IPAA Wording Virtually the Same as SOPA

With very few differences.

Read the full text of IPAA here (pdf).

Copyright enforcement and the Internet: we just haven't tried hard enough?

By Timothy B. Lee - Ars Technica

On Tuesday, Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum suggested that we don't have effective copyright enforcement on the Internet because we just haven't tried hard enough:

Something that's good enough to provide a measure of IP protection that works for the vast majority of non-supermen and isn't too unwieldy. Is that really any more unlikely than the invention of the internet itself? I'm not sure why. 

This is not something you want to believe if, ideologically, you're opposed to IP protection because you think that digital content is fundamentally different from meatspace content on the grounds that making a digital copy of something doesn't reduce anyone else's ability to use their copy. But neither does copying a book. That's never been the point of IP law. It's always been about the income stream an author can get from selling copies of his or her work, and that's exactly the same in the digital world as it is in the physical world. The arguments in favor of IP protection are much the same in both domains.

You might not want to hear that, but just because you don't want to hear it doesn't mean it's not true. The truth is that IP protection in the digital world might very well be possible. We won't know until we try, making a whole lot of mistakes along the way. If you want to argue that IP protection is a bad idea, then fine. Make the argument. But don't pretend that your preferences are also technological certitudes. They aren't.

The phrase that jumped out at me was "we won't know until we try." Among people who don't pay close attention to technology issues, there seems to be a widespread impression that the copyright debate pits those who think we should enforce copyright against those who are ideologically opposed to copyright protection. But the reality is that we've been "trying" to crack down on illicit file sharing for at least two decades, granting copyright holders stronger and stronger enforcement powers and devoting more and more taxpayer dollars to the effort.

This might not be obvious to those who only write about these issues on occasion. So in the interest of a better-informed debate, here's a partial list of significant US anti-piracy efforts made over the last couple of decades:

• 1992: Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act, which mandated that digital audio devices have copy protection baked into them, and it also imposed a tax on blank media to offset harms from digital piracy.

• 1997: Congress passed the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act, which jacked up statutory damages for copyright infringement.

• 1997: The recording industry tried to sue the first MP3 players out of existence. Fortunately, courts argued that "space shifting" is a fair use. (This was a sequel to Hollywood's effort to have the VCR declared illegal on copyright grounds in the early 1980s.)

• 1998: Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which effectively gave Hollywood the power to control the design of entertainment devices; all that was needed was to link new technologies with particular DRM schemes. Manufacturers couldn't crack the DRM, thanks to the new law, so they had to take out a license for its use, complete with a whole set of unrelated conditions. This is why, for example, most DVD players will refuse to fast-forward through commercials in a DVD if the publisher sets the "don't allow fast-forwarding" flag. Hollywood has used its rights under the DMCA to create a licensing regime for DVD players that allows it to micro-manage the design of DVD players, and consumer electronics firms that try to create a DVD player without Hollywood's permission are subject to civil and criminal penalties.

• 2000: The recording industry forced My.MP3.com out of business. My.MP3.com was one of the first "cloud music" services. It wasn't a file-sharing site. Rather, it allowed users to listen to their own music collections while on the road. The decision probably delayed the emergence of cloud music services like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player by a decade.

• 2001: The recording industry successfully forced Napster out of business.

• Early 2000s: Under pressure from Hollywood, most states adopted laws criminalizing recording movies with camcorders.

• 2003: The recording industry began suing individual file-sharers, a process it continued for at least five years.

• 2004: Hollywood sued Kaleidescape for creating a "DVD jukebox" product that allowed users to rip DVDs and stream them to various devices around their household. That litigation is ongoing, and likely prevented the emergence of similar products.

• 2005: content companies shut down the file-sharing service Grokster and several of its competitors after a lengthy court battle.

• 2007: Hollywood sued MP3tunes, another cloud music site by the same guy who created My.MP3.com. The courts mostly sided with MP3tunes in 2011, but the case is ongoing.

• 2008: Congress passed the PRO-IP Act, which gives the government the power to seize US-based domain names after a one-sided ex parte legal process similar to the one used to seize the property of drug dealers. The PRO-IP Act also jacks up the penalties for other copyright offenses, and it created a new "IP Czar" position in the executive branch.

• 2010: The federal government began seizing domains of accused pirate sites using the powers granted by PRO-IP. The program has resulted in several dubious seizures and a couple of outright errors, though has also taken down sites like NinjaVideo in advance of prosecution and later guilty pleas from its principals. 

• 2011: The US government sought the extradition of a British college student for operating a "link site." Neither he nor his servers were located in the United States during the time he ran the site, and it's not clear if he violated British law.

• 2011: Under pressure from the Obama administration, major ISPs adopted a voluntary "graduated response" system in which they will soon play a more active role in enforcing copyright on their networks.

• 2012: The United States raided and shut down Megaupload, a file-hosting site that hosted a lot of infringing content and was one of the most heavily trafficked sites in the world. The principals of the site were arrested and at least their CEO has been denied bail.

This is a partial list, focusing on the most significant anti-piracy efforts undertaken in recent years. To be clear, my point isn't that all of these policies are bad. I think the case against Napster and Grokster was pretty strong (and said so at the time in the case of Grokster). The US version of the "graduated response" system seems fairly reasonable to me, and I haven't always found locker and link sites' legal arguments persuasive.

But the broader point is clear: every item on this list has imposed costs on third parties. Technologies with clear non-infringing uses have been pushed out of the market. Innocent parties have had their websites shut down. A woman was arrested for filming a birthday party that happened to occur in a movie theater. Angel investor Paul Graham has said he avoids funding music-related startups because the record labels are "effectively a rogue state with nuclear weapons." And most of these enforcement efforts costs taxpayer money.

Individually, none of these things might be worth getting upset over. But in the aggregate, they reflect a disproportionate focus on the interests of a handful of large companies. It's hard to think of a single example during this twenty-year period of copyright restrictions being repealed, relaxed, or any in any meaningful way liberalized. Reform proposals like the orphan works bill have languished.

Drum suggests that opposition to further increases in copyright enforcement comes from people who are "ideologically opposed to IP protection." But most of us are not anti-copyright; we just think enough is enough, and that the menu of enforcement tools Congress has already given to copyright holders is more than sufficient. We're tired of the constantly increasing copyright enforcement efforts because most of the costs of the "mistakes along the way" fall on innocent consumers, innovators, and taxpayers.

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.

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."

Rep. Paul Ryan warns anti-piracy bill may lead to Internet ‘censorship’

By Stephen C. Webster - RAW Story
Monday, January 9, 2012

One of the most conservative members of Congress signaled on Monday what may be the beginning of the end for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA): Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee and one of the GOP’s frontmen against so-called “job killing regulations,” has officially come out against it.

Taking issue with its potential for abuse, Ryan said that SOPA could actually be a new kind of onerous regulation — the one thing Republicans hate most.

“The Internet is one of the most magnificent expressions of freedom and free enterprise in history,” Ryan explained in a prepared statement. “It should stay that way. While H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act, attempts to address a legitimate problem, I believe it creates the precedent and possibility for undue regulation, censorship and legal abuse. I do not support H.R. 3261 in its current form and will oppose the legislation should it come before the full House.”

Ryan’s statement comes days after a group of activists with the social media forum Reddit.com launched a campaign called “Pull Ryan,” in reaction to rumors that he was in favor of SOPA. Ryan later disavowed those rumors and insisted he hadn’t made up his mind.

Ryan is not the only prominent conservative to come out against SOPA. Although the bill was sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and supported by many of his fellow Republicans, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is also opposed.

“As a former tech entrepreneur and patent holder, I know that innovation depends on strong intellectual property rights and robust enforcement tools,” Issa explained to Raw Story in December. “SOPA, however, goes far beyond what is necessary to protect the rights of intellectual property owners from foreign rogue sites. It would put tremendous new regulatory and monitoring burdens on legitimate commerce in the digital space, leave the internet less secure and ultimately handicaps the policies that have allowed digital job creators to flourish.”

He also changed the profile photo on his personal Facebook page to a black box with the word “CENSORED” in the middle, in protest of the bill. Issa has a history working with technology products for automobiles. He is also part of a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House and Senate who’ve proposed an alternative to SOPA, called the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act.

Instead of using the courts to force search engines and ISPs to block websites accused of copyright infringement, as SOPA and Protect IP would, the alternative suggests simply cutting them off from all sources of funding, just like the banks did to WikiLeaks.

The lawmakers would accomplish this by regulating illegal downloads as a matter of international commerce. Doing so, the group of lawmakers hope to see the International Trade Commission (ITC) take charge of combating piracy, instead of judges. The ITC would be tasked with reviewing claims of online infringement against foreign website owners, and ordering them cut off from funding sources if the claims prove true.

It would also set up a rapid-response mechanism for temporary disconnections from funding if an imminent harm can be demonstrated by a copyright holder, such as broadcasters who air live events that are being illegally streamed online.

The House has delayed further hearings on SOPA until later in January, when it’s expected to come up for a vote before the House at-large.

A spokesman for Rep. Ryan did not return a request for comment.