I am not sure what, if any, legal repercussions there would be a to a site or its operators if it "facilitated" people obtaining or distributing the blueprints for an MX missile, but under the proposed legislation would impose significant criminal penalties for that as surely as for facilitating mpeg downloads.
SOPA/PIPA have nothing to do with this. It's not a matter of increasing national security at all.
You don't seem aware the US judicial system is already fully equiped to deal with all the examples you've produced. If the Pentagon gets hacked and secret data stolen, it's espionnage. If a US company gets hacked and its proprietary data gets stolen, it's espionnage. Laws already exist for all this, and extradition treaties between several nations are in place. The US government could already sue Google if it considered it helped disseminate state secrets, if it so wished.
The proposed legislation is meant to protect American commercial interests (at the detriments or risk to other American and non-American business interests). Trademarks, copyrighted images, music, movies and so on. It does so by allowing corporations to get websites blacklisted, or deprive it of their sources of income from advertising, all without even a law suit and proven guilt. It threatens all the American Internet giants like Google, Facebook You Tube and so on (could even make some of them move out of the US to nations where they would be less vulnerable. The US are currently the world leader in web development and this is an important economical sector, SOPA/PIPA would seriously endanger that.
There's so much opposition to it worlwide including from within the US (and not the least from Silicon Valley) isn't because people are against stopping piracy of cultural products, it's because it gives the US corporations way, way too much power as the two projects as they stand are full of backdoors to abuses, censorship, or violations of freedom of expression, and violation of "fair use". And it's all up to the sites, not the US corporations which claim copyright violations, to take the measures to prove in the US they are not guilty. Considering the business ethics in foreign countries of many of the US major cultural corporations, and with all the lobby groups in the US that would like nothing more than an opportunity to censor information on the internet and could very well find ways to do this abusing SOPA/PIPA, it's all very troubling from the foreign front, all the more since the means to go around the new legislations are already emerging (and it's nothing good, for anyone).
The MPAA and co. already have tons of tools under US law to protect its copyrights. It just managed to have a UK guy whose site merely posted links, not actual content, to pirated American content extradited. It doesn't need SOPA/PIPA for this, not in most foreign nations. Everybody knows its main targets with SOPA/PIPA are rogue nations where pirates are out of reach for US corporations and which don't recognize US copyrights, from which most of the piracy cases originate, China above all. It's a very high risk and high price to pay to curtail piracy of Disney movies in China, especially when you consider that so far the MPAA is not even able to demonstrate losses from actual lost sales because of piracy.
This message last edited by DomA on 18/01/2012 at 08:14:19 PM
English Wikipedia Anti-SOPA Blackout
17/01/2012 08:31:46 AM
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Yeah, man, because currently copyright holders have no recourse, am I right?
17/01/2012 11:47:35 AM
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"altering the infrastructure of the Internet so as to render RAFO virtually inaccessible"?
17/01/2012 08:12:27 PM
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I'll go ahead and ask before I get my panties in a bunch: do you understand these bills?
17/01/2012 09:09:22 PM
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I admit I have not looked into it much
17/01/2012 11:42:30 PM
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And yet you're still arguing the matter.
18/01/2012 02:34:04 AM
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I love you. *NM*
18/01/2012 03:41:03 AM
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heh, thanks. I usually find myself pushing minority opinions. Nice to be "appreciated" for once.
*NM*
18/01/2012 04:01:10 AM
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Can i second the adulation?
18/01/2012 04:07:17 AM
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I too (three?) appreciate the common sense and reasonable explanations. *NM*
18/01/2012 04:12:59 AM
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Right, because the argument is not just over THIS bill but, apparently, over ANY bill.
18/01/2012 11:09:13 AM
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Alternatives to SOPA/PIPA have been proposed for months now. Please stop arguing this.
18/01/2012 05:42:10 PM
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Also, in the case of the OPEN Act, it has not "been proposed for months."
18/01/2012 07:28:15 PM
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"sensitive federal content"? Provide a source justifying this claim and it's relevance, please.
18/01/2012 05:59:47 PM
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I would not have thought a source necessary.
18/01/2012 06:24:44 PM
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Okay, I'm with Aemon now.
18/01/2012 07:36:21 PM
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OK.
18/01/2012 10:16:16 PM
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should be interesting
17/01/2012 12:41:47 PM
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Could be; depends on a lot of factors.
17/01/2012 07:38:55 PM
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See, that's one of the biggest problems that people aren't understanding.
17/01/2012 09:31:38 PM
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So tell them that.
17/01/2012 11:54:19 PM
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Joel, I think I'm done with this unless you want to do some research.
18/01/2012 02:53:19 AM
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Research would tell me what is wrong with these bills and how a good bill should look.
18/01/2012 11:22:46 AM
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Could've done without the snide rejoinder, but, good.
17/01/2012 02:20:08 PM
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I love the black banner, like some kind of internet Holocaust.
17/01/2012 08:03:27 PM
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Are you aware that SOPA/PIPA has nothing to do with hackers and everything to do with copyright?
18/01/2012 02:08:56 AM
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There seems to be some overlap.
18/01/2012 01:08:22 PM
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Re: There seems to be some overlap.
18/01/2012 08:13:15 PM
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Re: There still seems to be some overlap.
18/01/2012 10:27:32 PM
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Re: There still seems to be some overlap.
18/01/2012 11:30:39 PM
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Just because the news does not mention something does not automatically make it non-applicable.
19/01/2012 04:08:58 PM
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Re: Just because the news does not mention something does not automatically make it non-applicable.
19/01/2012 10:39:40 PM
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If you re-read your last sentence it should be clear why this law is being pushed.
20/01/2012 09:12:29 PM
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Re: If you re-read your last sentence it should be clear why this law is being pushed.
21/01/2012 03:19:49 AM
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Er, what Ghav said.
18/01/2012 02:30:37 AM
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Sorry, protecting Pirate Bay and offshore gambling are not compelling counterarguments.
18/01/2012 11:38:08 AM
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Okay, another analogy:
18/01/2012 02:04:12 PM
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The devil is always in the details, and it seems clear the details need great revision.
18/01/2012 03:31:20 PM
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what they SHOULD do is stop taking money from proponents of sopa/pipa
18/01/2012 03:51:09 PM
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Yes, they should, but, once again, that approach will not prevent a new law.
18/01/2012 04:05:02 PM
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Re: The devil is always in the details, and it seems clear the details need great revision.
18/01/2012 04:27:30 PM
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If the US government wants to summarily block sites within the US, it already can and will.
18/01/2012 06:15:53 PM
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You know all this anti-SOPA bullshit is making me hope the bill passes.
18/01/2012 04:00:17 AM
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I would not go THAT far; it seems clear these bills have many objectionable provisions.
18/01/2012 11:41:23 AM
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Re: I would not go THAT far; it seems clear these bills have many objectionable provisions.
19/01/2012 01:57:46 AM
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Yeah, the extreme bias on both sides is why the bills will likely pass more or less as written.
19/01/2012 03:31:52 PM
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joel, you need to consider three things
18/01/2012 06:06:16 AM
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You need to consider that they WILL pass some legislation, and what you want it to contain.
18/01/2012 12:15:38 PM
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again, it's not about piracy, it's about protecting the mpaa/riaa business model at our expense
18/01/2012 03:34:32 PM
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Yeah, see, that is the problem: "it's not about piracy."
18/01/2012 03:57:55 PM
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if piracy is such a problem then the mpaa/riaa need to PROVE their losses
19/01/2012 02:43:31 AM
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How do you expect anyone to prove what people WOULD HAVE bought if they could not just take it?
19/01/2012 03:57:24 PM
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A technical examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP
18/01/2012 08:32:44 AM
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"As a disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, I'm a sysadmin."
18/01/2012 12:47:16 PM
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Wikipedia has already convinced me
18/01/2012 03:26:01 PM
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Trying to stop this legislation without proposing an alternative is trying to stop ANY legislation.
18/01/2012 03:44:18 PM
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It isn't their job to propose legislation
18/01/2012 04:12:53 PM
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No, but they have as much RIGHT to do so as anyone else.
18/01/2012 05:31:55 PM
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Strike three.
18/01/2012 05:37:55 PM
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That is fine; that is what people SHOULD be doing.
18/01/2012 06:03:59 PM
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Things being better now than they would be under SOPA seems like a legitimate argument to me
18/01/2012 09:04:18 PM
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Against SOPA, sure; against ANY new law, no.
18/01/2012 10:46:48 PM
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About "proposing new legislation"
18/01/2012 04:45:08 PM
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So true
18/01/2012 05:08:45 PM
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Re: About "proposing new legislation"
18/01/2012 05:59:55 PM
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Hm, you should read my post one above about combatting online piracy.
18/01/2012 06:20:16 PM
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I would not recommend photocopying a book and handing it out on street corners.
18/01/2012 06:45:52 PM
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Not to blame, neccessarily. But you have to live in the real world.
18/01/2012 07:31:18 PM
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Re: Not to blame, neccessarily. But you have to live in the real world.
18/01/2012 08:55:59 PM
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I always liked the codewheels SSI provided with copies of their Gold Box AD&D games.
18/01/2012 10:07:40 PM
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These are really different arguments
19/01/2012 12:05:10 AM
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TV is slightly different, because regional availability becomes a factor.
19/01/2012 04:18:58 PM
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Yeah, so I use Russian wikipedia for a day. Or German wikipedia, or French, or Italian... *NM*
18/01/2012 06:23:36 PM
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Or just hit stop right before the script runs. *NM*
18/01/2012 06:52:40 PM
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Or just disable Java. *NM*
19/01/2012 01:58:03 AM
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That's not as much fun though. *NM*
19/01/2012 02:13:44 AM
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Exactly, this way its kind of a game. *NM*
19/01/2012 02:20:37 AM
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I really don't see the fun in that. Wikipedia is just a tool, not a game. *NM*
19/01/2012 04:59:14 AM
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I don't know about those (except French), but none of the ones I ever used are remotely as good. *NM*
18/01/2012 08:13:47 PM
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Russian wikipedia is very good if you're not checking some obscure Western cultural phenomena.
19/01/2012 01:57:43 AM
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Or Answers.com, or even the actual sources that are often copy/pasted into Wikipedia...
19/01/2012 01:07:38 AM
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Re: Or Answers.com, or even the actual sources that are often copy/pasted into Wikipedia... *NM*
19/01/2012 01:34:46 AM
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Oh, no; now Congress will be inundated with complaints from lazy college students!
19/01/2012 04:40:12 PM
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13 previously unopposed senators now do not support SOPA.
19/01/2012 11:36:15 PM
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How does that "rebutt" what was a facetious post in the first place?
20/01/2012 09:24:27 PM
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