The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing today on the "Stop Internet Piracy Act" (aka SOPA). In typical Republican fashion, it was not broadcast on CSPAN and many interested parties were excluded from the proceedings. In fact, the only technology company allowed to testify was Google, who opposes the proposed law along with a coalition of companies which includes Facebook, eBay and Zynga, along with others.

If ever there were a law designed to fatten the pockets of intellectual property attorneys, it is this proposed law. It has the potential to change the Internet, and not for the better. Written by and for large media companies like Comcast, it places full responsibility for intellectual property piracy on the shoulders of site owners rather than users.

As currently written, any website that quoted another site's content, or linked to a site that quoted another site's content could be declared a rogue site by the content owner, whether or not that content is subject to fair use rules. Once declared "rogue", companies like Paypal and Visa could then cut off payments immediately without the benefit of a hearing or due process of law. Fair use? Free speech? Forget about it. Here is the official summary from the House Judiciary Committee site.

This bill focuses not on technology but on preventing those who engage in criminal behavior from reaching directly into the U.S. market to harm American consumers.

We cannot continue a system that allows criminals to disregard our laws and import counterfeit and pirated goods across our physical borders.

Nor can we fail to take effective and meaningful action when criminals misuse the Internet.
The problem of rogue websites is real, immediate and wide-spread. It harms all sectors of the economy.

And its scope is staggering. One recent survey found that nearly one quarter of global Internet traffic infringes on copyrights.

A second study found that 43 sites classified as ‘digital piracy’ generated 53 billion visits per year and that 26 sites selling just counterfeit prescription drugs generated 51 million hits annually.

Since the United States produces the most intellectual property, our country has the most to lose if we fail to address the problem of these rogue websites.

Responsible companies and public officials have taken note of the corrosive and damaging effects of rogue sites.

That last line is dripping with finger-pointing, as the announcement goes on to extol the virtuous Mastercard company while excoriating Google. Mastercard, of course, supports this wholeheartedly, while Google opposes it, along with Facebook and other websites. The Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that sites like Vimeo, Flickr and Etsy would likely die as a result of this legislation.

Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN reporter and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, had this to say:

Continue reading »

We all know by now that legislation usually means the opposite of its title -- in this case, the PROTECT IP Act. Instead, this too-broad, badly-written bill will stifle freedom of expression and make unintended criminals out of many of us. Imagine becoming a felon simply by streaming ten YouTube videos! If you want to oppose this legislation, click here to sign the petition.

From the Electronic Freedom Foundation:

Last year’s rogue website legislation is back on the table, with a new name: the "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011"—or (wink, wink) "PROTECT IP". The draft language is available here.

The earlier bill, which failed to pass thanks largely to a hold on the legislation placed by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, would have given the government dramatic new copyright enforcement powers targeted at websites "dedicated to infringing activities," even where those websites were not based in the United States. Despite some salient differences (described below) in the new version, we are no less dismayed by this most recent incarnation than we were with last year’s draft.

First, the legislation now includes a private right of action for intellectual property owners. This means that IP owners as well as the government can seek injunctions against websites "dedicated to infringing activities" in addition to court orders against third parties providing services to those sites. (Notably, IP owners can also bring actions to enforce the court orders.) Consider whether Viacom would have bothered to bring a copyright infringement action against YouTube—with the attendant challenges of arguing around the DMCA safe harbors—had it had this cause of action in its arsenal. The act includes language that says it's not intended to "enlarge or diminish" the DMCA's safe harbor limitations on liability, but make no mistake: rights holders will argue that safe harbor qualification is simply immaterial if a site is deemed to be dedicated to infringement.

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That video display with PacMan on it is supposed to look like this:

Yes, that is a voting machine. A voting machine that can be hacked to load PacMan without so much as a whisper of tampering.

Via BradBlog:

Sequoia's voting machines, used in some 20% of U.S. elections, employ Intellectual Property (IP) still owned by a Venezuelan firm tied to Hugo Chavez. Sequoia itself is now owned by a Canadian firm called Dominion. (Though Dominion, like Sequoia itself before them, lied about the continuing Venezuelan/Chavez ties in their recent announcement of the acquisition, as detailed exclusively by The BRAD BLOG, to little notice, in June.)

The Pac-Man hack onto the Sequoia/Dominion voting machine was revealed this week. It was accomplished without breaking any of the "tamper-evident" seals that voting machine companies and election officials claim are used to ensure nobody can physically hack into them without being discovered.

Read the rest here.

Can someone tell me how this country can claim to be the keeper of democracy with these ridiculous machines in use? And if they're going to be hacked, at least hack them with something worth playing.

Best. game. ever. It distracts me from the anxiety of knowing our democracy is in the hands of utterly hackable, unreliable crummy voting machines.

Marcy at FDL brings us this interesting tidbit that indicates you might be serving jail time for downloading music:

Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights.

[...] Now President Obama's White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."

[...] Jamie Love, director of the nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International, filed the Freedom of Information Act request that resulted in this week's denial from the White House. The denial letter (PDF) was sent to Love on Tuesday by Carmen Suro-Bredie, chief FOIA officer in the White House's Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

[...] Love had written in his original request on January 31--submitted soon after Obama's inauguration--that the documents "are being widely circulated to corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. There is no reason for them to be secret from the American public."

[...] Love's group believes that the U.S. and Japan want the treaty to say that willful trademark and copyright infringement on a commercial scale must be subject to criminal sanctions, including infringement that has "no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain."

This could affect the blogosphere as we know it, most specifically news aggregators:

A copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit filed last month against The New York Times Co., owner of The Boston Globe and its Boston.com website, is being watched closely by news organizations, Internet researchers, independent bloggers, and companies that aggregate news online by linking to a variety of news sites.

At the heart of the complaint, lodged by GateHouse Media Inc., which publishes 125 community newspapers in Massachusetts, is the question of whether Internet news providers will be able to continue the practice of posting headlines and lead sentences from stories they link to on other sites.The case has been scheduled for trial in US District Court in Boston as early as Monday.

"This is the first case where these intellectual property issues have come to a head," said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge. "If the judge was to rule for GateHouse on every point, it would have far-reaching implications for the news and information ecosystem that underlies the Web as we know it."

Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., a school for professional journalists, said the case could result in new guidelines for how much, if any, content from one website can be used by another. "This is standard procedure across the Internet now," she said. "Newsrooms adopted the procedure from other practitioners."

Net neutrality, anyone? What an incredibly slippery slope we're now hurtling down...

Scholars&Rogues:

Slashdot broke the news on Saturday that AT&T's updated terms of service for its high-speed Internet packages essentially forbid you from criticizing the company on pain of cancellation. The full terms of service are here, and here's the offending passage highlighted, courtesy of Ars Technica:

AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.

This is the exact kind of overbroad legalese that gets companies in trouble in ways they probably never thought of. If I am an AT&T subscriber, for example, and I post derogatory comments about AT&T on a site they own, does this give them leave to terminate my service? What if I post or send a complaint about AT&T to a complaint site or consumer news site, like ConsumerAffairs.Com (whom I write for), and they publish said complaint? Am I liable if I was using my AT&T ISP while writing said complaint? What if I did so while using my laptop at a Wi-Fi hotspot? The mind boggles.

Martin at S&R continues on with other egregious acts that AT&T has committed in the last few years, from cooperating with the Bush Administration on domestic wiretapping to blocking NARAL's text messages. And while Verizon's Terms of Service are no better, this kind of corporate fascism is truly disturbing. Tim Karr has more.  Thankfully, I don't use AT&T or Verizon for my service, so I feel comfortable quoting William O. Douglas to them:

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

Remember that.