Why aren't Second Lifers supporting SOPA?

[Prokofy Neva]

They should.

This is anti-piracy legislation that would establish the rule of law over intellectual property rights rather than the code-as-law and arbitrariness we have now in the TOS of platform providers and their dilatory handling of DMCA cases.

There's no "censorship" involved in legitimately pursuing pirates, and there are thresholds that would have to be met and defense mechanisms within the law itself that would prevent the things the hysterics are claiming would happen, i.e. all of Facebook being shut down over one person's pirated movie (ridiculous).

Second Lifers should be the natural constituent of this legislation, but if anything, the open sourceniks who prevail are probably opposed.

But has anyone thought about it and are they writing their Congress people? I wrote mine, fortunately they support the bill. I hope it passes.

 

[Carole Franizzi]

Maybe because we're not all Americans? Shot in the dark, I know...

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

I'd call myself downright indifferent to it.  The internet as a whole still pretty much behaves like a microbe.  Block something and someone will proxy around it.  Make something illegal and someone will game the loophole.  As for me, I pay for what I'm charged for and take what's given for free.  It's a fair balance where I see myself going unharmed if this bill passes and/or not. ()

That and I'm a steaming pile of political apathy. ()y

 

 

[Tristizia Demonista]

1. As Carole allready pointed out, not all SL Users are Americans.

2. A Proposal like this, that makes normal Companies something like Judge , Jury and Executioner is not something i would like to have.

3. If said Companies would finally acknowledge that their marketing strategies of old do not apply anymore and find new and better ones, stupid laws like this wouldn't even be neccessary. 

4. These "Thresholds" youre speaking of, are exactly what the Companies who lobbying this proposal DO NOT want to have!

To sum it up, SOPA = bad!!

 

[Potosi Abonwood]

Not to mention it has the potential to kill most streaming media in SL. 

[Lynda Baran]

I just read the bill.    It is to broad in scope, over-reaching and too vaguely worded.    I immediately wrote my Representative and Senators asking them NOT to support the bill as written.

I use the internet to allow students to submit papers.   In my field, plagiarism isn't a big problem, but neither is it non-existent.   As written, this bill would shift undo responsibility to me to more closely monitor for plagiarism.   It would also put me in danger of being civilly liable as well as shut down my website until the material in question was removed, thus depriving the honest students of a convenient venue for the submission of their work.

If you'll notice, the technology to be used is the same website blocking protocols pioneered for censorship purposes by China and Iran.   Those aren't two example the US. Government should be following.  Especially China, the largest violators of Intellectual Property Rights in the world.

In a related note, The US. DOJ is lobbying Congress to increase penalties for violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act originally passed in 1986.    This law was already struck down by a US. Federal Appeals court as being too broad and over-reaching.  It makes it a crime to say anything that is untrue on any internet site (for instance, something as simple as stating your age or weigh incorrectly on an internet dating site could find you in hot water with an over zealous prosecutor).   The DOJ wants the penalties increased, but doesn't think the law should be revised to reflect a more modern understanding of the norms of today's internet activities.

Honestly, I don't trust either the congress or the DOJ to get anything right these days.   The least either of them do the better, and I will expand those feeling to include the government as a whole.   Both of the above mentioned situations seem like another government power grab, which we've seem way too much of in the last decade or two.

[Parrish Ashbourne]

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Potosi Abonwood wrote:

Not to mention it has the potential to kill most streaming media in SL. 

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It has the potential to kill most steaming media on the internet, not just in SL

It would all so effect search engines, and free speech, specials when protesting corporations

[Storm Clarence]

Damn Prok, we are insular provincials; what the **bleep** did you expect? 

[Void Singer]

Oh I dunno, maybe because it's a stupid scorched earth tactic that does nothing to actually pursue the pirates but rather targets businesses, and destroys any posibility of of privacy and allows requires the interception and checking of in route packets. furthermore it has zero accountability, no proscribed methods to be in compliance, and no methods to contest violation. Additionally it provides no means of support to add the network resources and technology required to even attempt compliance.

it was drafted as an MPAA/RIAA wet dream by people who have no idea of how the internet works, nor it's structure, physical or logical.... and to top it off it isn't even effectively designed to do what it proposes.

IMHO it is quite possibly the most idiotic thing to hit the house floor.... ever.

[Ann Otoole]

The US Government has lost all it's respect. The only power they have left is firepower so they are going for the facist state approach. The best approach is for corporations and people to ignore the US Government. Maybe they will go away when people discontinue voting for republicans and democrats and return congress to a democracy.

[Deltango Vale]

I believe the main concern is that the law will have unintended consequences. Statute Law is often written by fallible people motivated by personal agendas under pressure from a variety of special interest groups. Moreover, the construction of a law to perform exactly as intended is extraordinarily difficult. The idea that one can easily 'solve' a problem by passing a law is naive.

I myself am very much in favor of protecting private property rights, but I believe it is best done through the tort system and the Common Law. I personally do not trust Big Government with Big Lawyers to be either effective or efficient in protecting private property rights. In fact, I don't trust Big Government and Big Lawyers to do anything right.

[Storm Clarence]

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Ann Otoole wrote:

The US Government has lost all it's respect. The only power they have left is firepower so they are going for the facist state approach. The best approach is for corporations and people to ignore the US Government. Maybe they will go away when people discontinue voting for republicans and democrats and return congress to a democracy.

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The "Constitution in Exile"  

[Jenni Darkwatch]

I'm all for protection of property in most of its shapes including IP.

What's passed as law in the US to protect said property is, however, dumb, ridiculous and pretty stupid. DMCA was one of the worst pieces of dung to ever pass in that regard. SOPA isn't any better. The reasons why it's a lunatics law have already been posted by others.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Isn't this the bill to make it criminal to violate a TOS?

I'm so against that, I'd almost suggest people go exercise their 2nd amendment rights...

The Constitution gives the legislature the power to ennact laws, and the judiciary the power to interpret them, and to shape the common law.

NO WHERE are private actors allowed the right to shape the -PENAL- code.

So if this thing does make a TOS violation a crime, its a patent facial unconsitutional law.

Mark Zuckerberg is not an elected member of the legislature. Not even the US President has the power to create laws.

 

EDIT: I think I'm crossing wires here and getting this one mixed up with CFAA:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57324779-281/doj-lying-on-match.com-needs-to-be-a-crime/

 Its like two draconian things at the same time... /sigh.

 

[Amethyst Jetaime]

SOPA is a bad law period - that's why.  It turns what has always been a civil law into a criminal law and then It gives power to private companies to enforce the law.

[Pussycat Catnap]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

Anything that unites Nancy Pelosi and Ron Paul onto the same side - has got to have something seriously wrong with it.

Opposition

**Only uploaded images may be used in postings**://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/18/EFF_Filtered.png/200px-EFF_Filtered.png" border="0" alt="" width="200" height="99" />

**Only uploaded images may be used in postings**://bits.wikimedia.org/skins-1.18/common/images/magnify-clip.png" border="0" alt="" width="15" height="11" />

EFF home page with American Censorship Day banner

Opponents of the bill include Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Mozilla Corporation, and Wikimedia Foundation, the Brookings Institution and human rights organizations such as Reporters Without Borders,[44] the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU and Human Rights Watch.[45][46][47]

The Library Copyright Alliance (including the American Library Association) objects to the broadened definition of "willful infringement" and the introduction of felony penalties for noncommercial streaming infringement, stating that these changes could encourage criminal prosecution of libraries.[48]

On November 16, Tumblr, Mozilla, Reddit, Techdirt, and the Center for Democracy and Technology were among many other Internet companies that protested the Stop Online Piracy Act by participating in a so-called "American Censorship Day". They displayed black banners over their site logos with the words "STOP CENSORSHIP".[49]

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has expressed opposition to the bill, as well as Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX), who joined nine Democrats to sign a letter to other House members warning that the bill would cause "an explosion of innovation-killing lawsuits and litigation."[50]

[Ceka Cianci]

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Prokofy Neva wrote:

They should.

 

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i'm sure some do....

somewhere..

[Prokofy Neva]

For all you smarties pointing out that this is merely an American bill in Congress and therefore has no relevance to the rest of the world, and make it seem as if raising the question of why SLers don't support it is some kind of ethno-centric crime, again, I suggest you go read the bill.

It's about FOREIGN piracy. That means it will affect YOUR COUNTRY -- particularly if you are in Europe, Russia, China and some other high pirating areas.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

Do you realize that companies are ALREADY judges and juries! And that's what's wrong!

This law would make it possible to get around the problem of having signed a TOS in a place like Second Life, where you have to wait for the company to do something, and makes it possible to litigate in a court of law on the merits of a law against piracy.

Lawsuits against copybotters in SL so far have revolved around trying to track individuals through nicknames and trying even to charge LL with culpability for being the platform, which it has been able to deflect on "save haven" grounds.

But now under SOPA and related legislation, if a platform provider is negligent and inactive in defending IP and doesn't mvoe through some kind of process reasonably to deal with complaints, you will have more remedies to challenge them. That's a good thing for content providers.

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm happy to kill most streaming media in SL. Pay a subscription to media sites and work it out with them. Pretty silly to demand copyright protection on your dresses in a mall where the stream is pirated.

There's a lot of grey area around this, as some websites provide free streams and don't care. But there are less and less of them.

[Prokofy Neva]

No, it's not vaguely worded, it has very, very precise conditions and defenses, as I've outlined here:

 

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2011/11/geeks-screaming-about-internet-censorship-ought-to-be-ashamed-of-themselves-and-ought-to-actually-re.html

 

"overbroad" is merely what the kneejerk lefty ACLU is saying, and of course the notorious copyleftist Electronic Frontier Foundation -- it's not defensible as a critique given the language of the bill.

No, the intent -- and language defining the acts -- in the bill would not touch you as you would have to be distributing infrinting content worth more than $1000, you would have to be operating for commercial purposes, and more than once every 180 days. So none of those tests would be met in your typical teaching situation, and it's silly to invoke specious edge cases. If by some exception you were served notice, you'd have two defenses: economic hardship and technical infeasibility, either of which would get you pretty far.

Saying that the US can't block piracy because China uses technology to block dissent is like saying that the US can't put armed robbers in jail because China puts dissenters in jail. It acts as if there is something special and magical about technology. One minute geeks are telling us that technology is only a tool; in situations like this they make it seem as if it adapts properties of human will. I actually lean more to that latter position, so it would be defensible for me to say that, but they don't.

The bill is intended to curb the billions of dollars lost to the US economy particularly from China, by the way.

I find that in reviewing these issues, people are too literalist and lacking in a sense of how precedent law works. There isn't a law or a case where someone was prosecuted for lying about their weight on an Internet site. There won't be one under even that law that was struck down. Putatively, THAT law might be overbroad, but that doesn't mean this more precise one is.

I'm happy to have Congress, the DOJ, and the courts begin to take back control over the sources of our livelihoods and pry it away from unconscionable hackers and coders, whether in the form of pirates and Anonymous or in the form of Google, which makes its ad revenue precisely on this California Business Model of enabling infringement to get users, then getting them to click on ads, then forcing the content owners to chase them with DMCA takedowns. Remind you of anything else? At least in SL the Lindens have in a sense already instilled SOPA with their third-party viewer policy, and thank God for it.

I elected Congress people, I didn't elect Mitch Kapor at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who is the ideology czar for this stuff behind the scenes. He should look inside Second Life and realize humanity is not served with these collectivist notions of the last century.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

No, it would affect search engines that turn up the results for illegal pill mills and pirate sites.

Already Google just had to pay a $500 million fine even without this law for churning up clickers for the pill mills with its search.

Crime is crime.

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, if you are worried about privacy, go back to your friend Tim Berners-Lee, who designed the WWW precisely with no privacy in mind. It was a profound design flaw.

You imagine that the government will be trawling everyone's accounts in search of infringing content? That's silly, and you've been led to think that by scarifying hysterical propaganda from EFF and Google.

It will work like it works now -- in response to complaints. There will have to be probably cause. The police will still have to get search warrants. It's not like the criminal justice system with its defenses and checks goes away because we get a better law.

It's not about RIAA, that's another kneejerk reactionary leftwing meme. The AFL-CIO backs this because it's about people's livelihoods and work and labour rights. It's about the little guy in SL, not just those big record companies.

Oh, the other hilarious thing about this entire debate is the idea that the Internet is "so technologically complex" that only nerds with their hacker open source culture can understand it, and everybody else can't, and hands off.

What's so refreshing about this legislation is that it puts paid to that era of nerds running things without accountability and democratic participation from the rest of us.

The senator I voted for in my state is voting for this legislation and I couldn't be more pleased. I feel as if for the first time in 7 years since I began battling hacker culture that we're turning a corner.

If the mailman didn't deliver a package of toxic chemicals into your mailbox, you wouldn't start screaming "censorship". Nor would you deman "mailbox neutrality" if he delivered 6 magazines out of 10 because 4 wouldn't fit, and made you pick them up later at the post office.

The Internet is just a big pipe, hooked up to some trucks.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ann, I hope you will go read the laws, and think about this some more.

All these years you've been screaming about the need to get the FTC, the FCC, the Secret Service, the IRS, and, I dunno, the Bureau of Land Management, to "do something" about all the crime and theft in SL.

The minute we have a uniform bill to start to do this without leaving it to the discretion of executive agencies only, you scream.

What, you want Obama's executive agencies to run everything?

[Prokofy Neva]

The special interest groups are Google, EFF, Facebook, and all of their Silicon Valley pals. You show shocking disregard for their big power grab.

Common law and the torts system needs a law to invoke for the modern time -- and this is it. Otherwise, it faulters among very diverse interpretations, and we in SL get only this -- too bad, so sad, unconscionable TOS, goombye.