[LINK] Digital rights DIY

[Tom Koltai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Jan Whitaker
> Sent: Wednesday, 21 December 2011 10:19 PM
> To: link at anu.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [LINK] Digital rights DIY
> 
> 
> At 07:36 PM 21/12/2011, Tom Koltai wrote:
> >I guess we need a Republican candidate to stand up to big biz for 
> >election 2012.  That might work. No SOPA and Repeal ACTA.
> 
> Good lord. Shows how little you know about US political parties..... 
> Republicans stand up to business? They are the poster children for 
> big business! You know, those 1% types?



Err... it appears that Big Business "inadvertently" destroyed part of
McCains 2008 campaign. Oooops. Possibly the Republicans have a long
institutional memory.
A friend sent me the following link in response to my posting:

http://www.rollcall.com/issues/57_74/stephen_demaura_david_segal_candida
tes_concerned_stop_online_piracy_act-211023-1.html

DeMaura and Segal: All Candidates Should Be Concerned About SOPA

By Stephen DeMaura and David Segal
Special to Roll Call
Dec. 14, 2011, Midnight
Quote/

During the waning days of the 2008 presidential race, there was an
important but overlooked occurrence on the John McCain campaign. In
mid-October, the McCain campaign awoke to find that its Web videos and
online advertisements were disappearing from its YouTube page.
The culprit turned out to be a major television network claiming they
owned portions of the videos and that posting the clips was a violation
of copyright law. Even though the campaign, and many others in the
online community, believed the content to be privileged under the "Fair
Use Doctrine," the videos were pulled down.
Fast-forward more than three years, and a new piece of legislation is
making its way through Congress that would make it easier for online
campaign content and websites to be taken down. Even more concerning, if
passed, this bill would allow opposing campaigns or campaign committees
- not just the original content provider - to pull down websites
harboring "infringing content."
The legislation that campaigns across the country should be concerned
about is the Stop Online Piracy Act. The overarching goal of SOPA is a
good one: Take aggressive steps to curb online copyright infringement.
The problem is that the bill would create heavy-handed regulations that
would blacklist legitimate websites without adequately addressing online
piracy.
Here's a plausible campaign scenario under SOPA. Imagine you are running
for Congress in a competitive House district. You give a strong
interview to a local morning news show and your campaign posts the clip
on your website. When your opponent's campaign sees the video, it
decides to play hardball and sends a notice to your Internet service
provider alerting them to what it deems "infringing content." It doesn't
matter if the content is actually pirated. The ISP has five days to pull
down your website and the offending clip or be sued. If you don't take
the video down, even if you believe that the content is protected under
fair use, your website goes dark.
The ability of any entity to file an infringement notice is one of
SOPA's biggest problems. It creates an unprecedented "private right of
action" that would allow a private party, without any involvement by a
court, to effectively shut down a website. For a campaign, this would
mean shouldering legal responsibility for all user-generated posts. As
more issue-based and political campaigns utilize social media to spread
their message and engage supporters, a site could be targeted not only
for the campaign's own posts but also for well-meaning comments from
supporters.
Another damaging aspect of SOPA is the increased liability the bill
would place on ISPs and search engines. SOPA effectively guts the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbors - one of the big reasons
companies such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter weren't crushed in their
early days by harassing lawsuits. Without these safe harbors, the risk
of frivolous lawsuits greatly increases, which makes it more expensive
for startups to get off the ground and decreases the chances of
investment and future job growth.
The good news is that there is an alternative to SOPA, recently
introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), which would effectively stop
online piracy without harming legitimate U.S. businesses and campaigns.
The Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade Act would create a
process for rights holders to protect their property that wouldn't shut
down entire sites over a small amount of copyrighted material. This
legislation helps to solve copyright infringement while protecting the
vitality of the U.S.-based Internet sector - an industry that has
contributed 23 percent of the growth in world gross domestic product and
has revolutionized the way we live.
By creating legislation that allows sites to be shut down at will, with
limited recourse available to the sites' owners, SOPA greatly threatens
the democratizing tool the Internet has become. With the Internet
playing an ever increasing role in the political process, the powers the
bill creates could be greatly abused by those wishing to silence their
opponents.
Political campaigns and anyone interested in an open political process
should be greatly concerned about the regulations SOPA creates and the
freedoms it restricts. Online piracy needs to be stopped, but not at the
expense of creating a legal wasteland that could restrict the vital flow
of candidate and campaign information on the Internet.
/Quote


> Speaking of politics, went to see Ides of March this 
> afternoon. Excellent film.
> 
> Jan
> 
> 
> 
> Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
> jwhit at janwhitaker.com
> blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
> business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
> 
> Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
> sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth. 
> ~Madeline L'Engle, writer
> 
> _ __________________ _ _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/lin> k
>