Knights of Tranquility

Today was the 'Blackout of Internet Sites to Protest SOPA/PIPA'.

Working in IT, I knew it was going to happen, and did pass this onto my manager to pass on, however, we still had to answer several questions about why certain sites were 'blacked out' and that I should 'fix it'.

For those that are not in the know about SOPA/PIPA, the following article is the best compilation of what's going on.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/18/0834219/ask-slashdot-what-can-you-do-about-sopa-and-pipa

I work in internet content production, and this thing is insanely scary for everyone in my industry.

I do stuff for two companies. One is large, and said we won't get cut because they'll have the lawyers available to deal with it. The other is a medium-sized startup, and they've said that if it passes, we're pretty much fucked and should all find other work.

Scary, terrible crap.

Myro, I am all for supporting people in the content industry. I just think that the laws being proposed are just in there to support the big players (MPAA/RIAA) and NOT the content producers, and def not the artists! (with their 'industry accounting' and what not).

We just need to keep on top of them, our reps.

I wrote my Senator. You should too! Feel free to crib.


Dear Senator Merkley,
I am writing you today in regards to concerns that I have with the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) currently under consideration in the Senate as an Oregonian. Although I cannot speak on behalf of my employer, Intel, as an engineer working on developing Wi-Fi and WiMAX technology, I feel that I have a valuable insight into this issue, to which I have strong feelings about.

Reviewing many of the remedies prescribed within the PIPA bill, and its sister bill in the house, SOPA, these two proposed acts appear to me as the product of a brainstorming session by traditional media sources and owners of trademarked brands, wholly lacking the encumbrance of having to be technically feasible or any having considered unintended consequences.

This is not to say there are not real problems these bills attempts to remedy. There exists an alarmingly large market for grey and black market goods that would be diminished in size given better enforcement of existing copyright and trademark laws. The impact of these goods not only hurts the manufacturers, where a good can be produced without the fixed research & development or marketing costs, and possibly with substantially lower quality and accompanying production costs. But the availability of counterfeit goods also impacts the customer, where they will purchase a product which is substandard or potentially dangerous to the one they believe they are purchasing.

The most damaging remedy provided by the PIPA act under consideration is targeting the domain name services and the prevention of rollout of DNSSEC. In essence, domain name services are similar to a street sign on a road; a DNS server will point you to the correct street or building. To illustrate the need for DNSSEC, it has been shown in the lab that it is possible to inject false names into a domain name request or to run DNS servers that will provide false addresses. With the street sign example, it would be the equivalent of a traveler following a sign pointing to a bank, but instead going to the bank, the traveler would find themselves traversing a street filled with bandits. This is not to say that this mechanism would be effective against the casual seeker of pirated material or counterfeit goods, after all this is one of the technologies used by countries such as Iran, China, and many other oppressive regimes to censor the outside world to their own citizens. But like the censors, there are ways around these mechanisms. And the prolific pirates this remedy seeks to attack will no more stop them then the human rights activists operating in authoritarian countries.

This is not to say that the name services provisions is the only troubling portion of this act Many of the provisions of this bill lay responsibility for self-censorship on various service providers. This smacks of prior restraint, and if passed will stifle innovation and new businesses in the technology sector. Who would want to make the new Youtube, Facebook, or Google in a post-PIPA America? I wouldn’t. These new businesses that provide thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in tax revenue in America would instead flock to nations throughout Europe and Asia, along with the jobs that they generate and future technological leadership these companies bring.

A better approach would be instead to directly confront the most prolific and damaging sources of the infringing content or counterfeit goods. Their weakness is that to make a profit, they must be visible to their customers. And unlike drug dealers, their margins are not so high they can remain hidden, with their enterprise limited among friends spread through word of mouth. Do an internet search for the pirates and counterfeiters; track them down by addresses physical and internet, along with their bank accounts, which they supply openly. In cases where foreign law enforcement isn’t cooperative, work through the existing framework of international trade organizations.

Currently, I believe that this bill is too fundamentally flawed for it to be amended into good law. For a future bill, please make sure that the legislators and aids not only consider the requests of many of the rights holders, but also make sure that any remedies for these violations do not infringe on existing fair use, nor have the remedies unfairly burden new and innovative business models emerging. Although staunch proponents of this bill, such as News Corps Rupert Murdoch want it passed as is, there is no need to sacrifice new jobs and impinge innocent’s rights to improve his profitability.

Please support your fellow Senator representing Oregon, Senator Wyden, in voting no on PIPA and supporting his filibuster of this bill.

Thank you,
Sean Dunn

I saw this link on Reddit, and it echoed my sentiment exactly.

http://i.imgur.com/ZZFW4.png


I too wrote my Congressman about it. May those POS legislations never make it through.