NO MÁS SOPA: Movement and Blackout List Grows

Posted on January 18, 2012 by melwin23

The movement is growing – close to 7,000 sites and counting have announced they will join the blackout. Google has announced a major protest on their homepage and Wikipedia is doing blackout. Will it work? Will it stop SOPA?

Via MSNBC
Opponents of controversial federal anti-piracy legislation known as SOPA seem to be picking up steam. Supporters of the legislation in both houses of Congress appear to have backed off, the Obama administration has expressed concerns with the legislation, and an Internet blackout slated for Wednesday is picking up supporters.

A House subcommittee was slated to prepare the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, for a vote later this month; the Senate had planned a vote on the companion bill, PIPA (The Protect IP Act,) even sooner. Now, it appears both votes will be delayed.

SOPA opponents are rallying around an effort to call attention to the legislation by convincing Web sites to “go dark” on Jan. 18, and display only a simple message of protest on a black background. On Monday, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that his website will go dark for 24 hours starting at midnight ET Tuesday, following the lead of other high-profile promised blackouts. Reddit.com will go black from 8 a.m.- 8 p.m. on Wednesday. The hacker group Anonymous also encouraged others to join in the 12-hour blackout, and garnered a lot of attention with its Twitter post using the hashtag #BlackoutSOPA.
Meanwhile, several signs point to SOPA legislation hitting some serious speedbumps. On Saturday, a statement issued by White House cyberczar Howard Schmidt, and other administration technology officials, threw cold water on SOPA’s anti-piracy efforts.

“Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online,” says the response, referring to SOPA’s proposal to allow law enforcement officials to blacklist Web sites — cut them off from U.S. users — that allegedly encourage piracy. The response, posted at WhiteHouse.gov on Saturday,does not take a position on SOPA, but it cautioned lawmakers that the administration will oppose anti-piracy efforts that might increase censorship.

“Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small,” the memo reads.

In Congress, supporters of the legislation have recently indicated they are open to changing their proposals.

Late Friday afternoon, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), said he planned to tone down the enforcement powers that would be granted by the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). A new version would not include the most controversial provision, which would have enabled federal authorities to “blacklist” domains that were alleged to be involved in distribution of pirated content, effectively cutting portions of the Web off from all U.S. users.

“After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision,” Smith, one of SOPA’s chief backers, said in a statement. “We will continue to look for ways to ensure that foreign websites cannot sell and distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers.”

The move comes after a similar step taken on Thursday by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), sponsor of the Senate version, PIPA. Leahy said complaints from “human rights groups, engineers, and others” had convinced him to change his thinking on the bill.

“I remain confident that the ISPs — including the cable industry, which is the largest association of ISPs — would not support the legislation if its enactment created the problems that opponents of this provision suggest. Nonetheless, this is in fact a highly technical issue, and I am prepared to recommend we give it more study before implementing it,” he said in a statement on his website.
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“As I prepare a managers’ amendment to be considered during the floor debate, I will therefore propose that the positive and negative effects of this provision be studied before implemented, so that we can focus on the other important provisions in this bill, which are essential to protecting American intellectual property online, and the American jobs that are tied to intellectual property. I regret that law enforcement will not have this remedy available to it when websites operating overseas are stealing American property, threatening the safety and security of American consumers.”

While Senate debate on PIPA is slated for later this month, advocacy group Public Knowledge said on Friday that it believed debate on SOPA was going to be postponed until February.

Either way, removal of DNS blacklisting provision is unlikely to satisfy critics of Congressional anti-piracy efforts. They find other provisions — such as the ability for the Justice Department to cut off payment processing for alleged “rogue” websites — to be nearly as problematic.

“The DNS filtering provisions represent only some of the fundamental flaws in PIPA,” the Electronic Froniter Foundation said in a statement to Geek.com. “This bill, and its House counterpart, cannot be fixed — they must be killed.”

Meanwhile, discussions about SOPA hung over the annual CES geek-fest, held this week in Las Vegas. At the trade show, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) talked up his legislative alternative to SOPA, the OPEN Act, or Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act. He also promised to hold hearings next week on the issue. (For more, see this story.)

Black Wednesday day In CYBERIA

Posted on January 18, 2012 by melwin23

On Wednesday, a group of technology companies are staging an unusual form of protest: They are shutting down their own popular Web sites for a day to show their unhappiness with two Internet-regulation bills grinding through Congress. They argue that the bills would impose huge regulatory costs and stifle innovation on the Web.

Around the country, Americans will wake up without some of the oddball essentials of online life. NoWikipedia. No Reddit, a compendium of links to stories and funny pictures that draws millions a day. And no icanhazcheeseburger.com, which is the world’s best-known collection of funny cat pictures.

In Washington, however, the day is to have another significance.

It will culminate a surprising lobbying effort in which technology companies such as Twitter, Wikipedia and Google have used their massive reach into Americans’ daily lives as a political weapon, to whip up support from online users.

In this fight, they were pitted against traditional Washington heavyweights, such as Hollywood and the recording industry.

And even before the LOLcats went on strike, it seemed like the tech companies were winning.

This fight is over two similar bills: the House’s Stop Online Piracy Actand the Senate’s Protect IP (intellectual property) Act. Both are meant to attack the problem of foreign Web sites that sell pirated or counterfeit goods. They would impose restrictions forcing U.S. companies to stop selling online ads to suspected pirates, processing payments for illegal online sales and refusing to list Web sites suspected of piracy in search-engine results.

The idea is to cut off the channels that deliver American customers, and their money, to potential pirates. But tech companies see the laws as a dangerous overreach, objecting because, they say, the laws would add burdensome costs and news rules that would destroy the freewheeling soul of the Internet.

“The voice of the Internet community has been heard,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who sided with the tech companies, said in a statement. Issa said he had already been told of a victory: GOP leaders told him that the House would not vote on a version of the bill that those companies oppose. “Much more education for Members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential.”

The biggest impact of Wednesday’s blackout may be in the shutdown of the English-language version of Wikipedia, which gets 2.7 billion U.S. visitors per month.

“It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web,” said a statement signed by three of the free encyclopedia’s administrators, with the handles “NuclearWarfare,” “Risker” and “Billinghurst.” They said the decision to shut down the English-language portion of the site, starting at midnight Eastern time, had been made after a virtual discussion that involved 1,800 users.

But already, the momentum of the two controversial bills has been largely halted. Just weeks ago, they seemed on their way to passage, having cleared a Senate committee and garnered bipartisan support in the House

Washington Post

.By David A. Fahrenthold, Updated: Wednesday, January 18, 10:35 AM

Black Out Of English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours -protesting SOPA/PIPA

Posted on January 17, 2012 by melwin23

To:

English Wikipedia Readers and Community

Image representing Wikipedia as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBase

From:
Sue Gardner,
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
Date: January 16, 2012

Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—theStop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECTIP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate—that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.

This will be the first time the English Wikipedia has ever staged a public protest of this nature, and it’s a decision that wasn’t lightly made. Here’s how it’s been described by the three Wikipedia administrators who formally facilitated the community’s discussion. From the public statement, signed by User:NuclearWarfare, User:Risker and User:Billinghurst:It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web.Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a “blackout” of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.On careful review of this discussion, the closing administrators note the broad-based support for action from Wikipedians around the world, not just from within the United States. The primary objection to a global blackout came from those who preferred that the blackout be limited to readers from the United States, with the rest of the world seeing a simple banner notice instead. We also noted that roughly 55% of those supporting a blackout preferred that it be a global one, with many pointing to concerns about similar legislation in other nations.

In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position. That’s a real, legitimate issue. We want people to trust Wikipedia, not worry that it is trying to propagandize them.

But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or, if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.

The decision to shut down the English Wikipedia wasn’t made by me; it was made by editors, through a consensus decision-making process. But I support it.

Like Kat and the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation Board, I have increasingly begun to think of Wikipedia’s public voice, and the goodwill people have for Wikipedia, as a resource that wants to be used for the benefit of the public. Readers trust Wikipedia because they know that despite its faults, Wikipedia’s heart is in the right place. It’s not aiming to monetize their eyeballs or make them believe some particular thing, or sell them a product. Wikipedia has no hidden agenda: it just wants to be helpful.

That’s less true of other sites. Most are commercially motivated: their purpose is to make money. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a desire to make the world a better place—many do!—but it does mean that their positions and actions need to be understood in the context of conflicting interests.

My hope is that when Wikipedia shuts down on January 18, people will understand that we’re doing it for our readers. We support everyone’s right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression. We think everyone should have access to educational material on a wide range of subjects, even if they can’t pay for it. We believe in a free and open Internet where information can be shared without impediment. We believe that new proposed laws like SOPA—and PIPA, and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States—don’t advance the interests of the general public. You can read a very good list of reasons to oppose SOPA and PIPA here, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Why is this a global action, rather than US-only? And why now, if some American legislators appear to be in tactical retreat on SOPA?

The reality is that we don’t think SOPA is going away, and PIPA is still quite active. Moreover, SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. All around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation seeking to regulate the Internet in other ways while hurting our online freedoms. Our concern extends beyond SOPA and PIPA: they are just part of the problem. We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone.

Make your voice heard!

On January 18, we hope you’ll agree with us, and will do what you can to make your own voice heard.

Sue Gardner,
Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation