New Legislation Would Crack Down On Online Piracy 350
GovTechGuy writes "Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee unveiled new legislation to combat online piracy on Monday that gives the Department of Justice more power to shut down websites trafficking in pirated movies, films or counterfeit goods. The new bill would give the government the authority to shut down the sites with a court order; the site owner would have to petition the court to have it lifted. The judge would have final say over whether a site should be shut down or not. Business groups including the US Chamber of Commerce hailed the legislation as a huge step forward."
Governmental Takeover? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever notice the same people who call Net Neutrality a government takeover of the internet are usually pretty quiet whenever somebody in Congress proposes a law that'd allow them to block or shut websites down?
Checks and Balances are soooo 1900's (Score:5, Insightful)
What's wrong with getting a court order?
Every time we drop court orders out of the mix, we wind up with abusive crap (see FBI and National Security Letters).
Just suck it up, deal with the paper work, and live in a nation governed by three equal branches of government that each work to ensure the other branches are not overstepping their bounds.
-Rrick
No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
Leahy said in a statement. "Protecting intellectual property is not uniquely a Democratic or Republican priority -- it is a bipartisan priority."
In other words, if you believe in Copyright reform, you have no choices at the polls.
One step forward, two steps back (Score:5, Insightful)
Business groups including the US Chamber of Commerce hailed the legislation as a huge step forward.
Yeah, a step forward for keeping their business models from dying off, thus preventing them from having to actually work to come up with new ones.
Meanwhile, this COULD be used to stamp out any site the US Government or the MAFIAA dislike. WikiLeaks? "Piracy." BAM, blocked. YouTube? "Piracy." BAM, blocked.
A step forward for government protectionism of failing business models, two steps back for free speech on the Internet.
Re:Bye Bye EBAY (Score:5, Insightful)
The government isnt going to shut down sites backed by the almighty $$$
But your movie blog is gone the first time you give a bad review.
Your political forum is shut down the first time some kid quotes 1984.
Etc, etc..
What ever happened to... (Score:5, Insightful)
The new bill would give the government the authority to shut down the sites with a court order; the site owner would have to petition the court to have it lifted
What ever happened to being innocent before guilty? In a free society, courts have to prove -you- guilty, not you have to prove your innocence.
Isn't it time that we realized that property is not property unless it is limited and move on?
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, both US parties are Corporatist. Any differences are just to make it look like you have a choice.
Re:Checks and Balances are soooo 1900's (Score:5, Insightful)
The Justice department would still have to get a court order, as they do now. The issue is that they could do so for a civil infraction, as opposed to a criminal infraction. Why the government is involved at all in civil justice is beyond me? Isn't that the job of the plaintiff?
Re:Governmental Takeover? (Score:1, Insightful)
No, I hadn't noticed that at all. I think any sort of government regulation of the Internet is a bad thing.
Re:No kidding (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Checks and Balances are soooo 1900's (Score:4, Insightful)
"What's wrong with getting a court order?"
When the person requesting it is a government official acting on behalf of a 3rd party's interest when really it should be between the 1st and 3rd parties, not the government. Basically this is just another way that the **AA and member companies are going to foot taxpayers with the bill for propping up their outdated and inflexible business models. If their business model can't survive change, it should die. Isn't that the entire fucking point of capitalism? Compete or die.
Re:What impact would this actually have? (Score:1, Insightful)
I would expect just the opposite. It will be used to make the U.S. based DNS registrars break DNS for servers hosted in other countries. If the servers were in the U.S., existing laws could be used to shut them down.
Re:What ever happened to... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Assumed innocent until found guilty" is criminal law. Civil issues are different.
But what I worry about the most is its use for political censorship. Look what the church that rhymes with Pie Ontology has done using copyright laws. I hope there are added protections against that kind of abuse. The little guy can't afford boatloads of lawyers.
Why not death sentences then? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is completely circumventing the notion of due process and the ideal of innocent until proven guilty. So if this is okay, then let's just have the judges hand down an order for execution of suspected murderers and then make the defendant file a motion for a stay of execution pending a trial.
DAMN ANNOYING (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Governmental Takeover? (Score:4, Insightful)
Cool, so I can break into your website and deface it? Start a smear campaign against you claiming you are an ex Nazi who likes having sex with dead relatives? Break into your online bank account and steal your money? Admit it, you want at least some government regulation of the Internet. Unless, I don't know, maybe you want a lawless old west where groups like Anonymous can wreak havoc unmolested by evil government types.
Lump much? (Score:4, Insightful)
"online piracy and the sale of counterfeit goods costs American businesses billions of dollars, and result in hundreds of thousands of lost jobs"
Much the way national defense and senators' salaries cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars each year.
Color me surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do not ever give in to pleas to relax controls to make life for the prosecutor a little easier "to catch more criminals". It's never about criminals nor child-molesters. We let them do it here, and allowed the government to thoroughly politicise the prosecutors' office, then took away the judiciary branch' power to check and balance. The result is not pretty... All these so called inconvenient controls exist for a reason.
Re:Have we... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, no, we passed that point about a decade ago.
Re:Another law makes the US less competitive (Score:4, Insightful)
I personally think this is more idiocy, but do you mind citing one or two actual companies "shut down" by DMCA? Just to show you're not making this up *entirely* ?
Re:Bye Bye EBAY (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bye Bye EBAY (Score:2, Insightful)
But your movie blog is gone the first time you give a bad review.
Your political forum is shut down the first time some kid quotes 1984.
Etc, etc..
Do you have any evidence of this? I don't see how it follows from the article, so it sounds like paranoia, and I'll regard it as such until I have any evidence at all to back it up.
Is it just me (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Another law makes the US less competitive (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been no new Googles for over a decade and we wonder where all of the jobs are going.
Every empire throughout history (whether military or economic) has eventually failed. It's inevitable. Now, sometimes another empire with more on the ball rolls over them. That happens. In most cases, though, it's because they shot themselves in the foot. In other words, their own governments failed to perform their duties under the law, became corrupt, sold out their own citizens and caused the entire house of cards to collapse. Fact is, Uncle Sam's feet are stumps at this point. Yeah, it will suck to be an American when the lights finally go out, but that's the way it's going. I'm trying to decide if I should get out before it's too late. Where to, that's the question. I want good food and fast broadband. Cool smartphones would be a plus.
... it's that they're willing to throw the entire country, all of us in fact, to the wolves, under the train, under the bus, into the fire, in order to get what they want. Worse, it's the naked corruption and malfeasance in office (if not outright treason) of Federal officials that is allowing to happen.
See, this is why the media cartels are so evil. It's not just because they want to protect their movies and music
I hate them all.
Re:You don't understand a thing. (Score:1, Insightful)
The MPAA, RIAA, and DMA have bought laws.
Don't you think that they have a right to expect a fair value for the legislators that they buy?
What good is buying a congressperson if you can't get the laws you want written the way you want?
Ever notice with party the MAFIAA goes to in order to purchase their laws?
Look here [opensecrets.org] and here [opensecrets.org]
Re:Governmental Takeover? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what securing your systems is for. The toughest possible law in the USA against unauthorized entry/access won't stop someone outside your jurisdiction doing this as the Internet is a global network. You take resonable steps to secure your systems or you're an irresponsible admin, it really is that simple. For better or for worse, no law is going to change that.
Supposing the person is within jurisdiction, existing libel laws would already cover this. The medium (newspaper, TV, Web site) should be irrelevant. If they are out of your jurisdiction, what were you going to do about that anyway?
That's fraud and/or theft. The medium should be irrelevant.
No discrimination on the basis of destination or origin sounds good to me. For the reactionary types out there who like to knee-jerk, traffic shaping that prioritizes traffic type such as VOIP does not need to consider the destination or origin.
I like that better than excessive government control. I'm not going to say that such things are perfectly fine. They aren't. They just aren't as bad as the immense distrust the federal government has soundly earned.
Incidentally, if you refer to an attack Anonymous made against a certain "church" then it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people. While I don't agree with the methods used, some groups seem to think they're untouchable and an occasional reminder that they aren't isn't a completely bad thing.
What are trying to shutdown? (Score:3, Insightful)
Search engines? Directly or indirectly search engines links to movies and pirated material
Web 2.0? Everything with user participation have potential to be used to "exchange links"
Mail? Mailing lists?
At most they should be going against the people that put them online at the first place
Wonder how fast will be censored all post that names the Great Firewall of America, but probably that is what they really should do if they don't want that americans download so easily pirated movies.
three equal branches (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree, in reality the supreme court holds more power, since they can pick and choose what cases/issues they take.
I agree the founders never meant for it to be that way however.
Re:Bye Bye EBAY (Score:4, Insightful)
Different AC here...
Are you saying you can't envision a scenario where a law is used as carte blanche for censoring speech, shutting down competitors, and generally being a nuisance?
Become familiar with DMCA takedown notices, for starters.
Re:The Fools Never Learn (Score:3, Insightful)
That wouldn't necessarily be counter-productive.
Hard-core pirates are always going to find a way to pirate. But it's not the hard-core pirates that the media industry is scared of; it's casual pirates, pirates who might actually represent lost sales. It's Joe Average, who has just discovered this wonderful website with torrents of all his favorite TV shows on it, so he doesn't need to buy the DVDs any more.
If piracy is driven deeper underground, the hard-core pirates will still pirate stuff -- but Joe won't be able to simply stumble across a major distribution site any more, and even if he figures out where to look, he still probably manage to get that distributed encrypted download software to work. So maybe he'll decide it's more trouble than it's worth and just buy the damn DVDs after all, because he'd rather pay $14.99 than spend the entire weekend swearing at his computer.
That's what the media industry is hoping, anyway.
Re:Governmental Takeover? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry for the second reply but I think a good point can be made here.
First of all, I clearly stated I didn't agree with the actions of Anonymous. That hardly qualifies as "cheering". I merely find it predictable cause-and-effect and the only surprise I see in the whole situation is that such things haven't happened more frequently. Also, to the best of my knowledge, Anonymous performed a bunch of very irritating, costly, and time-wasting activities but did not use actual violence. So I will use the term "mob action".
The best way to cause mob action is to either do nothing at all or perform only slap-on-the-wrist sanctions against an entity with (in my opinion) a long track record of repeated abuses of one kind or another. That's what allows for the possibility of a mob to form that thinks the job was left undone and that they should do something about it since no one else is going to.
The whole point of a justice system is so that the people can see that justice was done by the proper officials, that the matter has been settled and needs no further response. Fail to achieve that and what you will find is that the difference between decent people and bad people is that decent people will wait longer before taking matters into their own hands. Right or wrong, this is quite predictable.
Re:Bye Bye EBAY (Score:2, Insightful)
sorry, you did not read the bill. It has a special section that exempts rich people and corporations that fund reelection campaigns.
If you make less than $250,000.00 a year you are one of the dirty disgusting thieves that needs a good water-boarding at gitmo to teach you your place. Everyone else is the holy ones that only make innocent mistakes.
Ebay will never be shut down even if they start trafficking stolen organs. They have enough money to pay the police to look the other way.
Re:Checks and Balances are soooo 1900's (Score:3, Insightful)
Ask Steve Jackson how much protection that is. You don't want a court order standing between you and losing your livelihood. You want a trial.
Re:No kidding (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because German version of fascist nazi government came with concentration camps, doesn't mean that every version does. This is very much the same for democracy, which was very different back in ancient Greece where it was born, or in revolutionary France where core beliefs of modern Western society were defined.
Nontheless it is beyond any shadow of doubt that elements of fascism in Western world have been on significant increase ever seen the end of Cold War, as power shifted from people-run government to corporation-run government.
Which is by definition, fascism. Your scare of concentration camps came from nazism and nazi ideals. WW2 Germany had both. Fascist part wasn't much prettier then nazi part mind you, just like our democratic fascism isn't pretty.
Re:Governmental Takeover? (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, it's the "mob" that doesn't want these new laws. They were not the result of popular public pressure. It's a small minority of powerful special interests that have a lot of political clout. This is neither democracy nor a functioning representative republic.
The idea of libertarian (small 'l') thought is simplicity itself. Consenting adults should be free to do whatever they please with their property and their own body and should be free to believe whatever they want. They should be able to exercise those freedoms whether or not someone else doesn't like it; anyone who doesn't like their actions is free to provide a counter-example in the form of how they deal with their own body, property, and beliefs.
The selfish asshats are the ones who would use the force of law to tell you what you may not do with your own body or your own property. They typically do this out of some kind of Puritannical desire to enforce their morality on others. The people who want to be left alone by them so long as they don't violate anyone else's freedoms are not selfish in the slightest. They are reasonable.
This is so easy to understand that I must conclude the numerous attempts to portray libertarian thought as some kind of anarcho-capitalism are simple demagoguery conducted by people who either have an agenda or have been propagandized by those who do. You do need a government to enforce notions like private property and civil rights and I know of no libertarian who would argue otherwise.
Copyright has become out of control. If it returned to a 12-year term after which time the work became public domain, it would regain respectability. It would then fulfill its intended purpose of granting a temporary monopoly to creators in exchange for an enriched public domain.
Think about it; the original 12-year term was during a time when the printing press and paper was the most technologically advanced means of distribution. We can now distribute many more works in far less time yet copyright lasts much longer. People don't respect copyright today for the simple reason that it is not respectable. It is no wonder they feel no shame for violating it. This is also easy to understand unless you subscribe to such a strict "law-and-order" mentality that you have abandoned all concept of understanding human nature and wish to replace that understanding with harsher threats of penalty.
DONT host DNS in the usa (Score:2, Insightful)
then they can cost the hosting company money ...who cares
the usa is lost to innovation and is now akin to only greed cant wait for them to just cut off themselves form the rest of the world
no one wants or needs any americans
and i guess all the gun violence, murder rape and missing children the fbi aren't looking for are all solved and no more of that is happening.....GUESS if you can't solve the other stuff pick on kids sitting at home nice and safe...yup give them more reasons to wander off not the world and have the rest you can't solve get them....
GO OBAMA
Yes, everyone should obey all laws (Score:4, Insightful)