."
http://americancensorship.org/posts/19738/uncensor
FROM MOTHER JONES: Netizens beware: Depending on a house committee's debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act today, you could face felony charges instead of a fine the next time you illegally grab a song or movie off the Internet. The website that served up your digital pirate's booty could be shut down, blocked from Google and other search engines, and have its US bank accounts closed. Uploading is on the hot seat, too. If the bill passes and your next YouTube upload includes copyrighted music or video, you could be committing a felony. Even Facebook and YouTube, sites that exist to share user-generated content, could be held liable if just a few copyright-infringing links are discovered among the millions their users share daily.
The act, also known as SOPA, has set off a battle between major Internet players—Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia among them—and big media and entertainment companies that stand to benefit from SOPA's proposed copyright protections.
Advertise on MotherJones.com
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder, has threatened a temporary shutdown of English-language Wikipedia pages to protest the law if it passes. In November, the front pages of Mozilla, Reddit, and Tumblr urged users to "stop Internet censorship" by signing an anti-SOPA petition and contacting local lawmakers to demand that they vote against the bill.
Not to be outdone, a broad group of entertainment companies, including Time Warner, Disney, and the Motion Picture Association of America, have been lobbying Washington in support of SOPA. They released a joint letter to Congress this week, emphasizing that without SOPA, websites with pirated content will continue "destroying American jobs and causing billions in lost revenue."
SOPA's rules and enforcement methods are much harsher than the US's current copyright infringement law, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The DMCA gives site owners a chance to remove infringing content before a copyright holder can sue. But under SOPA, if a website is registered in the US, a copyright owner could immediately sue the offending site and order search engines to stop linking to the site in question. If a website is foreign but directed at US users, the US Department of Justice could file a court order against the site owner without first warning them to take down the offending content.
So if SOPA is just a copyright infringement law, why are Google and Wikipedia so bothered by it? Their concern is that SOPA—and its cousin Protect IP Act, the Senate's very similar version of the bill—won't just crack down on Internet piracy. Internet freedom activists and big net companies say SOPA will squelch Internet freedom and entrepreneurship.
In a letter to the US congress, Google, Facebook, and seven other Internet companies warned that the laws would subject their companies to lengthy legal battles and needless technology-monitoring rules. "We are concerned that these measures pose a serious risk to our industry's continued track record of innovation and job-creation, as well as to our Nation's cybersecurity," they wrote.
Nonsense, says Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment expert and entertainment industry lawyer. In a Washington Post op-ed on SOPA, he wrote, "The proposition that efforts to enforce the Copyright Act on the Internet amount to some sort of censorship, let alone Chinese-level censorship, is not merely fanciful. It trivializes the pain inflicted by actual censorship that occurs in repressive states throughout the world."
But according to Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, the risks SOPA poses to Internet freedom are grave: Online entrepreneurship would be stifled, suppressive web-monitoring technology would flourish and spread to repressive regimes across the world, and legal uncertainties would plague web companies and users, he says.
"If you think it's worthwhile to solve this problem of foreign pirate sites—which, admittedly, is a bad thing—it's a question of how much of the Internet infrastructure you should risk to get rid of this one bad thing," Benkler says. "So you're not getting a 100 percent profit—so what? At least you're not destroying the Internet."
FROM EFF.ORG:
Fight the Blacklist: A Toolkit for Anti-SOPA Activism
Congress is debating dangerous legislation that would give the Department of Justice unprecedented power to “blacklist” websites without a trial and give Hollywood copyright holders a new way to shut down a website’s financial services for alleged copyright infringement. It’s nothing short of a bill to create a U.S. censorship regime, and it’s moving fast.
We need your help to stop this legislation before it can undermine Internet security and censor the web. Ready to join EFF, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, CDT, the Participatory Politics Foundation, and Public Knowledge in the fight? Here are 12 things you can do right now to help us stop the blacklist bills.
Got more suggestions for ways to fight SOPA and Protect-IP? Tell us about it through identi.ca, Twitter, Facebook, in an email to rainey@eff.org, or add them in a comment to this thread on Reddit.
Call your Senators and Representative and tell them to oppose Protect-IP and SOPA, respectively. Click here for some suggested talking points. Then tell your friends about the call on social media sites.
Contact Congress through EFF’s action center. Customize your letter to explain who you are and why you are worried about this bill. If you’re outside the United States, try this petition from Fight for the Future instead.
If you work for a tech company, approach the leadership at your company and explain to them your concerns. Urge them to join you in speaking out. These companies (PDF) already took a stand.
Write a blog post about the blacklist bills. Whether it’s a candid explanation of why you oppose the legislation, a discussion of the effect on human rights, or a call to filmmakers to protest the blacklist, there are plenty of things to say about this scary legislation. Help us get the word out by writing articles on your own blog, your school blog, or on blogs that take guest contributors.
Are you an artist? Showcase the dangers of censorship through art and music, and use your art as a way of reaching people who might otherwise not know about this issue. You can make stickers, posters or patches, create a YouTube video, or hold an open-mic night around censorship.
Do you administer a website? Then put a banner on your site protesting censorship or link to EFF’s action center.
Coordinate a teach-in or debate at your local college or community center. Invite local experts in copyright and free speech to come discuss the issue.
If you’re in high school, talk to your civics and media studies teachers about a class discussion on the implications of this bill. Point them to our free Teaching Copyright materials.
If you’re in college, speak out through like-minded organizations working for digital freedom, such as Students for Free Culture or Electronic Frontier on Campus. If there isn’t a chapter at your school, start one. Then use that platform to coordinate with other students to speak out against this bill.
If you’re in college, set up a meeting with your college newspaper editorial board and explain the bill to them and why they should speak out about it. Work with them to write articles on the topics. Check out these examples from the University of Buffalo, University of Massachusetts, and University of Minnesota. See more examples at the Center for Democracy and Technology's Chorus of Opposition page.
Write a letter to the editor of your local paper. Remember, these are often really short. Find out the requirements for your local paper and follow them carefully.
Become a member of EFF. We’re leading the fight to defend civil liberties online, so that future generations will enjoy an Internet free of censorship. By standing together, we can make it happen.
Thanks-Stay Metal, Stay Brutal-BB LATER TONIGHT AFTER THE VOTE ON SOPA, WITH MORE.
\m/ -l-
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