“The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act sets up a system through which the US government can blacklist a pirate website from the Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid online ad networks from working with the site. This morning, COICA unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee.”
While the idea seems good, I’m sure it will be abused.
US Gov controlling the Internet, give me a break, they barely control the country (not that the rest of the world is doing any better).
I now welcome news such as this:
http://www.osnews.com/story/21694/EU_Admits_ICANN_Is_Doing_Fine_But…
even net neutrality sets the precedent that the federal government can strictly regulate the government.
Government intervention is not by definition a bad thing. The Internet can be a bit of a wild west at times. As any technology matures it makes sense that governments increase their oversight. Nor does every intervention have a negative result. For example, in Australia, the government bans enforcement of DVD region encoding, as this is regarded as anti-competitive. This means that any DVD player bought in Australia can play American and European DVDs. (Try selling a region free solution in America without being prosecuted!) In a similar vein, the US Supreme Court ruled in the 1970s that using a video recorder to copy a television program for later viewing was fair use and not illegal.
What is, I think, bad is the idea that a user’s legal rights – or their digital equivalents – can be either legislated away (like DRM enforcement or Australia’s net filter policy) or sold to the highest bidder (the thing net neutrality would prevent).
In other words, Internet freedoms have become part of broader civil liberties. The problem with the US in particular is that digital freedoms are being eroded by nonsensical commercial interests and a largely compliant system of government. The movie industry – which, as one article points out, also sought to stop home video – can’t see profitability on the Internet and so it is trying its old tactic once again: legal attacks. The difference is that this time Congress and most certainly the Supreme Court have a conservative bent – after years of either outright Republican control or power-sharing (Bush I and Clinton after 1994, and now Obama following the loss of the House in the mid-terms).
Having said that, I reiterate my opinion below: the text of the proposed legislation is actually fairly mild. It is a far cry from stupid stuff like searching everyone’s iPods when they go through US customs, and the recent news that some universities intend to report all P2P users to police without any regard for the actual content being shared.
You should go back and reread the article about that university. The writer got all his facts wrong. Its been updated to reflect that fact. As for this bill, the real problem isnt with them enforcing this in the US. The problem is that copyright is subject to each countries laws. We shouldn’t be trying to ram legislation down other people’s throats. While the RIAA and MPAA represent large businesses in the US, they have little to no stake in any other country. Why should those countries care what happens to them?
Maybe because these associations have an influence over the behavior of similar associations in the rest of the world (of course, I mean the part that matters)? The RIAA and MPAA lobbying has been copied here in France by their counterparts, which ended up in giving birth to a law that came into force just a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately they have a lot of influence in other countries, even’t when they (legally) shouldn’t. Remember DeCSS and DVD-Jon? He was raided by the Norwegian police and had all his stuff confiscated – even though he had done nothing illegal according to Norwegian law.
In the australian case the government need not intervene, it is government intervention in the US which allows prosecutions against those who make region free players… If no laws exist either way, then the market would create region free players because they are superior (eg see china).
Net neutrality is going to be history soon enough.
http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/847587-two-speed-internet-could-hit-con…
Quite sad that countries like USA & UK just cannot keep up with the times..
Fortunately the bill does not give the government total control over the Internet. The proposed text (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:S.3804:) requires that orders to block sites be made by a court, mandates that the “blacklist” be public, and furthermore provides for judicial review by way of a civil lawsuit. Of course if you are an impoverished blogger or do not have access to the American legal system for some reason there is still no practical way to obtain relief.
And now we’ll just have extensive lists of DNS entries in our own “hosts” files which we share with each other underground while the government attempts to screw with the DNS system in order to prevent us from visiting the sites we enjoy…
Alternative underground DNS systems will simply become more popular than they are today – being hosted in foreign nations outside of the U.S. government’s control.
That’s not even necessary. You just have to set your DNS to a non-US one.
I guess it depends on where the root servers are physically located. I admit I haven’t investigated this.
Edit: Since U.S.-based registrars will be required to blacklist the records too, it won’t matter where you’re located.
IOW, this will eventually affect the entire world.
Edited 2010-11-19 04:05 UTC
If this is true it’s insane. Particularly since it seems like the US government are able to get away with anything as long as they cite ‘in order to protect the nation’ or some such. I wonder how many seconds it will take until wikileaks.org is blacklisted if this passes into law…
The root servers are all over the world and not all are controlled by American interests. They could just ignore parts of the zone transfers from the US and go on serving the records.
Would make for some interesting controversy, that.
The registrars does not control the root servers though, only domains that has been registered with them and fortunately not all registrars are US-based.
Perhaps or maybe the world finally tells the US to go fuck itself.
Yep, problem is that the US will go to the UN and like so many other things pressure other countries to make US law the world new order law. Its a sad day… yet again.
Worth reading,
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/10291211924/the-19-senato…
Maybe less future votes will go to those guys (though I’m sure RIAA and the like have plenty of senators in their sleeve anyway).
I don’t think this will pass a supreme court review. Then again, sex offender lists have been upheld, so.
The most surprising of these is Al Franken, one of only three US senators known to use a computer.
If he voted for this, I wonder what was in the versions that didn’t make it.
Wow, Al Franken voted for this?
Assuming there were an open debate about this, I’m sure somebody told them how easy it would be to work around the DNS issue, and they went for it anyway? I’m not quite as cynical as some might be, so I assume that at least their heart was in the right place on this. But even assuming they’re just being paid off by the content industry, even the content industry can’t be stupid enough to think this is actually going to work?
Edited 2010-11-19 03:58 UTC
They believed in CSS, the Bluray protection scheme, heck they even believed in the web sheriff
Al Franken is a comedian who lives by royalty checks and has worked with the entertainment industry for over 35 years. Are you surprised he voted for this?
How many senators are there in total? Two per state?
Yes, 2 per state (100 total) in the full senate.
Edited 2010-11-19 15:35 UTC
Thank you. I indeed suspected that there were 2 per state when I saw two “Minnesota” in that list.
It’s really a shame that they didn’t have better things to do but waste time on that DNS ban.
Torrents, DNS, net-neutrality, cryptography on media, HDMI, broadcast flag, etc..
What I see here is that the lobbyists are persuading the legislators, media and folks (through media) to make all these small steps. One at a time. They are just basically using trial and error to figure out the effective combinations that allow them to enforce all these enslaving ideas.
It’s not a big deal for many now, but some day we’ll wake up in a world where all these small things put together make you feel like you’re in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
ps. I like the idea of “underground” DNS, kinda romantic – as in war romantic, not love.
Well said. It’s sort of like how geology works. Very difficult to see what’s happening even though the small changes add up to eventually make huge changes.
This type of policy change is evidence they are going to play the ‘running while standing still’ game through ineffectual government action. We already have laws to deal with illegal content, but since they failed we are going to start piling on even more laws which won’t work. As was said earlier, I don’t think these are very extreme, but still, I don’t like this direction.
5…4….3…
Arr! Me site for sea shanties was shut down today. Now, not a soul will know the proper words because a dead site tells no tales.
Seems to be a lot of online betting is going on too. Can’t they stop that? Or does the betting firms pay off someone?
They can never stop that because if they try a guy with a pin-stripe suit will come along and give them an offer they can’t refuse.
There seems to be a dim light at the end of this long, dark tunnel. Not all senators are morons (I hope):
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/oregon-senator-vows-block-intern…