atekut je napisao/la:
Newspost sa Demonoida
COICA
In the United States, a new law proposal called The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) was introduced last week, and there will be a hearing in front of the Judiciary Committee this Thursday.
If passed, this law will allow the government, under the command of the media companies, to censor the internet as they see fit, like China and Iran do, with the difference that the sites they decide to censor will be completely removed from the internet and not just in the US.
Please see the following article from the Huffington Post for more information.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-seg ... 39836.htmlAnd if you are a US citizen, please take the time to sign this petition
DemandProgress.org - Petition to Stop the Internet Blacklist!
Update: Also for US citizens, you can email your Senator from the following link and tell him or her your concerns about this bill
Tell Your Senator: No Website Blacklists, No Internet Censorship!
from:
http://seclists.org/nanog/2010/Sep/783EFF needs your help to stop the Senate’s DNS censorship bill From: Peter Eckersley
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:40:25 -0700
Dear network operators,
I apologise for a posting that contains some politics; I hope you’ll agree
that it also has fairly substantial short-to-medium term operational
implications.
As you may or may not have heard, there is a censor-DNS-to-enforce-copyright
bill that is going to be passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee this
Wednesday. It will require service providers to censor the DNS entries of
blacklisted domains where piracy is deemed too “central” to the site’s purpose.
Senators are claiming that they haven’t heard any opposition to this bill, and
it is being sponsored by 14 of the 19 committee members. We believe it needs
to be stopped, and we need your help.
What EFF needs right now is sign-ons to an open letter, from the engineers who
helped build the Internet in the first place. The text of our letter is
below. If you agree with it and would like to sign, please send me an email
at pde () eff org, with your name and a one-line summary of what part of the
Internet you have helped to design, implement, debug or run.
This is URGENT. I need your sign-ons by 4:00pm, US Eastern time (1pm
Pacific), tomorrow. Unfortunately, the civil liberties community has been
ambushed by this bill.
You can find out more details on the bill here:
https://eff.org/coica—————————
Open letter from Internet engineers to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee:
We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network called
the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the standards and
protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented parts of it. We’re
just a little proud of the social and economic benefits that our project, the
Internet, has brought with it.
We are writing to oppose the Committee’s proposed new Internet censorship and
copyright bill. If enacted, this legislation will risk fragmenting the
Internet’s global domain name system (DNS), create an environment of
tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously
harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key
Internet infrastructure. In exchange for this, the bill will introduce
censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers
while hampering innocent parties’ ability to communicate.
All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to
restrict, but this bill will be particularly egregious in that regard because
it causes entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or
files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be
blacklisted under this bill. These problems will be enough to ensure that
alternative name-lookup infrastructures will come into widespread use, outside
the control of US service providers but easily used by American citizens.
Errors and divergences will appear between these new services and the current
global DNS, and contradictory addresses will confuse browsers and frustrate
the people using them. These problems will be widespread and will affect sites
other than those blacklisted by the American government.
The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open
Internet, both domestically and abroad. We can’t have a free and open Internet
without a global domain name system that sits above the political concerns and
objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the leading role the US
has played in this infrastructure has been fairly uncontroversial because
America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a neutral bastion of free
expression. If the US suddenly begins to use its central position in the DNS
for censorship that advances its political and economic agenda, the
consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.
Senators, we believe the Internet is too important and too valuable to be
endangered in this way, and implore you to put this bill aside.
–
Peter Eckersley pde () eff org
Senior Staff Technologist Tel +1 415 436 9333 x131
Electronic Frontier Foundation Fax +1 415 436 9993
——————
Internet’s creator slams ‘blight’ of web disconnection laws
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/inte ... tion-laws/By Agence France-Presse
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 -- 9:43 pm
Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the world wide web, warned Tuesday of the "blight" of new laws being introduced across the globe allowing people to be cut off from the Internet. "There's been a rash of laws trying to give governments and Internet service providers (ISPs) the right and the duty to disconnect people," he told a conference on web science at the Royal Society in London. The "current blight" includes a French law that comes into effect this year that threatens to cut people off if they illegally download from the Internet, and a new British law passed in April which could see similar action, he said. "If a French family can be forcibly disconnected from the Internet by law for a year because one of their children downloaded something that some company asserts that they should not have downloaded, without trial -- I think that's a kind of inappropriate punishment," Berners-Lee said. He added: "I'd like to go on using the Internet. If it gets cut off, or for some reason things go wrong, in some cases, for me, my social life would disintegrate, for other people it may be access to medical information."
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor said the US Senate was also considering a bill this week that would have the government create a blacklist of Internet sites that US ISPs would be required to block. Twenty years after his breakthrough while working at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, Berners-Lee said "the net has got to a point that is so critical". Given the importance of the web in everyone's lives, he urged the Internet experts gathered at the conference to act on the encroachment of the once free-for-all online world. "We have this duty of care," he said. While Berners-Lee said ISPs should not in general be responsble for the content they were carrying, he admitted that issues of anti-terrorism and serious organised crime were "an exception".
________________________________________________________________
After committing to ‘Net Neutrality’, Rep. Waxman pushes bill to kill it
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/comm ... bill-kill/By Stephen C. Webster
Monday, September 27th, 2010 -- 11:53 pm
Legislative text put forward by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) under the banner of mandating network neutrality would instead prevent the government from requiring broadband providers to treat all Internet traffic equally. Waxman, who has vowed that he would support the so-called 'Net Neutrality' policy proposals favored by most Democrats and progressives, has instead put forward an as-yet-unsettled legislative framework that explicitly prohibits the Federal Communications Commission from regulating broadband Internet under Title II of the Communications Act: a caveat key to implementation of what's been called the Internet's First Amendment.
Should the president sign a bill containing Waxman's language, it would effectively kill 'Net Neutrality' efforts and make key parts of a hotly contested proposal by Google and Verizon the law of the land. While the bill [PDF link], first published by National Journal blog Tech Daily Dose, carries language that speaks of preventing ISPs from "unjustly or unreasonably" discriminating against "lawful traffic," the spirit of the rule is completely undermined by text that follows. For today's fast-growing wireless networks, largely seen as the future dominant mode of Internet access, it makes a provision allowing for "reasonable network management," but prohibits blocking "lawful Internet websites". It's unclear whether this prohibition would even be enforceable, since the bill states that it gives the FCC no new authority to regulate providers unless the company actually elects to be regulated. Violations of rules, which would be investigated only on a case-by-case basis, would incur a maximum fine of $2 million. Critics of Waxman's bill say that $2 million is almost nothing compared to the potential profits that could be generated by engaging in questionable network traffic management practices. Another concern expressed by 'Net Neutrality' proponents is that bloggers or whistle-blowers publishing content the network providers object to could simply be deprioritized, leaving their material in a gray zone devoid of traffic, which many Internet users cannot easily access.
The legislation also purports to prevent wireless providers from blocking "lawful applications that compete with the provider’s voice or video communications services," but it again makes an allowance for "reasonable network management." That term, "reasonable network management," is defined as "a network management practice that is appropriate and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management function". Waxman's text goes on to explain that "appropriate and tailored practices to reduce or mitigate the effects of what it calls "traffic that is harmful to or unwanted by users" are permissible. The catch: "Users" includes "premise operators, [...] the provider’s network, or the Internet". Stated in plain language, under Waxman's proposal, traffic that is unwanted on a provider's network may still be subject to "management." Instances of traffic shaping which can be construed as "unreasonable" pose only a minor inconvenience to ISPs, as the FCC is only investigating individual claims. From an Internet user's perspective, traffic shaping and discriminatory practices are impossible to prove without the service provider's own admission that it is occurring. "In determining whether a network management practice is reasonable, the Commission shall consider technical requirements, standards, or best practices adopted by one or more independent, widely-recognized Internet community governance initiative or standard-setting organization," the bill continues. "In determining whether a network management practice for wireless broadband Internet access service is reasonable, the Commission shall also consider the technical, operational, and other differences between wireless and other broadband Internet access platforms, including the need to ensure the efficient use of spectrum."
In other words, "[the bill] allows blocking over wireless broadband any peer-to-peer activity or even applications, and merely forces 'transparency' rather than a ban on discrimination of lawful traffic," David Dayen summarized, blogging for FireDogLake. Even lacking full consensus from fellow members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Waxman's text "seems to have enough support to pass the House," The Hill noted, citing three unnamed aides to the California Democrat. Waxman, at one point, was a proponent of the Internet Freedom and Preservation Act, which would have truly enshrined network neutrality as one of America's emerging broadband policies. It was referred to the Energy and Commerce Committee in July, 2009, where it still lingers at time of this writing.
Here's what Waxman said about 'Net Neutrality' on Sept. 17, 2009:
The fears some have professed that Net Neutrality rules will stifle network investment have proven unfounded over the years. Most recently, over 2,200 public and private entities applied for broadband grants and, in so doing, opted-in to Net Neutrality rules. Industry will benefit from clarity, consistency and predictability with regard to Net Neutrality. As a member who has worked hard to protect the intellectual property rights of our creative communities, I do not believe Net Neutrality and strong copyright protection are mutually exclusive goals. In fact, clear Net Neutrality rules should help broadband network operators explore innovative steps designed to stop the theft of online content. I know our new FCC Chairman shares my perspective on the importance of achieving both goals.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former FCC attorney selected by President Obama to lead the agency, has said he would like to reclassify broadband Internet as a universal service, subjecting it to the enforcement of network neutrality rules. He enjoys the support of the president on the issue, as Obama promised that his administration would usher in non-discrimination policies for Internet traffic. However, given that Waxman's bill explicitly allows network management on every level -- including the blocking of content "unwanted" by users that include the network's providers -- it would appear the one-time advocate of enforceable network neutrality has completely abandoned the principle. "Interestingly, the draft proposal has a sunset at the end of 2012," FDL's Dayen wrote. "That’s probably a good idea with all Internet-related legislation, given the fast pace of innovation. But it means that the FCC wouldn’t be able to do anything on reclassification until the next election, and I think the timing is pretty profound."
_________________________________________________________
Bill would let feds block pirate websites worldwide
Copyright enforcement as censorship
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco • Get more from this author
Posted in Law, 21st September 2010 21:22 GMT
US lawmakers have introduced legislation that would allow the federal government to quickly block websites anywhere in the world if they are dedicated to sharing copyrighted music or other protected content.
The “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” would empower the US Department of Justice to shut down, or block access to, websites found to be “dedicated to infringing activities.” Sites that use domain names registered by a US-based company, or a top-level-domain administered by a US-based company, would find their internet addresses frozen.
The bill also contains provisions to block sites with domain names and TLDs that are maintained by overseas companies, which are immune to US laws. Under the legislation, US attorneys would be authorized to obtain court orders directing US-based internet service providers to stop resolving the IP addresses that allow customers to access the sites. That would have the effect of making the sites inaccessible to US-based web users who don't use some sort of proxy service.
The bill, which was introduced on Monday, is sponsored by Senators Orin Hatch and Patrick Leahy and has support from at least 10 other senators. It is scheduled to be added to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s agenda for a Thursday hearing.
Read More...S. 3804 - Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:S3804:
________________________________________________________
Bill Would Give Justice Department Power to Shutter Piracy Sites Worldwide
* By David Kravets Email Author
* September 20, 2010 |
* 3:33 pm
Lawmakers introduced legislation Monday that would let the Justice Department seek U.S. court orders against piracy websites anywhere in the world, and shut them down through the sites’ domain registration.
The bipartisan legislation, dubbed the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, (.pdf) amounts to the Holy Grail of intellectual-property enforcement. The recording industry and movie studios have been clamoring for such a capability since the George W. Bush administration. If passed, the Justice Department could ask a federal court for an injunction that would order a U.S. domain registrar or registry to stop resolving an infringing site’s domain name, so that visitors to PirateBay.org, for example, would get an error message.
“In today’s global economy the internet has become the glue of international commerce –- connecting consumers with a wide array of products and services worldwide,” said Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Utah) in a statement announcing the bill. “But it’s also become a tool for online thieves to sell counterfeit and pirated goods, making hundreds of millions of dollars off of stolen American intellectual property.”
The bill would direct injunctions at a piracy site’s domain registrar, if the registration was through a U.S. company. If not, the Justice Department could serve the court order at the registry for the site’s top-level domain. Registry’s for the dot-com, dot-net and dot-org domains are all U.S.-based, and thus within the courts’ jurisdiction. For domains not under U.S. control, the bill would demand that internet service providers in the United States block resolution of the address upon a court order, but overseas users would not be impacted.
Read More
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/0 ... z10IBzF2Fl______________________________________________________________
Copyright, Censorship, and Domain Name Blacklists at Home in the U.S.
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/w ... ts-home-usBy Wendy Seltzer - Posted on September 21st, 2010 at 2:25 pm
Last week, The New York Times reported that Russian police were using copyright allegations to raid political dissidents, confiscating the computers of advocacy groups and opposition newspapers "under the pretext of searching for pirated Microsoft software." Admirably, Microsoft responded the next day with a declaration of license amnesty to all NGOs:
To prevent non-government organizations from falling victim to nefarious actions taken in the guise of anti-piracy enforcement, Microsoft will create a new unilateral software license for NGOs that will ensure they have free, legal copies of our products.
Microsoft's authorization undercuts any claim that its software is being infringed, but the Russian authorities may well find other popular software to use as pretext to disrupt political opponents.
"Piracy" has become the new tax evasion, an all-purpose charge that can be lobbed against just about anyone. If the charge alone can prompt investigation -- and any electronics could harbor infringing copies -- it gives authorities great discretion to interfere with dissidents.
That tinge of censorship should raise grave concern here in the United States, where Patrick Leahy and Orrin Hatch, with Senate colleagues, have introduced the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act." (PDF).
This Bill would give the Attorney General the power to blacklist domain names of sites "offering or providing access to" unauthorized copyrighted works "in complete or substantially complete form, by any means, including by means of download, transmission, or otherwise, including the provision of a link or aggregated links to other sites or Internet resources for obtaining such copies for accessing such performance or displays"; as well as those offering items with counterfeit trademarks. The AG could obtain court orders, through "in rem" proceedings against the domains, enjoining the domain name registrars or registries from resolving the names. Moreover, in the case of domains without a U.S. registrar or registry, other service providers, financial transaction providers, and even advertising servers could be caught in the injunctive net.
While the Bill makes a nod to transparency by requiring publication of all affected domain names, including those the Department of Justice "determines are dedicated to infringing activities but for which the Attorney General has not filed an action under this section," it then turns that information site into a invitation to self-censorship, giving legal immunity to all who choose to block even those names whose uses' alleged illegality has not been tested in court. (Someone who is listed must petition, under procedures to be determined by the AG, to have names removed from the list.)
Finally, the statute's warped view -- that allegations of infringement can only be good -- is evident in the public inputs it anticipates. The public and intellectual property holders shall be invited to provide information about "Internet sites that are dedicated to infringing activities," but there is no provision for the public to complain of erroneous blockage or lawful sites mistakenly or maliciously included in the blacklist.
Hollywood likes the Bill. Unfortunately, there's plenty of reason to believe that allegations of infringement will be misused here in the United States. Even those who oppose infringement of copyright and trademark (myself included) should oppose this censorious attempt to stop it.
_______________________________________________________________________
EFF: Censorship of the Internet Takes Center Stage in "Online Infringement" Bill - S.3804
Submitted by Michael Nystrom on Tue, 09/21/2010 - 22:08
in
*
Daily Paul Liberty ForumLegislative Analysis by Richard Esguerra | EFF
September 21, 2010
Senator Patrick Leahy yesterday
introduced the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act" (COICA). This flawed bill would allow the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to break the Internet one domain at a time — by requiring domain registrars/registries, ISPs, DNS providers, and others to block Internet users from reaching certain websites. The bill would also create two Internet blacklists. The first is a list of all the websites hit with a censorship court order from the Attorney General. The second, more worrying, blacklist is a list of domain names that the Department of Justice determines — without judicial review — are "dedicated to infringing activities." The bill only requires blocking for domains in the first list, but strongly suggests that domains on the second list should be blocked as well by providing legal immunity for Internet intermediaries and DNS operators who decide to block domains on the second blacklist as well. (It's easy to predict that there will be tremendous pressure for Internet intermediaries of all stripes to block these "deemed infringing" sites on the second blacklist.)
COICA is a fairly short bill, but it could have a longstanding and dangerous impact on freedom of speech, current Internet architecture, copyright doctrine, foreign policy, and beyond. In 2010, if there's anything we've learned about efforts to re-write copyright law to target "piracy" online, it's that they are likely to have unintended consequences.
This is a censorship bill that runs roughshod over freedom of speech on the Internet...
Continue at EFF.org_____________________________________________________________
SLAPP Blogger lawsuits originate at BCCI/Ptech/Iran-Contra Narco Banksters
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=181512.0The Case of The Fairness Opinions and the Bankster-Drug Cartels' Conflict of Interests
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=183792.0Stephens, Inc. is Ptech
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=187246.0______________________________________________________________
Bill would let U.S. kill allegedly infringing sites without trial, immunize ISPs
By Denise Howell | September 21, 2010, 6:54am PDT
Summary
Proposed new legislation would strip domain access from sites ‘dedicated to infringing activities,’ cutting through the red tape of due process, sovereignty, and property rights.
Recently I’ve gotten a lot of mail from concerned people wondering whether the Obama administration has secreted an “Internet kill switch” into a pending cybersecurity bill. As of yesterday, I can tell them: right needle, wrong haystack.
While it’s apparently debatable whether the U.S. government already has the ability to shut sites down, proponents of the just-introduced Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (PDF) don’t want there to be any confusion on the point: if this law is passed, it will. Not in the name of national security, but instead to protect the economic interests of U.S. intellectual property owners.
To put things in context, it’s no secret aggressive enforcement by U.S. rightsholders in the entertainment, software, and other industries has driven online traffic in infringing material offshore. In May, the Congressional Anti-Piracy Caucus named China, Russia, Mexico, Canada and Spain — home of some of the top file-sharing sites — as its primary Axis of Evil, and of course Sweden, which houses the uber-resilient Pirate Bay, gets an honorable mention on any such list. The legislation introduced yesterday is evidence of a lightbulb going off over someone’s head on the enforcement side of this struggle: though the U.S. lacks jurisdiction and control over far-flung Web hosts and ISPs, it has jurisdiction over the registries for the .com (VeriSign), .net (VeriSign), and .org (the Public Interest Registry) domains, and various other TLDs. “Let’s use it,” the rightsholders have declared.
Under this proposed new law, in light of the dominance of U.S. firms in the domain registry arena, U.S. rightsholders would be able to effectively flip the kill switch on sites offering allegedly infringing material without having to rely on the cooperation of pesky foreign governments and courts. Here’s how Keith Kupferschmid, Senior Vice President for Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement at SIIA, put it:
Read More...___________________________________________________________
Proposed Law Would Allow Justice Department to Shut Down Websites
http://www.infowars.com/proposed-law-wo ... -websites/Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
September 23, 2010
The Senate Committee on the Judiciary will consider action today on a bill entitled Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, ostensibly designed to allow the Justice Department to combat copyright infringement. “The legislation authorizes the Justice Department to file a court order against the domain name and seek an order from the court stating that the domain name is being used to access a website that is engaging in illegal activities,” reports TechNewsDaily.
In addition, the bill contains provisions to block sites with domain names and TLDs (top-level domains) that are maintained by overseas companies, which are immune to US laws.
The bipartisan legislation “amounts to the Holy Grail of intellectual-property enforcement,” writes David Kravets for Wired. “Websites eligible for Justice Department targeting – if the measure is approved – must be ‘dedicated to infringing activities,’ according to the text’s language. A site can be ‘subject to civil forfeiture’ if it’s ‘primarily designed’ as a pirate site with ‘no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use’ other than to distribute pirated or counterfeited wares,’” according to Kravets.
Congress and the Obama administration, however, have demonstrated antipathy toward the idea of a free and open internet regardless of copyright infringement. Earlier this year, Senator Joe Lieberman pushed the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, legislation designed to give Obama dictatorial power to shut down the internet under the rubric of national security.
“Senators pushing the bill rejected the claim that the bill was a ‘kill switch’ for the Internet, not by denying that Obama would be given the authority to shut down the Internet as part of this legislation, but by arguing that he already had the power to do so,” Paul Joseph Watson reported on June 25, 2010.
As Philip Giraldi notes, the government continues to invent excuses to intervene into the internet. All of these “arguments for intervention are essentially themselves fraudulent and are in reality being exploited by those who favor big government and state control,” writes Giraldi. “The real reason for controlling the internet is to restrict access to information, something every government seeks to do.”
In July, a hosting company pulled the plug on Blogetery, a blog website, after the FBI told the hosting service that a blog on the site had posted bomb-making information. “Sources close to the investigation say that included in those materials were the names of American citizens targeted for assassination by al-Qaeda. Messages from Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the terrorist organization, as well as bomb-making tips, were also allegedly found on the server,” CNet News reported on July 19.
“The extreme response implies a possible presumed terrorist connection, but it is important to note that no one was charged with any actual offense, revealing that the government can close down sites based only on suspicion,” writes Giraldi.
On Wednesday, senior Obama administration officials argued that “al-Qaeda inspiration… has become increasingly accessible through the Internet, and English-language Web sites are tailored to address the unique concerns of U.S.-based extremists,” according to the Washington Post.
Is it possible, in the event the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act is enacted, the government will use the law to shut down disfavored websites, using the excuse of copyright infringement?
In 2009, the great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, nephew of banker David Rockefeller, and former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller said the internet not only represents a threat to national security, but also said we would all be better off if the technology had never been invented.
The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act is the latest effort by the government to control and eventually roll back the free and open internet under the guise of protecting copyright. In 2008, Alex Jones detailed government efforts to shut down the internet and kill off the most effective technology ever devised to spread truth and counter government and corporate media propaganda.