It's impossible to enforce copyright thoroughly on the Internet. Any website that accepts user-submitted content is bound to have at least a few pieces of infringing material. Nobody can shut them all down. Which means that the powers that be can pick and choose which sites to target.
The fact that everyone else is breaking the law is not an excuse for you to break the law, so you can't complain when the feds choose to target you instead of somebody else. For all you know, you could actually have been targeted because of your views on Proposition 19 or whatnot, and that infringing spam comment you didn't even know existed is just a convenient excuse.
Sounds like tinfoil hat? Ask somebody from China, Iran, or any other questionable regime. Heck, ask a South Korean, they made a similar law last year.
They could easily use this to take down sites like Wikileaks. I don't condone piracy, but this is going way too far. As long as there is a force against it, P2P will thrive and expand.
The EFF's description of this makes it sound functionally equivalent to the Chinese system. This seems like a very bad idea especially because it would legitimize internet censorship globally. Am I missing something?
If by "legitimize internet censorship globally" you mean the US would set an example of censorship for other countries to follow, I guess that makes sense. Remember, Hillary Clinton took Google's side in criticizing China's internet censorship. China will go into full US-bashing mode when this bill gets passed, not to mention all those blackberry-censoring countries. I'm glad I live in neither country, but my government loves to follow the US's example so I'm concerned. Time to start routing my traffic through Sweden!
They want to use DNS to censor the Internet? Ooh, great idea!
Wait until they hear that anyone can run a DNS server or just type the IP into their browser. And then tell them about IPv6. And then tell them about countries outside of the US. And then tell them about Tor and VPNs. Omigod, it's like the Internet is too big for the government to censor. OH NOES.
Also, that whole first amendment thing is a major problem. I recall several other attempts to censor the Internet, and they were struck down by the courts. And that was for child porn; this is for movies. If you can't get the courts to censor child porn, you won't get them to censor a couple leaked screeners.
I hope you're right. I think you're probably right. But there is a hell of a lot more money behind blocking leaked screeners then there was behind blocking child porn.
As far as telling them how technology works, please don't. I think the main thing that's saved the internet so far is that the people with the biggest interest in stopping it have no idea how to even begin.
I like the free market principles defined by such a bill.</sarcasm>
The idea of blatant censorship, even though it might be used to protect copyright holder's rights, is entirely out of line with the First Amendment; let alone free speech principles. Posting on a website is technically fair use, it's only when accessed that you have issues. IANAL, of course.
How long can the MPAA's (and the ilk) reign of terror and lobbyists last? The free market always wins, provided regulation doesn't occur. That's exactly what they want to happen.
It is time for a serious disruption(s) in the content producers, not the content distributors. The content distributors will never change, the internet has ruined their business model. They are clawing to recover their broken ideas, dreams, and bank accounts.
The first company to figure out how to take the content directly from the producers and deliver it to the public in a free (not monetarily free, but in regards to civil liberties) manner will make a killing. (iTunes is a stop-gap. Netflix is also. Both continue to access through distributors.)
This bill is also an example why come election day in November, every single sitting member of Congress (all 435) and every senator up for reelection, needs to __lose their seat__.
The only thing that politicians in today's world actually understand is "loosing my seat". That is the one and only thing they hear louder than their big-business supporters.
Unemploying every single member of both houses up for reelection would send a strong message to both the newly unemployed as well as the new members that the voters have woken up to the fact that they are no longer representing us, the voters, but are in fact representing the special interests of big business. And it would firmly point out to them that it is us, the voters, who truly control their destiny, not big business, and that they better start listening to us.
And that is why, come November, my choice of who to vote for is easy. If you are an incumbent, you will be voted against.
I do not believe any of these unintended consequences are unintended, they were intended but never spoken out. Authoritarian traitors of human kind are very patient about reaching their goals, no matter where they come from, we are sitting on a major entitlement problem that will have a extremely violent outcome of which I hope will not happen during my time on this planet. But shit will really hit the fan if current development stays it's course.
I2P doesn't work very well as outproxy to surf the regular Internet. There's just one outproxy as far as I know.
Tor (http://tor.eff.org) is built to work mainly as an outproxy, but depending of what outproxy you land in, you might hit a wall: the Great Chinese Firewall, the censorship in Australia, etc.
A better alternative seems to be a VPN from IPREDator (https://www.ipredator.se/?lang=en), by The Pirate Bay folks, so your traffic gets routed to Sweeden, where there is no censorship (yet). IPREDator costs €5 a month.
So HN downvoters prefer the current centralized model of Internet name services which are vulnerable to a denial of service attack from technologically illiterate politicians?
They're downvoting you because you're not only missing the point of the article with your first comment, but because allowing this to happen would make DNS even less likely to be replaced any time soon. Once the government is involved in attempting to control the flow of traffic to different websites, any backbone essential to their method of control will stagnate and remain in place almost indefinitely. These people still use IE6 out of misplaced fears for security and a general laziness when it comes to updating, remember?
DNS is not the only place where an ISP can block a website. They could block the IP, or sniff your unencrypted requests. Look at China, they even do keyword filtering! I can see this "feature" being marketed as parental control or whatnot...
$5/month. You can afford it! ;)