ACTA: An International SOPA

By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office

While the Internet community came out in force to protest the free speech and privacy threats posed by the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an international trade agreement with the same stated goals—and potentially greater threats—was being negotiated behind closed doors. While the First Amendment can be served by intellectual property protections that incentivize content creation, IP laws can easily be misused. Like PIPA and SOPA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (“ACTA”) is another misguided and overbroad attempt to crack down on counterfeiting and piracy over the Internet. There has been excellent analysis of the issue by sources including EFF, Tech Dirt and Ars Technica, but we have also been watching this issue and wanted to summarize what’s at stake.

While many of the worst provisions of ACTA were ultimately watered down (mainly due to pressure from outside groups reacting to leaked drafts), many issues remain, both procedural and substantive. There are four primary problems with ACTA.

1. Tying Congress’s Hands on Copyright Law

     While supporters of ACTA insist it does not change U.S. law (were it technically to change existing law, it would require Senate ratification) opponents have different concerns—namely, that it will reinforce current copyright laws in an area that is changing rapidly and many believe should be updated. Opponents fear that signing the agreement will make it unnecessarily more difficult for Congress to update copyright laws while staying compliant with our new “international obligations.”

2. Lack of accountability

     Unlike PIPA and SOPA, ACTA would establish a new international body to enforce certain IP rules. This body would be made up of unelected members acting outside the purview of any current international institution. So, while SOPA and PIPA at least would have been enforced by U.S. agencies and subject to constitutional checks and balances, ACTA could be used for worldwide crackdowns on Internet activity by a coordinated authority that could work at cross-purposes with the laws and policies of the participating countries.

3. Negotiated in secret

     Despite the fact that such world-wide e-regulation has the potential to impact everyone with a computer, ACTA was negotiated in secret by a small, exclusive group of countries and a few private companies. The first the public heard about the talks was when WikiLeaks released a discussion document in May 2008. Both Presidents Bush and Obama rejected calls from advocates and members of Congress to make ACTA negotiations public, claiming that such disclosure would cause “damage to the national security.” However, a 2009 FOIA request found that the draft had been shared with Google, eBay, Dell, Intel, the Business Software Alliance, News Corporation, Sony Pictures, Time Warner, the Motion Picture Association of America, and Verizon under a nondisclosure agreement. Once the agreement was finalized it was posted to the United States Trade Representative’s website here.

4. Evading Senate approval

     To keep the negotiations secret and avoid having to obtain the Senate’s approval, the president is claiming that ACTA was negotiated within his presidential powers as a “sole executive agreement.” A sole executive agreement is one that the president may enter if the terms will not change U.S. law. However, the extent of the president’s authority to completely bypass Congressional approval and enter into a sole executive agreement is controversial. Earlier this month 50 leading U.S. legal scholars sent a letter to members of the Senate Finance Committee stating,

     the Administration currently lacks a means to constitutionally enter ACTA without ex post Congressional approval. The present issue reaches far beyond the topical matters covered by ACTA, into the fundamental Constitutional issue of separation of powers. If Congress allows the executive to claim that ACTA was authorized by language that clearly does not authorize the agreement, it will be ceding unprecedented power to the executive."

     Senator Wyden (D-OR) has also questioned the president’s authority to treat ACTA as a sole agreement. “There are questions of constitutional authority surrounding whether the administration can enter into this agreement without Congress’s approval,” he said. “Either way, when international accords, like ACTA, are conceived and constructed under a cloak of secrecy it is hard to argue that they represent the broad interests of the general public. The controversy over ACTA should surprise no one.”

     Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) warned participants at the World Economic Forum that ACTA was more dangerous than SOPA and PIPA and.then called into question the president’s authority to negotiate the agreement. He said, “It’s not coming to me for a vote. It purports that it does not change existing laws. But once implemented, it creates a whole new enforcement system and will virtually tie the hands of Congress to undo it.”

International opposition
To date the United States, the European Union (and 22 of its member states), Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea have all signed ACTA but none have formally ratified the agreement yet.

At the grassroots and at the highest levels of government, ACTA has sparked protests. In Poland, tens of thousands of people protested across the nation and activists attacked government websites when that country signed the agreement in January. Members of the Polish Parliament wore Guy Fawkes masks to demonstrate their disapproval. Since then, protests have been organized throughout Europe including in Sweden, Germany, Bulgaria, Greece, and the United Kingdom. Notably, Kader Arif, the first "rapporteur" for ACTA in the EU parliament (the member who prepares the official recommendation to the parliament on a legislative proposal), quit his role in disgust, stating,

I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organizations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament's demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.

This agreement might have major consequences on citizens' lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.

Arif’s successor, David Martin, recommended against adoption of the agreement, fearing unintended consequences and overbroad enforcement (though he also asked the parliament to consider a replacement).

Post-ACTA: The Trans-Pacific Partnership
Since ACTA’s completion we have learned that part of a new massive trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), aims "to ensure an effective and balanced approach to intellectual property rights among the TPP countries.” Talks on the TPP are currently being held between nine Pacific Rim countries: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States. Like ACTA all negotiations are being conducted behind closed doors with details shared only with Industry Trade Advisory Committees (ITAC). The U.S. ITAC is called ITAC 15 and includes top executives from AT&T, Verizon, the RIAA, the pharmaceutical lobby, and Cisco. All anyone else knows about the agreement comes from a leak of the "intellectual property chapter" that surfaced about a year ago. EFF’s international IP director, Gwen Hinze, told Ars Technica, “I would say it’s ACTA-plus, not ACTA redux,” Secret international trade agreements negotiated between only government and industry is not a trend we want to see catch on.

Healthy democracies depend on transparency and public debate. Good policies are created through the input of experts, advocates, industry, policy makers, and citizens. Circumventing basic checks and balances to fast-track policies that have already been defeated by the public—often called “policy laundering”— is not how representative democracy is supposed to work. Many fear that agreements made in ACTA and TPP will put our civil liberties at risk. At the very least, the president should allow a free and open debate on the measures.

Reid Sneaks SOPA Back Into Senate With New Name

Posted by Alexander Higgins - February 8, 2012
Alexander Higgins Blog

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is re-branding SOPA and the Protect IP act under a new name to launch a second round of attacks in an attempt to censor the Internet.

After trying to adopt Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), both pieces of legislation turned out to be a disaster, causing outrage among Internet giants and ordinary users alike. Congress had to retreat. However it’s determined to get what it wants this time.

After the shelving of SOPA and PIPA back in January Reid stated,“There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved.”

As RT reported last month, Senator Reid added that lawmakers will “continue engaging with all stakeholders to forge a balance between protecting Americans’ intellectual property, and maintaining openness and innovation on the Internet.”

The vote on the anti-piracy legislation was postponed from its January 24 date after Wikipedia and other popular websites went dark to protest the draft law.

Now the battle for online freedom continues.

The rebuttal to push Internet-regulating legislation has transformed into a new cybersecurity bill. The particulars of the latest attempt by senators to censor the Internet have not been disclosed to the public.

However some leaks suggest that the bill will grant the authority to crack down on the Internet to the executive branch of power, namely the White House. It looks highly possible taking into consideration that the legislation has to come out of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, chaired by Connecticut Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman.

The same Lieberman who earlier co-sponsored the so called Kill Switch bill that could allow the president of the United States to “declare a cybersecurity emergency,” and practically shut down the Internet.

After outrage from Internet advocacy groups, Kill Switch never made it in the Senate. This time it may be back under a new name.

How Hollywood’s Own Reality Undermines Its Position on Internet Policy

Credibility Lost

by RICHARD FORNO

The furor over the latest legislative proposals to address online copyright infringement in the United States have cast the major American intellectual property companies – most notably, the entertainment industry — in a very negative light within the global Internet user community.  I join with technologists, scholars, and industry observers who are amazed at the level of concentrated outcry over a single technology policy issue and hope it represents a more civic-minded Internet population when it comes to matters affecting Internet users both in the United States and around the world.

Much of the controversy surrounding The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) [1] and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) [2] pertains to how they were drafted and their potential adverse consequences to the Internet itself, if not society generally. While a prolonged analysis or description of these proposals are beyond the scope of this article – but can be found quite easily online – they represent the latest attempts by the intellectual property (IP) industry (although ‘cartel’ might be a  more appropriate term) to further extend its reach into cyberspace to enact what it believes are necessary measures to protect its copyrighted property such as movies, music, and software.  Unfortunately, these legislative proposals were conceived and developed primarily by industry lobbyists with little input from Internet engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, or other subject matter experts who understand the technical, legal, and social consequences should these proposals, as written, become law.  The secrecy surrounding the drafting of SOPA and PIPA are reminiscent of how these same industry organisations were adamant that the international  development of 2011′s controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) occur in secret with little if any public consultation, comment, or discussion.[3]

Apparently, developing laws to protect intellectual property on the Internet are exempt from Washington’s alleged desire for greater transparency in the policymaking process. It also represents a shift in how technology issues previously were dealt with in the earlier days of the Internet — i.e., involving all stakeholders in a public forum to reach a mutual consensus on a given matter.  Such one-sided practices can lead to proposals like SOPA and PIPA, which indeed may endanger the effective and secure operation of the Internet, harm innocent Internet users, establish a “shoot first” policy based on accusation not proof, and potentially present assorted constitutional concerns over due process and online freedom of expression.  [4]

Concerns over the technical and legal ramifications of SOPA and PIPA were voiced publicly by companies like Google and Facebook and a veritable Who’s Who of Internet Engineering[5]. These concerns subsequently were marginalised or ignored[6] by American legislators wanting to enact them into law quickly while minimising public discussion about their potential consequences.  In response, the Great SOPA Blackout of January 18^th, 2012 was launched by major Internet companies, prominent Web sites, and individual luminaries to protest and raise public awareness of these proposals, building upon the successful online protest the prior month against Internet company GoDaddy.Com, a longtime SOPA supporter.[7]  The significant public attention brought to these proposals during the January 18^th Blackout forced legislators to realise these proposals might be a political problem for them; even before the one-day protest ended, politicians began scrambling to distance themselves from these proposals, including several of their original sponsors.[8][9][10]  Political support turned so quickly against SOPA and PIPA that the president of the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) publicly threatened to cut off campaign support for politicians who didn’t support its legislative desires once it was known that Congressional leaders and the Obama Administration had removed those proposals from active consideration in their current form.[11]

That said, the enforcement of copyright on the Net is an ongoing concern for Hollywood and represents an significant, if not apocalyptic, problem to the entertainment industry, as evidenced in recent years:

• 2005: MPAA claims $6.1 billion in losses due to “continued camcordering” of movies in theaters. [12]

• 2005: US Chamber of Commerce reports 750,000 jobs lost due to online ‘piracy.’[13]

• 2006:  A study based on Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) data from the Institute for Policy Innovation claims the US economy loses $20.5 billon a year from movie ‘piracy.’[14]

• 2011: In a letter to the New York Times, the US Chamber of Commerce’s Mark Elliot says online ‘piracy’ threatens more than 19 million American jobs.[15]

Clearly, the entertainment industry is suffering tremendous financial losses due to online theft.  More frightening, the potential job losses have increased from 750,000 in 2005 to more than 19 million in 2011. This stark news suggests there must be severe financial and employment losses for the entertainment industry resulting from the online ‘piracy’ of its products. These statistics and predictions must be true — after all, these are ‘industry numbers’ being reported!

Interestingly, despite this gloomy news, the MPAA reported that “global box office receipts reached an all time high” of $29.9 billion in 2010 — and soon after announced new statistics showing how movie ‘piracy’ is killing its industry and destroying jobs. [16]

MPAA can’t have it both ways. Either it is losing money and laying people off due to ‘piracy’ or it’s making profits hand-over-fist and keeping its industry very much alive and profitable. Either way, it’s offered up some very misleading statements about its profitability and well-being in the face of an alleged epidemic of online theft that only draconian measures like SOPA or PIPA can address.

Similar antics were used by the MPAA’s musical counterpart, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) over the years to describe its alleged financial woes due to online theft.  In the case of music, iTunes destroyed the decades-old concept of “album sales” — yet recording industry statements and news articles continued to suggest that “declining album sales” was a direct consequence of the online ‘piracy’ problem rather than acknowledging that increasing number of customers now purchased individual tracks from iTunes instead of full albums. [17][18]

Nevertheless, these manipulated statistics are invoked by the entertainment industry at every opportunity to justify and perpetuate attacks on technology, customers, and the Internet itself while ignoring societal evolution and the evolving expectations of its customers.  I do not dispute that the theft of copyrighted materials on the Internet is a problem and needs to be addressed, but we must be mindful of the statistics presented by the entertainment industry on this issue and not blindly accept their view as reflective of reality. Unfortunately, like all pieces of propaganda, repeat it often enough and the audience will believe it’s true.

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.”  So let’s dig a bit deeper into the statistics routinely cited by the entertainment industry as it plays the victim of ‘piracy’ in the eyes of legislators and the media to determine if these indeed are facts or merely fantasy:

• 2010: The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) releases a study that, while confirming online copyright infringement indeed is a problem, cast serious doubts on the intellectual property industry’s ‘piracy’ statistics. It also concludes that measuring the impact of ‘piracy’ with any degree of meaningful accuracy may be impossible.[19]

• 2011: A ‘piracy investigator’ working for the entertainment industry describes how the entertainment industry worked to boost its piracy statistics to gain stronger media and political interest in its efforts.[20]

• 2012: Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute notes that the statistics associated with online ‘piracy’ are flawed if not something purely in the fantasies of lobbyists and their paid-for legislators.[21]

In short, great doubts are, and should be, cast upon the statistics used by the entertainment industry regarding ‘piracy’ and the theft of its products.  Therefore, in negotiating with the entertainment industry, lawmakers must be prudently critical in their analysis and due diligence of the facts presented — or, as the late Ronald Reagan famously said, “trust, but verify.”

Sadly, these very metrics, flawed or fixed as they are, continue to define the entertainment industry’s vision of reality and are used by its Congressional lobbyists to garner support for more far-reaching mechanisms to control the flow of information — theirs or anyone else’s — on the Internet in the name of countering ‘piracy.’  After all, the flurry of widespread public criticism of SOPA was dismissed by lead SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith as “not based in reality”; in other words, the reality conveniently contrived by the entertainment industry lobbyists and subsequently believed as absolute truth by Congress.[22]  Such sentiment, if not simply an excessive sense of self-entitlement, also helps explain why members of the entertainment industry have sued foreign governments that do not enact legislation favourable to them immediately upon request.[23]

Therefore, how can anyone take seriously the claims of Hollywood over its declared losses to ‘piracy’?  Not only do the entertainment industry’s statements about ‘piracy’s’ debilitating effects on its profitability conflict with its proclamations about strong annual sales, but it’s been caught basing its actions on a misconstrued sense of reality and groupthink reinforced by an ongoing inability to work with those whose views differ or raise concerns about its agenda. But Congressional lawmakers routinely believe the entertainment industry’s claims and cater to its needs, because they appreciate the flow of money received by enacting legislation favourable to those supporting their political campaigns. [24]

Interestingly, either through a superb act of irony or willful ignorance, the entertainment industry (and Congress) fails to note that the very technologies it lobbies (or votes) against are the ones that continue to make it so profitable over time.  Technological innovations such as the VCR, DVR, iTunes, NetFlix, and yet-to-be-discovered (or invented) services all contribute to the long-term success of the entertainment industry by allowing customers to enjoy entertainment products in a manner conducive to and consistent with the modern age and societal expectations.  For example, the launch of iTunes as the de facto Internet site to purchase music was a direct response to the rampant theft of music over the Internet in the late 1990s when Napster, GnuTella, Limewire, and other services met an emerging customer need (portabilityof a purchased music to multiple devices and over the Internet) that the recording industry chose to ignore. iTunes transformed that mostly criminal venture – obtaining and sharing music over the Internet – into the recording industry’s standard, if not preferred, method of distributing commercial music to customers.

Unfortunately. any new technology in the hands of average customers absolutely terrifies the entertainment industry. An insane fear of ‘piracy’ and zealous desire to protect its digital products at all costs have contributed to the imposition of restrictive technology controls, laws, and legislative proposals that created the uproar we see currently over SOPA and PIPA. Similar efforts over time explain why customers couldn’t easily duplicate VHS tapes in the 1980s, or DVDs in the 1990s, and are forced to watch un-skippable FBI “Anti Piracy Warnings” on DVDs and Blu-Rays in the 2000s.  It’s why you hear terms like ‘safe harbour’, ‘circumvention’, HDMI, HDCP, DRM, TCP, CSS, TPM, ‘analog holes’, ‘broadcast flags’, and things called ‘content protection’ inflicted upon our computers, monitors, video cards, iPods, cell phones, home theater systems, movies, music, and other digital products we might place on our various ‘authorised devices.’ It’s why since 2005 you risk arrest on federal felony charges if you take a photos or quick movie clips of a relative in a movie theater and happen to also catch a film playing in the background.[25] Why? Because you might be a criminal looking to steal digital content.  Even if you’re not, you might be. But that chance that you might be a criminal means everyone must be considered and treated as one, too — and why every new piece of consumer technology is considered by the entertainment industry as a potential Weapon of Mass Infringement. [26]   Remember that in 1982 the former MPAA president famously equated the VCR to the Boston Strangler [27] in terms of endangering the future success of the film industry; yet despite the proliferation of VCRs, DVRs, and streaming video services in the years since, that same industry reported record profits in 2010!

Effectively working together to counter online copyright infringement requires trust — trust in the data presented, and trust in the trustworthiness of those you are working with. Sadly, the entertainment industry repeatedly demonstrates it is not to be trusted — and the flawed statistics endlessly cited to further its agenda confirms this belief, as does its repeated inability to work with people and groups whose views differ from their own.  Those working to develop lasting solutions to the very real problem of contemporary copyright infringement must strive towards a mutually acceptable resolution to this problem and realise that a winner-take-all scorched-earth outcome may not be an appropriate solution. Legislation and treaties regarding copyright enforcement that raise serious concerns about Internet security, stability, and constitutionality (i.e., SOPA, PIPA, ACTA) must not be developed in secret by a committee of selected lobbyists but rather in full view of the public and with input from qualified external subject matter experts representing all sides of the issue.  Finally, to reach such a solution, the entertainment industry must abolish its practice of treating its paying customers as potential criminals and overcome its paranoia about technologies that it doesn’t yet control or influence heavily[28][29].

Unlike Silicon Valley, Hollywood considers ‘innovation’ as the process of lobbying for newer and more stringent controls over information and the flow of information in modern society. By clinging to its own version of reality, the entertainment industry demonstrates that it prefers to inflict lasting damage on the rest of the world to protect its antiquated Industrial Age business models rather than evolve with the modern world and so-called Information Age. Moreover, I posit that the entertainment industry’s ongoing and frequently controversial efforts to deal with what it purports to be an apocalyptic threat of ‘piracy’ merely are attempts to justify its legitimacy and self-perceived relevance in a world where the capabilities of quality production, marketing, and distribution of entertainment and other digital products now exist in the hands of Every Man[30][31] and not exclusively One Man[32][33].

Sources.[1] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3261[2] http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/text[3] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/report-acta-secrecy-is-all-the-united-states-fault.ars[4] https://www.eff.org/document/law-professors-letter-sopa[5] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-warn-against-sopa-and-pipa[6] http://www.gamepolitics.com/2012/01/04/smith-says-reddit-sopa-protestors-are-039not-legitimate-or-large-number039 [7] http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57349913-281/godaddy-bows-to-boycott-now-opposes-sopa-copyright-bill/[8] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71697.html[9] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57362990-501465/sopa-is-dead-smith-pulls-bill/[10]  http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/harry-reid-pipa-sopa-mpaa-blackout-283549[11] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120120/14472117492/mpaa-directly-publicly-threatens-politicians-who-arent-corrupt-enough-to-stay-bought.shtml[12] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/pirates-of-the-canadians/article735563/singlepage/#articlecontent[13] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10213367-38.html[14] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5395218.stm[15] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/opinion/rogue-web-sites.html[16]http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/03/mpaa_box_office_bragging.html[17] http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/01/the-itunes-effect-and-the-futu.html[18]http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music_industry/[19] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-government-finally-admits-most-piracy-estimates-are-bogus.ars(The GAO Report is @ http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-423)[20] http://torrentfreak.com/private-anti-piracy-investigator-spills-the-beans-111003/[21] http://www.itworld.com/security/242587/best-evidence-showing-we-need-sopa-based-govt-studies-never-existed[22] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120105/04462117287/rep-lamar-smith-decides-lying-about-insulting-dismissing-opposition-to-sopa-is-winning-strategy.shtml[23]http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120112/09203917388/insane-entitlement-emi-sues-irish-govt-not-passing-sopa-like-censorship-law.shtml[24] http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/205491-consumer-group-accuses-hollywood-of-threatening-politicians[25] http://consumerist.com/2009/12/charged-with-felony-after-taping-4-minutes-of-new-moon.html[26] http://www.mpaa.org/contentprotection/camcorder-laws[27] http://cryptome.org/hrcw-hear.htm[28] http://www.dvdforum.org/about-mission.htm[29] http://www.digital-cp.com/about_dcp[30] http://www.apple.com/[31] http://www.youtube.com/[32] http://www.riaa.com/[33] http://www.mpaa.org/

Hollywood threatens Obama over SOPA

RT - 20 January, 2012
If you see the White House invaded by aliens, blown up by laser beams or bombed by terrorists in any of the big summer blockbusters this year, consider it a subtle hint to the Oval Office by way of Hollywood.

After US President Barack Obama demanded revamped provisions in the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, Los Angeles film executives are rescinding their support of the commander-in-chief.

While Hollywood hot-shots were in the past major contributors to the 2008 campaign for Barack Obama, movie execs are heated up over the presidents halting of SOPA. On the West Coast, filmmakers and affiliated are insisting that the move is a major blow to the movie industry and it will only further encourage an Internet already ripe with pirated motion pictures.

Under the proposed SOPA legislation, both websites and Web surfers involved in sharing copyrighted material would be imposed with hefty fines and imprisonment, imposing a government-sanctioned firewall of sorts to shut down a large chunk of the Web. Advocates for an open Internet have protested in droves against both SOPA and its sister legislation, the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, and a massive campaign against them both on Wednesday this week brought thousands of websites down to show the impact the laws could have. Search engine giant Google warned users of the acts’ implications on Wednesday, and both Wikipedia and Reddit turned their sites black for the day. On Twitter, users used the microblogging sight to tweet opposition to SOPA and for a while the term “Save Porn” became the top trending topic in America, as passed legislation would no-doubt cripple the online adult entertainment industry.

Although Obama has won the favor of much of Silicon Valley by striking down SOPA for now, downstate in the Hollywood Hills, executives are furious that the president has put his foot down on the legislation, potentially allowing for the sharing and pirating of films to continue endlessly.

In Los Angeles, execs are fearful of the consequences and are revoking their support. For Obama’s re-election campaign, that could be one big dent in his 2012 fundraising efforts out west.

President Obama has managed to garner substantial support from the Internet and computer tech industry, although the Democratic National Committee has, as of September 30, 2011, received around $1 million more from the Hollywood and entertainment industry than their Silicon Valley counterparts. Among those that are at the top of the donor list are DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenerg, who personally has raised more than $500,000 for Obama’s re-election so far and has contributed $2 million to a super PAC with similar viewpoints.

If the backlash already aimed at Obama is any indication, however, the amount in the money well might begin to dry up.

“We just feel very let down by the administration and Obama for not supporting us,” one anonymous movie exec tells the Hollywood-geared website Deadline.

Another executive, who is identified only as a well known movie mogul and a supporter of the administration until now adds, “At least let him remain neutral and not go against it until we can get the legislation right. But Obama went against it. I’m personally not going to support him anymore and not give a dime anymore.”

With Hollywood funding not just Obama but the Democrats as a whole, a rift is dividing the president’s own party as lawmakers are forced to take sides with anti-SOPA supporters and the entertainment industry.

Former Democratic Senator Chris Dodd campaigned for Obama in 2008 but today heads the Motion Picture Association of America. He called the blackout on Wednesday waged by anti-SOPA advocates “the height of irresponsibility” when speaking to MSNBC and equated it to children screaming until they hold their breath.

Others within the Hollywood elite, including Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, have in the past donated large sums to the Obama campaign, which hosted three separate fundraisers at the Sony Pictures movie studio in Los Angeles before.

While 19 US Senators flipped their stance regarding SOPA on Wednesday alone and became opponents of the bill, the vast majority of them are Republicans.

Democrats, on the other hand, are largely in support of both SOPA and PIPA, with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) personally raking in almost one million dollars from supporters of the legislation. In a report published by the Raw Story on Thursday, the top 20 beneficiaries of special interest money in favor of PIPA doubles as a roster of some of the left’s biggest names, including Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Patrick Leahy, among others. In all, writes the website, the total amount of money handed over to the Democrats on the list of supporters of the act from special interests favoring SOPA amounts to more than $7 million. Anti-SOPA lobbyists, in comparison, have only contributed $807,502 to those very same Democrats.

“God knows how much money we’ve given to Obama and the Democrats and yet they’re not supporting our interests,” another anonymous Hollywood insider tells Deadline. “There’s been no greater supporters of him than we’ve been from the first day and the first fundraisers continuing until he was elected. We all were pleased. And, at its heart institutionally, Hollywood supports the Democrats. Now we need the administration to support us. This is a very important time for Hollywood.”

The Internet and computer industry has supported the Democratic Party to the tune of $52 million since 2007, which the Center for Responsive Politics says is up $12 million from the period of 2001 to 2006.

In regards to the week’s blackout, a senior Democratic congressional staffer close to the issue tells the National Journal, “Before this happened, the perception around here was that those who are in favor of ever-increasing copyright protections always won.” Because of Wednesday’s blackout, adds the staffer, “This may shift people’s expectations. It’s hard to say how much, but I think in a way that we haven’t seen in a long time. Folks on the Hill are realizing that there are a lot of people out there, and not just tech companies, that care about copyright issues.”

“This is something that could be repeated, but it couldn’t be repeated on just any issue. It resonates with people in having the freedom to go on the Internet and not be censored,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California and an opponent of the bills, adds.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

American Censorship: SOPA - The Internet Blacklist Bill

Strike Against Sopa!

sopastrike.com

Internet goes on strike — blackout everywhere. This Wed Jan 18, many of your favorites sites--including this one--will be unavailable to you to stop web censorship. Tell everyone, petition even more sites to join.--jef

Break In Case Of Censorship

What Are Our Free Speech Fail-safes If SOPA Passes?

by Joshua_Kopstein - motherboard.vice.com

As I’m writing this, Congress is getting ready to vote on the single most destructive piece of legislation that the internet has ever faced. SOPA, penned by a team of corporate shills who now have swell lobbyist jobs to show for it, is a bill aimed at combating online piracy in the worst conceivable way possible: By giving copyright holders and the government overreaching, due process-circumventing powers to shut down entire websites based on the mere suspicion that they might contain infringing material.

Worst of all, it’s already happening. Even before the bill has come to vote, censorship shenanigans have already been demonstrated by Universal, who fraudulently removed a music video by Will.i.am that voiced opposition to SOPA. Now, imagine what will happen when SOPA is in full-swing and all of YouTube is held liable for bogus copyright claims … or Etsy, or Flickr.

Of course that says nothing of the countless technologists who have warned SOPA’s China-style DNS blocking will seriously fuck up the internet in general, so it’s really not hyperbolic to say that this is the worst nightmare of a democratic and stable internet.

So the question on everyone’s mind right now is what kind of free speech fail-safes exist if and when SOPA (and its twin in the Senate, PROTECT-IP) passes? Although we can’t guarantee that they will be 100 percent legal, here are a couple of them:


THE IP ADDRESS TRICK (THE DIRTY WAY)

The first is an extremely simple and dirty hack: Because SOPA’s provisions call for the re-routing of DNS (the web’s addressing system that links browsers with the computer hosting a site), the websites will still be there — you just won’t be able to get to them via the usual “www dot com” method. If a site gets blocked, typing the IP address of the host directly (eg: 192.168.1.1) would connect you to that site. The downside: This creates a lot of security risks for the site in question. The fact that DNS exists in part to mask these addresses from the average user should tell you something.

THE WORLD TOR

Tor is what some would call a “darknet,” a network that runs under the radar of the normal internet and can only be accessed using special client software. By connecting to the Tor network, you are anonymizing and encrypting your browsing activity by making your IP address appear as that of a random node somewhere else on the network. And since that random node will typically be outside of the United States, you won’t be getting routed away from sites the copyright elite have deemed “infringing.”

It’s scary to think that Tor might become an option for some Americans, seeing as how it’s been previously used to subvert censorship in places like China and Syria. But even with web traffic fully anonymized and virtually untraceable, it’s not merely a “censorship off” button and there are risks involved if you don’t know what you’re doing. Additionally, securing the means of connecting to (and obtaining information about) the Tor network could become a lot more difficult for newcomers if Tor’s website gets blocked. And moreover, doing so would likely be illegal under SOPA on grounds that it is exists to subvert the filtering system being put in place.

The Bitcoin “Dimnet”

Dot.Bit is another hidden network similar to Tor but operating off a system of encrypted “tokens,” acquired in a way very much like Bitcoins, the decentralized digital currency system . Potentially a boon for sites that want to run outside the reach of the censor, Dot.Bit allows these tokens to be used in order to anonymously register domains under its network, which are accessed under the Top-level Domain (TLD) .bit

This seems like a great idea, but even .bit domains run the risk of being targeted under SOPA. If the law requires ISPs to block access, it would be a simple matter of cutting off the ports that those domains run on. And if those domains are involved in shady black market dealings like the rest of the Bitcoin network, they’ll have ample reason to do so.

All in all, the options are either incredibly obtuse, risky or likely to become illegal anyway. But one thing is for certain: SOPA and PROTECT-IP’s ‘killing spiders with a sledgehammer’ strategy isn’t going to smash piracy — it’s just going to make the internet a lot messier.

The Author of SOPA Is a Copyright Violator

By Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, Digg.com

 

US Congressman and poor-toupee-color-chooser Lamar Smith is the guy who authored the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as I'm sure you know, is the shady bill that will introduce way harsher penalties for companies and individuals caught violating copyright laws online (including making the unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime which you could actually go to jail for). If the bill passes, it will destroy the internet (for more info, go here).

I decided to check that everything on Lamar's official campaign website was copyright-cleared and on the level. Lamar is using several stock images on his site, two of which I tracked back to the same photographic agency. I contacted the agency to make sure he was paying to use them, but was told that it's very difficult for them to actually check to see if someone has permission to use their images. (Great news, copyright violators!) However, seeing as they're both from the same agency and are unwatermarked, it seems fairly likely that he is the only person on the entire internet who is actually paying to use a stock image (and he'd be an idiot not to).

So I took a look back at an archived, pre-SOPA version of his site.

This is a screenshot of his site as it appeared on the 24th of July, 2011.

And this is the background image Lamar was using. I managed to track that picture back to DJ Schulte, the photographer who took it.

And whaddya know? Looks like someone forgot to credit him.

I contacted DJ, to find out if Lamar had asked permission to use the image and he told me that he had no record of Lamar, or anyone from his organization, requesting permission to use it: "I switched my images from traditional copyright protection to be protected under the Creative Commons license a few years ago, which simply states that they can use my images as long as they attribute the image to me and do not use it for commercial purposes.

"I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith's organization did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com."

The News Networks' SOPA Blackout

Monday, January 9, 2012 by Save the Internet

by Josh Levy

 

You may have heard about the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. Simply put, this Web-censorship bill in the House could open the door to widespread Internet censorship.

Opposition to the bill has reached a boiling point. Millions of activists, hundreds of startups, social media sites like Tumblr, Reddit and Twitter and even big companies like Google, Yahoo! and eBay have joined with Free Press and other Internet advocacy groups against it.

This is one of the biggest tech stories of the year. Yet as a recent report from Media Matters for America shows, TV news has ignored it.

According to the report, SOPA — and Protect IP, its cousin in the Senate — have “received virtually no coverage from major American television news outlets during their evening newscasts and opinion programming.” Among the offenders are ABC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC and NBC.

A likely reason for the media blackout? The big networks — and their parent companies — support these two Internet-censorship bills.

This is what happens when the interests of big business get in the way of the need to inform the public and protect free speech. These same media giants are lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to loosen its ownership rules and allow for even more media consolidation — another issue they’ve failed to cover. If the FCC permits runaway consolidation, media blackouts like the one affecting SOPA could become even more common.

Meanwhile, rank-and-file journalists are coming out strong against these censorship bills. And print media have reported on them. Earlier this month New York Times columnist David Carr wrote that SOPA was “alarming in its reach.” Time, the Atlantic, Forbes and the Boston Globe have all reported on the legislation in the past week.

What is TV news afraid of?

These networks — ABC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC and NBC — need to be held accountable for failing to provide coverage of such damaging legislation.

Does A Simple Firefox Add-On Make SOPA Useless? (2 articles, video)

Are browser add-ons the key to defeating SOPA?  
Chris Richardson | December 20, 2011

As the world of SOPA continues to turn, the emergence of a simple Firefox browser add-on may render the potential punitive actions of these protection acts null and void; or, at least ineffective, if not outright useless.

Firefox, which already boasts an outspoken stance against SOPA, and has already shown they are willing to stand by add-on developers who create circumvention extensions designed to go around measures currently employed by Homeland Security, has welcomed a new add-on, one that is designed to circumvent whatever SOPA website blacklists that are created, provided the bills become law.

Working much like the MAFIAAFire Redirector extension, the DeSopa add-on was developed by Tamer Rizk, and designed with SOPA circumvention in mind. Naturally, the idea behind the add-on is to be in defiance of the oft-maligned protection act. This even includes the extension’s name, “DeSopa,” which is short for, “DNS Evasion to Stop Oppressive Policy in America.” On the extension’s page, there’s also a multiple paragraph manifesto of sorts, detailing the developer’s stance.

An example:

This program is a proof of concept that SOPA will not help prevent piracy. The program, implemented as a Firefox extension, simply contacts offshore domain name resolution services to obtain the IP address for any desired website, and accesses those websites directly via IP. Similar offshore resolution services will eventually maintain their own cache of websites, without blacklisting, in order to meet the demand created by SOPA.

If SOPA is implemented, thousands of similar and more innovative programs and services will sprout up to provide access to the websites that people frequent. SOPA is a mistake. It does not even technically help solve the underlying problem, as this software illustrates. What it will do is give undue leverage to predatory organizations, cripple innocent third party websites, severely dampen digital innovation and negatively impact the integrity and security of the Internet.

If you’ll notice, the blocked quote also contains a description of how it works and if this is all it takes to sidestep/circumvent/defeat SOPA measures — “[DeSopa] simply contacts offshore domain name resolution services to obtain the IP address for any desired website, and accesses those websites directly via IP” — then these protection acts are worth less than the paper they’re written on.

The sad things is, if you were to point these shortcomings out to the government officials who support SOPA/PIPA, there’s a strong possibility it would get ignored, or they would pass it anyway and worry about the details later.

As far as the inevitable backlash that DeSopa will probably get from concerned government officials, keep in mind, Mozilla has already outspokenly stood by the MAFIAAFire Redirector, so I would expect the same when it comes to DeSopa.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Which tech companies back SOPA? Microsoft, Apple, and 27 others

November 19, 2011

After writing a rather lengthy and somewhat firey post on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) yesterday, I realized this morning that I didn’t know Microsoft’s position on the matter. As I edit our Microsoft channel, I immediately sent off a query to the company concerning the Act.

To my surprise it took some time to hear back, and when I did get word the response was ‘no comment.’ Obviously intrigued, I dug into the issue. As it turns out, ‘no comment’ is Microsoft’s official position on SOPA. The company has made no noise at all on the issue, other than what I would wager is a rather conspicuous silence.

But Microsoft did support the pre-SOPA Protect IP Act, something that SOPA did draw on heavily for its roots. To quote the official page on the House website: “The Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261) builds on the Protect IP Act of 2008 and the Senate’s Protect IP Act introduced earlier this year.” So we have Microsoft supporting the intellectual ancestor of SOPA, but that’s certainly not enough to say that the company supports SOPA outright.

We can, however, show that it does. And somewhat disingenuously, if I may. You see, Microsoft is a major player in the Business Software Alliance, along with Apple and 27 other companies. And the BSA supports SOPA. This is from a recent BSA bulletin:

The Business Software Alliance today commended House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) for introducing the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (H.R. 3261) to curb the growing rash of software piracy and other forms of intellectual property theft that are being perpetrated by illicit websites.

Yeah, how about that. In short, Microsoft is using a front group to throw its support behind SOPA, while publicly saying and doing nothing, thus avoiding our rancor and displeasure. Well, no, that won’t do at all.

The following list is every single member of the Business Software Alliance. Each of them is complicit in supporting SOPA unless they publicly distance themselves from the BSA on the issue. As the companies are, presumably, dues paying members of the BSA, they are financially supporting the enaction of SOPA.

• Adobe
  
• Apple
  
• Autodesk
  
• AVEVA
  
• AVG
  
• Bentley Systems
  
• CA
  
• Cadence Design Systems
  
• CNC Software – Mastercam
  
• Compuware
  
• Corel
  
• Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corporation
  
• Dell
  
• Intel
  
• Intuit
  
• Kaspersky
  
• McAfee
  
• Microsoft
  
• Minitab
  
• Progress Software
  
• PTC
  
• Quark
  
• Quest
  
• Rosetta Stone
  
• Siemens PLM Software, Inc.
  
• Sybase
  
• Symantec
  
• TechSmith
  
• The MathWorks
  

To learn more about SOPA, and why you should be afraid of it, head here.

Movie executives see record profits, salaries despite piracy fear-mongering

By Stephen C. Webster - RAW Story
Tuesday, December 13, 2011


Movie industry lobbyists like to say that online piracy costs their clients billions of dollars every year, and it’s getting worse — but that’s doesn’t quite seem to be the case, according to data released this week by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS).

The CRS report (embedded below) shows that the movie industry is doing very well, earning record profits and paying executives more than ever, even as it hires fewer workers than it did just a decade ago. 

Although a recent National Crime Prevention Council ad campaign tries to make the point that piracy kills jobs, the CRS found that total gross revenues and box office receipts have doubled in the last 15 years. Grosses went from $52.8 billion in 1995 to $104.4 billion in 2009, while box office receipts went from $5.3 billion in 1995 to $10.6 billion in 2010 — yet hiring still went down.

One thing that has gone up, higher than ever, is executive pay. The CRS report noted that News Corporation paid CEO Rupert Murdoch $33,292,753 in 2011; Viacom gave CEO Philippe Dauman $84,515,308; Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes took home $26,303,071; while Disney CEO Robert A. Lger earned $29,617,964. Sony CEO Howard Stringer was at the bottom of the bunch at $4.3 million, having taken a 14 percent pay cut due to losses.

Those salaries are quite hefty compared to the top earners just a decade and a half ago. At Disney, former CEO Michael Eisner’s total compensation was $10 million in 1994, while Time Warner was compensating former CEO Gerald M. Levin $5 million, the CRS reported. Historical data for the other executives was not included.

The CRS report further shows that employment by film studios and related service companies has remained relatively stable since 1998. Though there have been spikes and slumps in hiring over the years, about 374,000 people worked full or part time making movies last year, down from 392,000 in 1998. That’s on the upswing from a low in 2009, when employment dipped just below 370,000.

Despite what the industry’s lobbyists are telling lawmakers, it’s impossible to say whether a minor slump in hiring is really reflective of piracy’s effects. That seemingly proves the industry’s biggest concern is not the Jack Sparrows of the Internet, but rather Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

“Revenues from the U.S. movie industry’s home entertainment sector have been declining in recent years,” the report noted. “According to the Digital Entertainment Group, an industry-funded nonprofit, total U.S. spending on home entertainment, including movies and television content, was $13.9 billion in 1999. Spending rose to a peak of $21.8 billion in 2004, before declining gradually to $18.8 billion in 2010. The decline partly reflects the shift to less expensive video-on-demand services, such as Netflix.”

Netflix said that as of Sept. 30, it had 23.79 million customers, a slight decline over the previous quarter due to subscriber losses after a recent price hike. And in spite of the CRS report, Netflix insists it is good for studios.

“Netflix is a boon to the entertainment industry, paying more than $1 billion a year to the studios for licensing rights to stream movies and TV shows over the internet for more than 20 million Netflix members to instantly watch,” spokesman Steve Swasey told Raw Story. “In addition, Netflix purchases DVDs for more than 10 million Netflix members who receive discs by mail.”

With their convenience factor and low cost of entry, Netflix has become a tremendous success, even as it has depressed sales of home videos. Much like what Apple’s iTunes did for music, driving down piracy and opening up new revenue, albeit in smaller streams than what the industry once knew, Netflix is doing for movies. But instead of working with them to provide a compelling alternative to piracy, studios are playing hardball with Netflix, raising prices on their streaming contracts.

Netflix is expected to pay over $1.98 billion next year to keep the bulk of its online library, up from $180 million in 2010. To make matters worse for Netflix, network owners like Time Warner and Comcast are rolling out their own video-on-demand services and setting caps on users’ bandwidth consumption. That will ultimately make them pay more for streaming large chunks of data, which cuts into the amount of time people can spend watching Netflix or downloading pirated content.

Netflix at present time accounts for up to 30 percent of Internet traffic in North America during peak hours, according to network measurement firm Sandvine (PDF). That means Netflix far outweighs movies being downloaded from the peer-to-peer network bittorrent, which Sandvine estimates accounts for roughly 21 percent of Internet traffic.

Breaking that figure down further still, a study into online piracy conducted by intelligence firm Envisional Inc., commissioned by NBC Universal and often cited by movie industry lobbyists, claims that just 35 percent of bittorrent traffic was people trading movies illegally. By comparison, another 35 percent was dedicated to sharing pornography not under copyright to studios, and another 29 percent was television shows, books, music, software and games.

But even with those numbers, it is impossible to extrapolate exactly what percentage of the total is purely infringing traffic, as some bittorrent downloads are legitimate. And even if that figure could be determined, studies have shown that those most involved in copyright infringement are typically the movie industry’s best customers, meaning a final total number for overall losses due to piracy is impossible to calculate.

As entertainment industry lobbyists hammer members of Congress about the need to fundamentally change the structure of the Internet by passing the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, Parker Higgins, a spokesperson for technology advocacy group The Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he hopes they remember that even today’s declining home video market was once in the studios’ cross-hairs.

“The home video market is one that the movie industry tried to crush in its infancy, by trying to outlaw the VCR,” he told Raw Story. “This is an industry whose take on new technology you can’t really trust.”

The MPAA did not respond to a request for comment.

The full CRS report follows.
####

CRS Memo

Stop Online Piracy Act Can Be Used to Shut Down Legitimate Websites

By Madison Ruppert
End The Lie

The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, proposed in the House of Representatives, would put completely legitimate sites like countless alternative news outlets at risk of being shut down, along with literally any site that freely allows users to post content.That includes YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Blogger, Craigslist, Dropbox and literally any website or service that allows users to upload content.

The United States Attorney General can not only seek court orders against “foreign infringing sites,” meaning any website with a non-U.S. domain name, but can also demand that internet service providers (ISPs) would have to cut off access to the site by not resolving domain name requests.

If served with one of the Attorney General’s court orders, search engines would have to remove any links to the site, payment networks would have to stop all payments to the site from U.S. customers and advertising networks would be forced to stop serving advertisements about the website or for the website.

SOPA would require that within five days of receiving an allegation by a copyright holder, payment services and advertising networks would have to cut off all business with the site either U.S. based or foreign.


All the copyright holder has to do is allege that the site is “dedicated to the theft of property,” and if the payment provider and advertising networks don’t cease business within five days, the copyright holder can file a private lawsuit against the site compelling the payment service and others to cut off relations.

The Atlantic reports that the definition of “dedicated” in this bill “has little relation to common usage,” and in addressing the bill they characterize it as experts in the technical, operational, academic and research communities who are the leading domain name system (DNS) designers, operators, and researchers who have also published numerous peer-reviewed academic studies regarding the architecture and security of the DNS have pointed out (PDF), this will create major cybersecurity and other technical concerns that did not exist previously.

The above-linked technical whitepaper regarding the PROTECT IP Act also quite interestingly points out that the DNS filters could be easily circumvented, essentially making one of the biggest parts of the bill null and void.

The thing that the House and Senate don’t seem to realize is that there will always be online pirates and they will always find a way around whatever roadblocks are put in their way.
The issue is that this can and likely will be used to target important platforms for sharing information like YouTube and blog platforms like WordPress and Blogger.

All it would take is for a copyright holder to find one bit of infringing content and then it could very well be the end of the website, despite the massive amounts of legitimate content.
We must remember that major websites like YouTube and blog platforms are quite skilled and hasty when it comes to removing infringing content from their websites.

SOPA would also endanger the entire spirit of the internet which has pioneered social media and free expression, giving a platform to writers like myself who might otherwise be sidelined by the establishment media.

The following are companies that signed this letter which was written in support of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, which is the House’s equivalent of the PROTECT IP Act, which I have previously exposed as China-style internet censorship on steroids.

1-800 Contacts, Inc.
1-800-PetMeds
2b1 Inc
3M Company
ABRO Industries, Inc.
Acushnet Company
adidas America
Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed)
Allen Russell Photograph
Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers
Alliance of Visual Artists (AVA)
Altria Client Services
American Apparel and Footwear Association
American Association of Independent Music (A2IM)
American Board of Internal Medicine
American Federation of Musicians
American Gramaphone LLC
American Made Alliance
American Mental Health Counselors Association
American Photographic Artists
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP)
American Society of Media Photographers
American Society of Picture Professionals
American Watch Association
Anatoly Pronin Photography
Andrea Rugg Photography
Anti-Counterfeiting and Piracy Initiative (ACAPI)
Applied DNA Sciences
Art Holeman Photography
Association of American Publishers (AAP)
Association of Equipment Manufacturers
Association of Independent Music Publishers (AIMP)
Association of Test Publishers
AstraZeneca plc
Australian Medical Council
Autodesk, Inc.
Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association
Baker & Taylor Ent.
Bay State Psychological Associates
Beachbody, LLC
Beam Global Spirits & Wine
Blue Sky Studios, Inc.
Bose Corporation
Braasch Biotech LLC
Brian Stevenson Photography
Brigid Collins Family Support Center
Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI)
Burberry
C. F. Martin & Co., Inc.
Callaway Golf Company
Cascade Designs Incorporated
Caterpillar Inc.
Caveon, LLC
CBS Corporation
Cengage Learning
Center for Credentialing & Education
Center Stage Photography
CFA Institute
Chanel USA
Christopher Semmes Photography
Church Music Publishers Association
CMH Images
Coach
Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy (CACP)
Columbia Sportswear Company
Comcast Corporation
Commercial Photo Design
Commercial Photographers International
Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System
Consumer Healthcare Products Association
Copyright Alliance
Copyright Clearance Center (CCC)
Coty Inc.
Council of Fashion Designers of America
Country Music Association
CropLife America
Cross-Entertainment LLC
CSA Group
CVS Caremark
D’Addario & Company, Inc.
Dan Sherwood Photography
Danita Delimont Stock Photography
Dayco Products, LLC
Deluxe Entertainment Services Group
Dennyfoto
Derek DiLuzio Photography
DeVaul Photography
Direct Selling Association (DSA)
Directional Insight
Distefano Enterprises Inc.
Doriguzzi Photographic Artistry
Dolby Laboratories, Inc.
Dolce & Gabbana USA, INC.
Dollar General Corporation
Don Grall Photography
Dunford Architectural Photography
Eagle Rock Entertainment
Ed McDonald Photography
Educational & Industrial Testing Service
Electronic Arts, Inc.
Electronic Components Industry Association (ECIA)
Eli Lilly and Company
Englebert Photography
Entertainment Software Association (ESA)
ERAI, Inc.
Eric Meola Studio Inc
Evidence Photographers International Council
Ex Officio
Exxel Outdoors
FAME Publishing Co., LLC.
FAME Recording Studios
Far Bank Enterprises
Fashion Business Incorporated
Federation of State Boards of Physical Therapy
Fender Musical Instrument Company
Footwear Distributors & Retailers of America (FDRA)
Ford Motor Company
Fortune Brands, Inc.
Fred J. Lord Photography
GAR Associates
Gelderland Productions, L.L.C.
Gemvision Corporation
Gibson Guitar Corp.
GlaxoSmithKline
Gospel Music Association
Governors America Corp.
Graduate Management Admission Council
Graphic Artists Guild
Greeting Card Association (GCA)
Greg Nikas Photography
Guru Denim
H.S. Marketing & Design, Inc.
Harley-Davidson Motor Company
HarperCollins Publishers
Harry Fox Agency
Hastings Entertainment, Inc.
ICM Distributing Company, Inc.
IDS Publishing
IEC Electronics corp.
Images Plus
Imaging Supplies Coalition (ISC)
Independent Distributors of Electronics Association (IDEA)
INgrooves
Innate-gear
International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC)
International Trademark Association (INTA)
IPC-Association Connecting Electronics Industries
Ira Montgomery Photography
J.S. Grove Photography
James Drug Inc.
Jaynes Gallery
JCPage Photography
Jean Poland Photography
Jeff Stevensen Photography
John Fulton Photography
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Johnson & Johnson
Juicy Couture, Inc
Julien McRoberts Photography
K&R Photographics
kate spade
Kekepana International Services
Kenneth Garrett, photographer for National Geographic
Killing Jar Productions LLC
Lacoste USA
Leatherman Tool Group, Inc.
Lexmark International, Inc.
Light Perspectives
Linda Olsen Photography
Little Dog Records
Liz Claiborne, Inc
L’Oréal USA
Lucky Brand Jeans
LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton
Macmillan
Major League Baseball
Marcia Andberg Associates LLC
Mark Niederman Photography
Marmot
Marona Photography
McLain Photography Inc
Merck & Co., Inc.
Messy Face Designs, Inc.
Michael Stern Photography
MicroRam Electronics, Inc.
Minter Works of Art
Mira Images
Monster Cable Products, Inc.
Moose’s Photos
Morningstar Films LLC
Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA)
MotionMasters
Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association
MPA – The Association of Magazine Media
Mr. Theodor Feibel (sole proprietor)
Music Managers Forum-U.S.
Nashville Songwriters Association International
Natalie Neckyfarow Actor/Dancer/Singer
National Association of Broadcasters
National Association of Manufacturers
National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM)
National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO)
National Basketball Association (NBA)
National Board for Certified Counselors
National Board for Certified Counselors Foundation
National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA)
National Football League (NFL)
National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA)
National Retail Federation (NRF)
NBCUniversal
Nervous Tattoo Inc., dba Ed Hardy
New Balance Athletic Shoe, Inc.
New Era Cap Co Inc
New Levels Ent. Co. LLC
News Corporation
Next Decade Entertainment, Inc.
NHL Enterprises, L.P.
Nicholas Petrucci, Artist, LLC
Nike, Inc.
Nintendo of America Inc.
Nissle Fine Art Photography
North Dakota Pharmacists Association
North Dakota Pharmacy Service Corporation
Oakley, Inc.
One Voice Recordings
OpSec Security, Inc.
Outdoor Industry Association
Outdoor Power Equipment Institute (OPEI)
Outdoor Research, Inc
Pacific Component Xchange, Inc.
Party Killer Films LLC
Pearson Clinical Assessment
Peavey Electronics Corporation
Perry Ellis International
Personal Care Products Council
Peter C. Brandt, Architectural and Fine Art Photography
Peter Hawkins Photography, Inc.
Petzl America
Pfizer Inc.
PGA of America
Philip Morris International
Photojournalist Dave Bartruff
Picture Archive Council of America (PACA)
Pigfactory Music
PING
PNW Images
Premier League
Production Music Association (PMA)
Professional Photographers of America
Quality Float Works, Inc.
Raging Waters Music
Ralph Lauren Corporation
Ramsay Corporation
Rebel Photo
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
Red4 Music/Doogs Rock Inc
Red Wing Shoe Company
Reebok International Ltd.
Reed Elsevier Inc.
Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA)
Revlon
Richard Flutie Photography
Rite Aid
Robin Davis Photography, Inc.
Rodger Scott Craig, a member of Liverpool Express, The Merseybeats, Fortune, Harlan
Cage, 101 South, and Mtunz Media
Roger Smith Photography Services
Rolex Watch USA Inc.
Romance Writers of America (RWA)
Rosetta Stone Inc.
Saddle Creek
Sage Studios LLC
Sam D’Amico Photography
Schneider Electric
Sean McGinty Photography
Secret Sea Visions (Photography)
SESAC, Inc.
SG Industries, Inc.
Shure Incorporated
SIGMA Assessment Systems
Six Degrees Records
Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council
SMC Entertainment
SMT Corp.
SoBe Entertainment
Society of Sport & Event Photographers
Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA)
Sony Electronics Inc.
Sony Music Entertainment
Sony Pictures Entertainment
Soul Appeal Records and Music
SoundExchange
Southern Gothic LLC
Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA)
SPI (The Plastics Industry Trade Association)
Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association
Sports Rights Owners Coalition
Spring Fever Productions LLC
Spyder Active Sports, Inc
Stenbakken Photography
Stephen Dantzig Photography
Stock Artist Alliance
Stuart Weitzman Holdings, LLC
Student Photographic Society
Studio 404
SunRise Solar Inc.
Taylor Glenn Photographs
Taylor Guitars
Taylor Made Golf Company, Inc.
Tednologies, Inc.
The Cambridge Don
The Collegiate Licensing Company/IMG College
The Donath Group, Inc.
The Dow Chemical Company
The Estee Lauder Companies
The McGraw-Hill Companies
The Music People! Inc.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)
The Recording Academy (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences)
The Timberland Company
The Walt Disney Company
Tiffany & Co.
Time Warner Inc.
Tony Bullard Photography
Toshiba America Business Solutions, Inc.
TRA Global
Tricoast Worldwide
Trio Productions, Inc. / Songscape Music,
Twist & Shout, Inc.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Ultimate Fighting Championship
Underwriters Laboratories Inc.
Universal Music Group
Uniweld Products Inc.
VF Corporation
Viacom
Vibram USA, Inc
Virtual Chip Exchange USA, Inc.
Voltage Pictures, LLC
W.R. Case & Sons Cutlery Co.
Walcott Studio, LLC
Wal-Mart
Warner Music Group
Wendy Kaveney Photography
Western Psychological Services
Westmorland Images, LLC
Wild & Associates, Inc.
Wild Eye Photos LLC
William Sutton Photography
Willis Music
WindLegends Ink LLC
Winestem Company
Winslow Research Institute
Wolfe Video
Wolverine World Wide, Inc.
Woolrich, Inc.
World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.
Xerox Corporation
Zippo Manufacturing Company
Zumba Fitness, LLC