SOPA

Reddit Users Team Up to Defeat SOPA Lawmaker Lamar Smith. SOPA 2.0: Why the Fight for Internet Freedom Is Far From Over. Is the fight over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) over?

Not even close, according to Internet law expert Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. A world-renowned expert on Internet, copyright and trademark law, Lessig is an outspoken advocate for Internet freedom and net neutrality. Hey Hollywood, Online Piracy Doesn't Hurt Your U.S. Box Office Returns [STUDY]

Remember SOPA?

Remember the urgency with which the bill's backers were trying to convince us that its intended target, online piracy, was a clear and present danger? Remember how those dastardly BitTorrenters were going to deprive us of a functioning, creative movie industry? Well, an academic study now doing the rounds suggests that's nonsense. According to researchers at the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College who examined box office history, piracy has never affected Hollywood's U.S. revenues. Second Lamar Smith ISP-Oriented Bill Draws New Protests. Last December, an anti-child pornography bill co-authored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R - Texas) and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D - Fla.) passed the markup phase and was referred to the House floor.

Though the bill's chief provision is to enable law enforcement authorities to arrest and prosecute entities that knowingly provide financial transaction services to child pornographers, the bill would also require Internet service providers to maintain records of the IP addresses they lease to their customers, for no less than 12 months (18 as originally drafted). In the wake of the historic failure in the House of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which was co-authored by Rep. Smith and sponsored by Rep. Wasserman-Schultz, a newly empowered, and enlarged, wave of protesters aims to stop any bill that would leverage popular sentiment to force ISPs to retain customer data for use by government.

Photo credit: Shutterstock Images. Beyond SOPA. The Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, sponsored by Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Darrell Issa, offers a straightforward and transparent approach to the problem.

Content owners could ask the International Trade Commission to investigate whether a foreign Web site was dedicated to piracy. Here we go again: Congress considers blocking government's open access policy. On SOPA. Several readers have asked me my opinion of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Could SOPA Rise From the Dead? The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act may have been the two most hated bills in recent legislative history and now they’re dead.

Web Darkness, The Day After: Why The SOPA Protests Matter. Www.sopa.bg/request.php?1457. Сдружение за оптимизиране на правосъдието и администрацията, СОПА: Дейност. What You Need to Know About SOPA in 2012. The Internet is in an uproar over the Stop Online Piracy Act.

The battles lines are drawn. Big Media (the record labels, movie studios and TV networks) support the bill while Big Tech (search engines, open source platforms, social networks) oppose it. The bill, introduced to Congress by Representative Lamar Smith, is ostensibly supposed to give the Attorney General the ability to eliminate Internet piracy and to "protect U.S. customers and prevent U.S. support of infringing sites. " How To Get Around SOPA (If It Ever Becomes Law) GoDaddy's SOPA Support Sparks Calls for Boycotts and Domain Transfers.

The Internet Wins: Go Daddy Flip-Flops On SOPA. After outraging the Internet yesterday by declaring support for the Stop Online Piracy Act, Go Daddy has reversed its position in a smarmy press release.

It tweeted the link to Ben Huh, CEO of the Cheezburger Network, who threatened to move his company's thousands of domains yesterday in protest. In the statement published on its website, Go Daddy maintains that "fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance," reminding us that the company has been working on the legislation. But it admits, in the face of massive boycotts, that "we can clearly do better. " If you want more information about SOPA before forming an opinion, Dan Rowinski has written this comprehensive guide: What You Need to Know About SOPA in 2012. GoDaddy CEO: 'We're Not Cynical Folks' In an interview with Mashable shortly after GoDaddy announced its withdrawal of support for the Stop Online Piracy Act, new company CEO Warren Adelman said that the web hosting and domain registration service was acting purely in the best interest of its customers and would now "let others carry the ball forward" as the fiercely contested piece of legislation continues to make its way through Congress.

"After digesting what was being said online and looking at how we got involved in the process, we came to the conclusion that it wasn't ready in its current state and that we'd step back and let others provide leadership," Adelman said. Adelman indicated that the vociferous public outcry this week against the House Judicial Committee's list of supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — and against GoDaddy in particular — was the main factor in the company's reversal. Competitor Accuses GoDaddy of Delaying Domain Transfers. Meet SOPA author Lamar Smith, Hollywood's favorite Republican. Rep.

Lamar Smith, whose congressional district in Texas encompasses the cropland and grazing land stretching between Austin and San Antonio, might seem an unlikely ally for Hollywood on Internet piracy. Smith, a Republican member of the Tea Party Caucus, is from an old South Texas ranching family and proudly subscribed to Field and Stream magazine as a college freshman. He earned a perfect "A+" rating from the National Rifle Association and, in a move not calculated to endear him to coastal elites, tried to increase fines for "indecent" broadcasts. The self-described former ranch manager has become Hollywood's favorite House Republican not because of his conservative views on social issues, or his zero percent rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America -- but because he heads the influential House Judiciary committee, which is charged with drafting copyright laws.

(Sen. Smith declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article. Rep. SOPA Sponsor Withdraws Bill From House. Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, said on Friday that he is pulling the bill "until there is wider agreement on a solution. " "I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy," Smith (R-Texas) said. "It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products. " YouHaveDownloaded Digs Up Piracy Secrets on French President, SOPA Supporters. As heat continues to build around the controversial and contentious Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), one site is taking matters into its own hands to out opponents of piracy as pirates themselves.

YouHaveDownloaded.com is a site that keeps track of everything you have downloaded from file-sharing sites and torrents. The site tracks IP addresses (an identifying number given to computers attached to the Internet) that use sites such as the BitTorrent network. It then matches these IP addresses with a list of files that have been downloaded. Logging into YouHaveDownloaded.com will do a quick cross-check of your IP with the site's database of potentially pirated downloads and show you your potentially criminal download history. More impressively, you can use the site to look up other IP addresses, torrent hashes or specific files. At time of writing, the site has a database of nearly 54 million users (IP addresses), more than 118,000 torrents and more than 2 million files.