Controversial Copyright Bills Would Violate First Amendment–Letters to Congress by Laurence Tribe and Me « Marvin Ammori Today, both Professor Laurence Tribe and I submitted letters and legal memoranda to Congress explaining that proposed copyright legislation would violate the First Amendment and be struck down in court. (His letter is available here, and mine is available here.) Who Else Opposes the Bills? Professor Tribe and I both felt compelled to write because of the threat to freedom of speech from the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA) in the House. Who are Professor Tribe and I? Professor Tribe is perhaps the nation’s leading constitutional law expert and among its greatest Supreme Court advocates. Why SOPA and PROTECT IP Violate the First Amendment From a free speech perspective, the problem with SOPA and PROTECT IP can be stated simply. They do not, as often advertised by the copyright industry, merely target foreign “rogue” sites like the Pirate Bay. My letter addresses the threshold question of why standard First Amendment scrutiny applies to these bills.
These 61 Senators are refusing to meet with their constituents before the critical Jan 24 vote on PIPA/SOPA. Oh Reddit, can you call them? : politics Frequently Asked Questions on Identity Cards » NO2ID What is an ID card? The government is planning to establish a system that will involve unprecedented collation and monitoring of personal information. The House of Lords said the Identity Cards Bills name is misleading. This is about more than plastic cards! An ID card, as part of the National Identity Scheme, will impose upon every adult legally resident in this country, including foreign nationals, a card which will link to the National Identity Register, holding fifty pieces of information about each of them. This technology brings many pitfalls, including enormous cost, a one stop shop for organised criminals and intrusion into civil liberties. Why introduce a National Identity Scheme? The Government claims its decision to introduce its identity scheme is based in part on the fact that many countries are starting to put biometrics into their passports. But this is being used as an excuse for a National Identity Register (NIR), masked by the concept of an ID card. What are biometrics?
SOPA, PIPA and bills like them want to kill this blog. And yours January 18, 2012 by Olivier Blanchard If you like this blog and others like it, don’t support SOPA or any of its variants. If you hate this blog and others like it, support SOPA and all of its variants. It’s that simple. 1. 2. As much as I’ve loved writing here for the last 7 years, if SOPA or any future incarnations of SOPA pass, I will have to shut down this blog. As for the reason why supporters of SOPA are wrong about it, there’s this: SOPA doesn’t just completely miss the mark when it comes to making it harder for digital piracy to take place, it also basically puts the internet under Taliban rule. Call or email your representatives (or post to their wall on FB) and tell them not to vote in favor of the bill or any other bill that addresses online piracy in this way. PS: This blog post is in violation of SOPA/PIPA. Like this: Like Loading...
The Definitive Post On Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas There's been plenty of talk (and a ton of posts here on Techdirt) discussing both SOPA (originally E-PARASITE) and PROTECT IP (aka PIPA), but it seemed like it would be useful to create a single, "definitive" post to highlight why both of these bills are extremely problematic and won't do much (if anything) to deal with the issues they're supposed to deal with, but will have massive unintended consequences. I also think it's important to highlight how PIPA is almost as bad as SOPA. Tragically, because SOPA was so bad, some in the entertainment industry have seen it as an opportunity to present PIPA as a "compromise." That main issue, we're told over and over again, is "piracy" and specifically "rogue" websites. Thus, the real issue is that this is a business model problem. And, as we've seen with near perfect consistency, the best way, by far, to decrease infringement is to offer awesome new services that are convenient and useful. So...
Rep. Smith Waters Down SOPA, DNS Redirects Out | Threat Level Rep. Lamar Smith, front, and Sen. Patrick Leahy. Both lawmakers have offered major concessions to online anti-piracy proposals Rep. The announcement from the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee came a day after Sen. Both Leahy and Smith left open the possibility that redirecting could be brought back in at a later time. “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. It was not immediately clear whether Smith would also remove the requirement that, if an ISP decided not to redirect, it must employ other censoring methods as outlined in the bill such as IP address filtering to prevent American citizens from visiting sites the attorney general maintains are dedicated to infringing activities. On Jan. 24, the Senate is expected to vote on whether to unwind Wyden’s hold, which would take 60 votes. Photo: AP
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement What Is ACTA? The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an agreement to create new global intellectual property (IP) enforcement standards that go beyond current international law, shifting the discussion from more democratic multilateral forums, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), to secret regional negotiations. Through ACTA, the US aims to hand over increased authority to enforcement agencies to act on their own initiative, to seize any goods that are related to infringement activities (including domain names), criminalize circumvention of digital security technologies, and address piracy on digital networks. ACTA was negotiated from 2007 through 2010 by the US, the EU, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Singapore, Morocco, Japan, and South Korea. Why Should You Care About It? From its inception, ACTA was intended to target the Internet and its users. Provisions of ACTA What’s Next? What You Can Do
Join Our Censorship Protest! Have you been paying attention to all the hubbub online about the proposed U.S. legislation (SOPA/PIPA) that threatens internet freedom? I wrote about it last week over on WordPress.org, but the gist is this: there’s a bill in the U.S. Senate that if passed would put publishing freedom severely at risk, and could shut down entire sites at the whim of media companies. Fight for the Future created this nifty video to sum it up better than I can. On January 18, 2012, sites all over the internet will be blacking out to protest and try to mobilize more people to speak out against this bill coming up in the Senate next week — S. 968: the Protect IP Act (PIPA) — in an attempt to let U.S. lawmakers know how much opposition there is. Here on WordPress.com, we want to participate as well. Sorry to take away your daily fix of yummy web content, but this bill threatens to do that on a much wider scale. More importantly, we are making it possible for you to participate in the protest. That’s it!
How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation Over the weekend, the Obama administration issued a potentially game-changing statement on the blacklist bills, saying it would oppose PIPA and SOPA as written, and drew an important line in the sand by emphasizing that it “will not support” any bill “that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet." Yet, the fight is still far from over. Even though the New York Times reported that the White House statement "all but kill[s] current versions of the legislation," the Senate is still poised to bring PIPA to the floor next week, and we can expect SOPA proponents in the House to try to revive the legislation—unless they get the message that these initiatives must stop, now. The Anti-Circumvention Provision Perhaps worse, EFF has detailed how this provision would also decimate the open source software community. The “Vigilante” Provision Corporate Right of Action Expanded Attorney General Powers
‘Rogue’ Attorney General Spreads MPAA-Fed SOPA Propaganda Last weekend Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff wrote a column in the Salt Lake City Tribune supporting the pending SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills. In his article Shurtleff argues that the bills are a necessity if the US is to "stop Internet thieves and profiteers." An interesting take, but not very credible, as the Attorney Generally who may soon have the power to seize domains, simply passed off MPAA-penned propaganda as his own words. It is no secret that the MPAA and other pro-copyright groups lobby politicians and law enforcers, but when a column by a prominent Attorney General appears to be written directly by the entertainment industries something is horribly wrong. A few days ago Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff wrote an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune. The Attorney General’s statements do indeed bolster what the MPAA and other pro-copyright groups have said all along. Could it be that the column was partly written by the MPAA? We say yes. But there’s more.
2012 Law Enforcement Requests Report Microsoft receives legal demands for customer data from law enforcement agencies around the world. In March 2013, as part of our commitment to increased transparency, Microsoft began publishing details of the number of demands we receive each year in our Law Enforcement Requests Report and clear documentation of our established practices in responding to government legal demands for customer data. We update this report every six months, and each report includes the number of demands we receive and the number of accounts or identifiers that may be affected by these demands. We also provide details on the number of demands we complied with and, if we complied, whether we provided content or non-content data. This Law Enforcement Requests Report is focused only on law enforcement requests at this time and does not include data about national security requests. About Microsoft’s response process Microsoft follows clear principles in responding to government legal demands for customer data: