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Senate bill amounts to death penalty for Web sites
- jim-greer 15y agoHere's EFF's take on the bill: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/protect-ip-act-coica-redux http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/protect-ip-act-coica-re...
- madmaze 15y agoThis is certainly a way to go about taking websites off of the most commonly used web. And cutting off ad funding is like strangling them. But this power can very well be misused and used to quiet organizations. I dont believe the government should have the power to dictate who is allowed to do business with who. Also filtering DNS is only a precursor of what is to come with internet censorship.
- wccrawford 15y agoCould you imagine if corporations were required to blacklist all companies that had done anything illegal? Everything would crumble. This is such a ridiculous idea.
- madmaze 15y agoEspecially because the government dictates what is considered illegal. Should I welcome us to china?
- corin_ 15y agoWhat? Now, I don't support internet censorship, but unless you support anarchy, who do you expect to decide on laws? That's a fairly large part of what governments are meant to do.
- wccrawford 15y agoI think his point was that since the government creates laws, and companies could deal with other companies that broke those laws, the government could destroy any corporation it wanted, at any time. Not that it can't do so now, but it's a lot harder to blind the public about it, and it would take quite a bit longer. With this law, it would be an overnight thing.
- corin_ 15y agoThis law is terrible, yes, but the issue is with this law, not with the fact that the government "dictates what is considered illegal".
- madmaze 15y agoI understand the government always dictates what is considered legal/illegal, maybe I used the wrong wording. But My issue is that if they have the power to regulate the internet and what the internet displays, they have the ability to censor what every they like. If kept unmonitored this could threaten freedom of speech and press.
- corin_ 15y agoIn that case apologies for misunderstanding, I read your comment as one of those generic pointless fuck the man comments that are normally written by 14 year olds. "Government making laws? WE'RE IN CHINA!" Understood now :)
- lukeschlather 15y agoThe issue is that the executive branch is being granted broad judicial powers, much like with the Patriot act.
- CWuestefeld 15y agoGood question, I never thought about it this way. Why does IP get such special protections? Why not blacklist companies that cheat on their taxes, or violate EPA regs?
- Natsu 15y ago> Why does IP get such special protections? A lot of expensive lobbyists.
- dedward 15y agoAs soon as the door is opened to allow this for IP, everthing else will follow like a tidal wave.
- anigbrowl 15y agoBecause copying and duplication of IP are trivially easy over the digital infrastructure. The shutdown measures are primarily injunctive rather than penal. Firms in other industries often have sanctions imposed on them as well, but they're not as obvious to those outside that industry.
- beedogs 15y agoCan? Will be misused.
- Natsu 15y agoHas been misused. They already falsely accused a great many sites of being associated with pedophilia in one of their domain seizures. And now they want to expand that program.
- heyimfromreddit 15y agoThis is scary. I run a popular forum on which users sometimes post links to copyrighted materials – despite the fact that it's explicitly against the rules. Because of this I occasionally receive DCMA takedown notices regarding links that were posted 3-5 months prior (even though the links are often expired by that time). The last time it happened my hosting company was involved and threatened to suspend my account in less than 48 hours if I did not comply (harsh). How easily could this bill result in an innocent site (such as mine) being taken down? Obviously the bill describes "steps" that have to be taken up to that point, but considering I was less than 48 hours away from my site being suspended for a 3 month old expired link to a video, I don't have much faith in the people entrusted to make these decisions. Besides, isn't the DMCA enough?
- suking 15y agoYou were given 48 hours notice because that is what the DMCA dictates, not because your webhost were being dicks... They legally have to give you 48 hrs.
- sawyer 15y agoIs it time to build the darknet yet?
- madmaze 15y agoMaybe we should start a darknet DNS service
- jimktrains2 15y agoi2p and gnunet ##dns-p2p and #namecoin on freenode
- frewsxcv 15y agoAlready exists. It's just waiting for population http://www.i2p2.de/ http://www.i2p2.de/
- sp332 15y agohttp://freenetproject.org http://freenetproject.org ? Also has the ability to run as a darknet, where only people you invite will even know the network exists.
- gasull 15y agoIt's strange that nobody already mentioned Tor and its hidden services: https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en I2P and Freenet aren't as widely used (AFAIK) and they are slower. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion EDIT: There's also namecoin, that someone submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2546815 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2546815 And the MafiaaRedirector Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-re...
- brudgers 15y agoBased on what happened to the gambling sites recently, I expect it to be used as a tool against adult content on the web because the politics are so easy.
- madmaze 15y agoyes that is a very valid point. In general non conforming content is endangered along with freedom of speech and press. See a couple of posts above
- brudgers 15y ago[Warning: Snark] Will Google be forced to block youtube and remove advertising?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- anonymous 15y agoThis bill will be used to censor any form of information and data on the internet. Whether it be legal or not. It will be used as a tool to threaten and intimidate people, organizations and corportaions. It will be used by government agencies against other organizations/corps and people. Think of this as the "watchlist" currently used by the TSA. This bill is not harmless. America is no longer the symbol of freedom and truth it once stood for. Americans are not free any more.
- rorrr 15y agoIsn't it awesome that the "democracy" can be bought by bribing a small number of politicians in charge. Whoever set that system up, didn't think it through.
- tokenadult 15y agoThis is a well known result of public choice theory. http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html Well, maybe this is not well known enough, because school civics lessons usually don't teach this. I'll refrain from speculating about what interest groups might be influencing the school curriculum. As Winston Churchill said, "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill Or as James Madison put it, "But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions." http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm If it really becomes impossible for people to operate legitimate, opinion-promoting websites (as contrasted with copyright-infringing websites, which I don't operate), then the way out of the problem is the same as it has always been, people power. http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations98ce.html http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations98ce.html
- rorrr 15y agoWell, there are many truly democratic systems that nobody has tried yet. For instance a system where any citizen can vote on any issue. To prevent the tyranny of the majority, there can be rules set up. A system where people decide where their taxes go, how much to spend on healthcare, science, education, warfare.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- pg 15y agoExcept this death penalty we can fix by creating new protocols.
- pdenya 15y agoGood point as far as DNS access goes but new protocols won't get the sites advertising money or search engine views.
- marshray 15y agoThat's a secondary issue in the grand scheme of free speech. It's also the kind of thing that the market is good at solving. E.g., the ad revenue business will simply leave the US like many others.
- nostromo 15y agoI don't see how this is constitutional under the first amendment. Even if it passes, it will probably be overturned after wasting vast amounts of taxpayer and non-profit (ACLU, EFF) dollars.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- hvs 15y agoI'm not sure how most of the DMCA is constitutional but there it is. I agree with you, except for the part about "it will probably be overturned". I'm much more pessimistic.
- pygy_ 15y agoI'd love to hear grellas' input on this (thanks for submitting the link btw).
- gallipoli 15y agoImplement vague and capricious laws that criminalize large swaths of the target population. Enforce them only against your enemies and use the threat of prosecution to eliminate dissent.
- makeramen 15y agoso people will just have to bookmark IP addresses if it comes down to it? and then someone will come up with an alternative to DNS that will help people remember these IP addressees... and then we'll have that new updated infrastructure for DNS we all wanted anyway? it seems to be attacking everything but ISPs, so as long as the sites still have internet access, people will find a way around it.
- cageface 15y agoIn the longer run it seems likely to me that inexpensive subscription services are inevitable, and this will wind up being largely moot.