SOPA talk, yo.

[Anaximander]

Sent to Representative and both state Senators:

Spoiler:

Dear (insert elected official here),

I am writing to you today in regard to the proposed legislation H.R. 3261: Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate bill S. 968: Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011, known colloquially as SOPA and PIPA, respectively.

A long time ago, some people sought to restrict the free exchange of information as it was deemed a threat to their power. They wouldn't let certain books be read by most people and several copies of "controversial" books were burned. I can't remember any of the details. Normally, I would look it up on Wikipedia, but, it is down today. If memory serves, I think they were called Nazis. I know this anecdote may seem a bit satirical, but I wanted to, at once, illustrate how important I believe the free exchange of information is in society and the historical consequences of the restrictions thereof.

It has always been my understanding that we have rights in this country protecting the free exchange of information via freedom of speech and freedom of the press. These rights have existed concurrent to private property rights since the founding of this country. If these acts or any other manner of sweeping legislation is passed to protect copyrighted material and IP and upheld via the judiciary, then I feel that we will have truly "crossed the Rubicon" and our country and home will no longer be recognizable as a free and independent republic.

For the good of the country and in the names of all those who have fought and died to protect our rights, I feel that people should speak out against legislation such as SOPA and PIPA.

I urge you to protect our rights by doing all you can to vote against the passage of SOPA, PIPA and similar bills. I also encourage you to dissuade your colleagues from supporting these bills.

Thank you for your time and service.

Regards,

[Heisenberg]

With sincerity, how (in your opinion) should I of responded?

You should have read the thread first, and you should not have attacked the credibility and objectivity of Wikipedia without some sort of evidence or coherent argument.

(You should probably have also not made it public that your primary motivation for supporting SOPA was that you were annoyed at Wikipedia for protesting it and thus inconveniencing you. )

[Dauric]

Step 1) Take a deep breath and step away from your annoyance before posting.

Step 2) Make it a relevant point of discussion rather than a declaration of truth based on personal opinion, even consider how you might have phrased it in part or in whole as a question. To wit:

What are people's opinions on the protest blackout?

I'm finding it frustrating to get the information I want on Wikipedia, and it occurs to me that the blackout may be counterproductive given how little media coverage there's been of SOPA/PIPA and the blackout being the first thing people see or hear about it.

Step 3) Reread and edit your post before you hit that Submit button. If you find that you've typed something that reads like a conspiracy nut ("They're using their social influence to force me to believe shit man!") find a better way to phrase it, or just delete it. A badly worded phrasing can hurt your argument more than not including the point.

---
I'm hardly perfect at this myself, I have some colossal judgement errors in these fora, but mostly I find these techniques generally useful for maintaining a civil discussion.

[dragonmustang]

Back on-topic, looks like the protests are having some desired effect: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2012/01/sopa-blackout-sopa-and-pipa-lose-three-co-sponsors-in-congress.html.

Oh, and I love my school:

Spoiler:

No rules were broken in doing that- it's a statue specifically set up outside the University Center so students can paint it.

[Endless Mike]

The folks beating their breasts, tearing their head, and gnashing their
Teeth over SOPA are in many cases the same who were in favor of The Affordable Care Act. This is what happens when we are inconsistent in our defense of liberty: eventually it affects something we care about.

"... Then they came for the cartoonists..."

What?

[Panonadin]

So in other words hold myself to a higher standard in my posts than what is currently in the 12 pages. I understand how thats ovbvious you should always aim high. If I were to try and apply your rules(suggestions) to this thread about 13 posts would pass.

This is getting off topic so I'm moving on.

Does anyone know if you filled out an online petition way back when this stuff first got coverage if you should/can fill out others now that PIPA is on the table or will it just get disgarded because of the original? I followed a link from a friends facebook about 1-2 months ago that had me fill out name/address/location and sent an e mail opposing the bill on your behalf.

Unless of course that was just a scam, I don't really know how those things work.

[Triangle_Man]

The folks beating their breasts, tearing their head, and gnashing their
Teeth over SOPA are in many cases the same who were in favor of The Affordable Care Act. This is what happens when we are inconsistent in our defense of liberty: eventually it affects something we care about.

"... Then they came for the cartoonists..."

What?

I guess he's commenting that SOPA is just as bad as the Affordable Care Act and implying hypocrisy on the part of those who supported one and not the other?

Also, I guess you could just fill it out again. I'd hope it wasn't a scam...

[folkhero]

If you send a letter to your congress-critters, if they are Republican, you might want to frame the issue as government regulations hurting small businesses. Big government vs. job creators in a growing part of the economy and the like.

[Endless Mike]

The folks beating their breasts, tearing their head, and gnashing their
Teeth over SOPA are in many cases the same who were in favor of The Affordable Care Act. This is what happens when we are inconsistent in our defense of liberty: eventually it affects something we care about.

"... Then they came for the cartoonists..."

What?

I guess he's commenting that SOPA is just as bad as the Affordable Care Act and implying hypocrisy on the part of those who supported one and not the other?

Also, I guess you could just fill it out again. I'd hope it wasn't a scam...

Oh, I went and looked at his Twitter feed. He seems to think the government took over health care by giving private insurance companies a whole bunch of new customers.

[Nylonathatep]

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/01/18 ... gislation/

According to Bloomberg, “co-sponsors who say they can no longer support their own legislation include Senators Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican and Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat. Republican Representatives Ben Quayle of Arizona, Lee Terry of Nebraska, and Dennis Ross of Florida also said they would withdraw their backing of the House bill.”

[Game_boy]

Are there any recent estimates of what the vote would be if held now? The individual alignment changes are good but is that actually affecting the bill's chances with so many existing co-sponsors?

[Diadem]

I'm following the media response to this blackout with growing amazement. And with 'media coverage' I mean the total lack of. I don't know how things are in the US, but here in The Netherlands no news source seems to give it more than a few lines at most. Even those newspapers that are considered of high quality. The few lines they do write are mostly about how not every editor of wikipedia agrees with the boycot. Not a word about why, or about SOPA itself.

I don't believe in conspiracies, but I'd almost start believing in them from this coverage. How can all newspapers collectively ignore such a huge and important issue?

[Ghostbear]

I don't believe in conspiracies, but I'd almost start believing in them from this coverage. How can all newspapers collectively ignore such a huge and important issue?

That's very easy, actually: the companies that own the newspaper, or own the TV station, or own whatever form of news propagation is at work, they're nearly universally owned by companies that support SOPA/PIPA. I don't see any way around such things without having a BBC style news option in the US, and I can't imagine enough people supporting that. For what it's worth, I saw that politico covered it with a few articles.

[Game_boy]

FOX had it as the lead story and with an anti-SOPA skew in the article (no Murdoch or MPAA quote, which the BBC had). But Murdoch owns it, and it's FOX..

[Panonadin]

This is a snippet I read in an article about an hour ago.

Spoiler:

Regardless, SOPA opponents are painfully misinformed: Critics of SOPA and PIPA absurdly charge that the bills would "break" the internet, "turn Google and its cohorts into full-time internet cops, and end freedom of speech as we know it," says Eva Rodriguez at The Washington Post. But PIPA doesn't force Google to scour the internet for pirates — it is copyright holders who must hunt down potential violators and then "convince a federal judge" that offending sites are "dedicated" to copyright infringement. Those are the facts. A good part of Wednesday's protests is based on hyperbole — and "what some of us might call lies."

Of course both sides are going to spin it to make the other side look bad, but what is the rebuttal to the facts listed in this quote?

[Griffin]

There aren't any facts listed in that quote, is the thing.

[Steax]

The rebuttal is that this statement is false:

But PIPA doesn't force Google to scour the internet for pirates — it is copyright holders who must hunt down potential violators and then "convince a federal judge" that offending sites are "dedicated" to copyright infringement.

Relevant part bolded. SOPA simply requires a court order, and search engines and payment processors must pull the plug within 5 days or they're also liable. The only way to reverse that is with legal effort (which is hardly fair when it's copyright holding megacorporation vs website). I'll let someone else cover this part, since it has to do with the US justice system, of which I'm not well-versed at.

--

Even the irrelevant parts are relevant:

Via Wikipedia:

The bill would authorize the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders against websites outside U.S. jurisdiction accused of infringing on copyrights, or of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.

They don't even have to actually do any infringement, simply "facilitating" is good enough. No, really, Section 103 defines it as such: "engage in, enable, or facilitate". You don't even need to "dedicate" yourself to it.

--

SOPA section 104 gives immunity to ISPs who police the internet - yes, independently block websites at will. Quoting The Verge:

Oh, but it gets worse. Much worse. SOPA section 104 offers legal immunity to ISPs that independently block websites that host illegally copied material without any prompting from the government. That's a major conflict of interest for a huge ISP like Comcast, which also owns NBC — there would be nothing stopping Comcast from blocking a foreign video service that competes with NBC if it could claim it had a "reasonable belief" it was "dedicated to the theft of US property." And indeed, Comcast is among the companies that support SOPA.

--

Then you have the logic errors, such as:

Critics of SOPA and PIPA absurdly charge that the bills would "break" the internet, "turn Google and its cohorts into full-time internet cops, and end freedom of speech as we know it,"

Google is making a statement that they'll have to police their content if SOPA/PIPA pass. So yes, it will turn them into "internet cops". They're making the statement themselves.

A good part of Wednesday's protests is based on hyperbole

Laws should always be examined in every hyperbolic sense. Something's wrong if you can misuse a law simply by using it fully.

and "what some of us might call lies."

Because the entertainment industry never lies when they randomly pluck videos off YouTube for no disclosed reason at all.

[phlip]

The way that SOPA forces Google et al to police the Internet is indirect - the bill doesn't, AFAIK, directly say they must legally do so... it's correct that the legal onus is on the copyright holder to find the infringement. However, if any infringement is found, then the punitive results against Google or whoever are so massive that there's a huge incentive to Google to make sure there isn't anything to be found.

That is, the law doesn't say "Google must police its databases, of search results, and YouTube videos, and Google+, and so on or face legal punishment", which is what the quoted pro-SOPA person is saying. However it does mean, in effect, that Google must police those databases or risk having something infringing be found by a copyright-holder, and end up having their site shut down, and have all their income streams cut off, and then have to fight a lengthy legal battle just to get everything back.

As for the "dedicated" line... given how loosely and vaguely everything is defined, I doubt it would be a massive challenge to find a judge somewhere in the US who'd be willing to rule that YouTube is "dedicated to copyright infringement", in its current state.

[Panonadin]

First, I'm not pro-SOPA or anti-SOPA I'm kind of just in the middle.

SO I'm just seeking the opinions of more informed and passionate people than myself on the matter.

However in both responses to the quote I linked the line "court order" was included. What's to stop them SEEKING a court order and the judge saying something along the lines of "No"? Wouldn't that be the law/bill/etc working as intended?

Or do we just assume Sony(enter big corperation name here) will just say "hey judge they have this stuff there" and the judge will just sign his name and move on?

[Ghostbear]

Or do we just assume Sony(enter big corperation name here) will just say "hey judge they have this stuff there" and the judge will just sign his name and move on?

Many courts are known to be strongly in favor of certain courses of action- I remember reading that the majority (as in, greater than 50%- I think it might have been as high as 80% or 90%, actually) of all patent or trademark lawsuits are filed in the same court in Texas. I suspect that if this law is passed there will be judges in LA or southern California (and if not there, then somewhere in the US- there's a lot of judges to work with) that will be found to be effectively rubber stamps for such actions. Not because of bribery or corruption, but because they'll be surrounded by the entertainment industry all day- they probably would have worked for it prior, many of their friends will be directly or indirectly working for them, etc.- and once they do find such a judge, the court order requirement will be effectively pointless. Think of all the issues with robo-signing that we had with the housing crisis- courts are backed up, and if the judge gets a source that they think is generally trustworthy, they'll give them an easier time getting through the system, just to clear up their own schedule.

Basically, it comes down to the fact that the RIAA and MPAA members can afford the ludicrous legal fees relatively easily, and can afford to "shop around" to find judges that will agree with them. A small internet website- think of xkcd itself for instance- can not readily afford those costs, and will have an even more difficult time fighting them when the order of operations is "shut down site, then begin court trial"; you'll have just removed their entire revenue stream from them, with practically nothing they can do to stop it.

[Telchar]

If this has already been posted I'm sorry but this is fucked up.

TLDR: English kid gets extradited to the US to face piracy charges....even though he's never set foot in the US. Our extradition treaty with you guys is royaly (teehee) fucked up.

[KnightExemplar]

This is a snippet I read in an article about an hour ago.

Spoiler:

Regardless, SOPA opponents are painfully misinformed: Critics of SOPA and PIPA absurdly charge that the bills would "break" the internet, "turn Google and its cohorts into full-time internet cops, and end freedom of speech as we know it," says Eva Rodriguez at The Washington Post. But PIPA doesn't force Google to scour the internet for pirates — it is copyright holders who must hunt down potential violators and then "convince a federal judge" that offending sites are "dedicated" to copyright infringement. Those are the facts. A good part of Wednesday's protests is based on hyperbole — and "what some of us might call lies."

Of course both sides are going to spin it to make the other side look bad, but what is the rebuttal to the facts listed in this quote?

1. Breaking the internet: There are some real concerns about DNSSEC. Since PIPA is a DNS-level blockade, PIPA may in fact damage DNSSEC. DNSSEC is an encryption protocol between DNS servers (the servers that connect "xkcd.com" to the IP address). However, if the new law forces ISPs to redirect you because of say... a DNS ban, then that means the law requires companies to break DNSSEC. When you visit "thepiratebay.org", you won't be sure if you're heading to the Government's server (that probably will say "This Site was banned due to SOPA") or if you're heading to actually "thepiratebay.org".

A break in the encryption means the whole security mechanism becomes flawed. Of course, DNS has security flaws of its own, but PIPA aggravates the security flaws by conflicting with DNSSEC. With the new law in place, it may become impossible to implement DNSSEC.

2. Convincing a Federal Judge that the offending site is dedicated to copyright infringement. Under SOPA, this happens without a trial. Note, its convincing a federal judge. NOT conduct a trial or win a lawsuit. You just have to convince a judge, and the defendant won't even be there to defend himself.

EDIT: Didn't see your other post.

First, I'm not pro-SOPA or anti-SOPA I'm kind of just in the middle.

SO I'm just seeking the opinions of more informed and passionate people than myself on the matter.

However in both responses to the quote I linked the line "court order" was included. What's to stop them SEEKING a court order and the judge saying something along the lines of "No"? Wouldn't that be the law/bill/etc working as intended?

Or do we just assume Sony(enter big corperation name here) will just say "hey judge they have this stuff there" and the judge will just sign his name and move on?

We have some historical evidence. A law called DMCA was passed in the 90s and was similar. It also dealt with copyrights, grants immunities to cooperating websites but is much smaller in scope. A DMCA takedown notice only takes down the offending material. Similar to SOPA, you only need to "prove" to a federal judge that there is infringing material on a site, and the site will be forced to take it down. (Before a trial At least its only the content however, and not the whole damn site). But then comes the interesting statistic: 37% of DMCA takedowns submitted to Google don't even have to do with copyright infringement. And yet, Google was forced to take those links down anyway should it want to keep its immunity status. Since SOPA instead targets the whole site instead of just the specific content, the potential of abuse is that much worse.

SOPA takes a lot of its language from DMCA actually, so anyone who has been following the DMCA abuse knows how things will turn out in the future. A recent example of DMCA abuse was the Megaupload video, which was taken down from youtube due to "Copyright Infringement". But Megaupload created the entire video from scratch as an advertisement.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... videos.ars

In the Megaupload case, they were forced to take the video down, and now they are suing UMG for DMCA abuse. Hell, an online news site was forced to take down a video because they reported the news. If this level of abuse is already happening with DMCA, it will only get worse when the stakes are raised with SOPA.

Give me a second while I fact-check

[Metaphysician]

If this has already been posted I'm sorry but this is fucked up.

TLDR: English kid gets extradited to the US to face piracy charges....even though he's never set foot in the US. Our extradition treaty with you guys is royaly (teehee) fucked up.

That is fucked up. Poor kid.

[Ghostbear]

If this has already been posted I'm sorry but this is fucked up.

TLDR: English kid gets extradited to the US to face piracy charges....even though he's never set foot in the US. Our extradition treaty with you guys is royaly (teehee) fucked up.

That is fucked up. Poor kid.

I hope that kid wins appeal- what the fuck kind of fucking shit ruling is that? The judge is a complete fuckhead. And so is whoever in the US is requesting their extradition: fuck you, whoever you are. Seriously though, fuck that judge. If I was a UK national I would be even more fucking pissed than I am now reading that.

Spoiler:

P.S. Fuck

[KnightExemplar]

Yeah, by this point, my memories are getting mixed up between SOPA and DMCA. Whatever, they're so similar I'm mixing them up >_<. Also, a Wikipedia blackout is making me a bit dumber today as far as posting stuff. (lol, I know I can avoid it, but whatever).

Anyway, have you guys been enjoying the slants placed onto all sides? Here's a bit from the Washington Times (Conservative Newspaper):
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/ ... e-disease/

Hollywood has for a long time been politically active, and its executives think in political terms. Innovation and individuality scare them silly. They want their world to be orderly and controlled, the very antithesis of Silicon Valley. Capitalism scares them, unregulated markets scare them, and so they want to “bring order” to a digital world that looks to them like chaos.

But then Rachel Maddow was talking about SOPA also in a favorable light:
http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/ ... pa/6jkc92x

I guess its more progressive to harp on Freedom of Speech. (ACLU == left wing / protector of free speech?).

Anyway, I just find the political disconnect on both sides to be interesting. Hollywood supports the bills together with Rupert Murdoch. Nancy Pelosi joins her criticism of SOPA / PIPA with Paul Ryan. The "two-party system" ain't so two-party when it comes to bills like this. Aside from the largest online protest ever done, I think this will go down in history as also a political issue that defied party lines. Party lines simply did not exist at all throughout this issue, either on support or in opposition.

------------

Some stats (thanks @Wikipedia for coming back online, lulz. I'm intelligent again)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... Learn_more

* 1% of all tweets between 4:00 and 5:00 were under the tag: #wikipediablackout.
* 8 Million people looked up their representative using the Wikipedia zip-code locator.
* Estimated 250,000 SOPA related tweets / Hour during the blackout

I have heard SOPA on every news channel I watched when I got home as well as on the Radio as I came back from work. Good job people, I'd have to say the protest was amazingly successful.

[The Great Hippo]

But then Rachel Maddow was talking about SOPA also in a favorable light:
http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/ ... pa/6jkc92x

How was that at all favorable to SOPA? She explained the facts in a pretty neutral manner; if anything, her presentation was slightly slanted against SOPA.

EDIT: Maybe this is unfair, but it seems to me like SOPA is one type of barometer to detect whether or not politicians are interested in helpful policies or bulletpoints provided by the entertainment industry. I think any reasonable person who assesses the data available will conclude that SOPA is a bad idea; the reason you have so many people standing against it across the aisles is because there are people who oppose bad ideas on both sides.

[cjfm]

Well, the blackout may not have been much on the news in the Netherlands, but it was quite high on the news in the UK. Jimmy Wales got a lengthy slot to explain it on on Tuesday night, and put his case very well against the "of course it wouldn't work like THAT, against sites like WIKIPEDIA..." promoter of the bill, whose name evades me. And today the stepping back to the senators is third headline, right after death and disaster with the Italian cruiser and the biggest UK high-street bankruptcy since 2008. Pretty high.

Possibly because of the McKinnon and O'Dwyer extradition cases, what America does with its laws, especially on the internet, is pretty interesting to us, and this is not confidence-inspiring. Given how it affects everyone in the world, it's a bit dispiriting how little anyone outside the US can do to influence it: they're your lawmakers, but the laws they make affect us pretty directly. Our elected representatives can basically only talk quietly to Obama, who sounds pretty negative about the bills anyway.

Of course the other issue influencing how much coverage it got over here it might also be that Britain, or the British media, seem to have collectively fallen for Jimmy Wales. Personalities do count with the media as much as the nitty gritty of the issues, and we like him a LOT.

[Steax]

Not strictly about SOPA, but related in a way.

Small news site asked to reveal anonymous commenter's personal details by subpoena. (subpoena details by the news site)

In short, Grooveshark, a music streaming service, was sued for copyright by all the major music labels. In that process, they used an internet comment, posted on a website called Digital Music News, as evidence. You heard me right. Here's the comment in question:



So Grooveshark goes off and finds a way to demand information about said commenter from Digital Music News by subpoena. I'll paste this here, verbatim from the verbatim of the subpoena, snipped off, but regarding that commenter:

(3) Any and all documents concerning the identity of the First Anonymous Commenter, including, without limitation, that person's name, address, telephone number and e-mail address, and the IP Address and ISP associated with that person, as well as any other information that would assist Escape in ascertaining the identity of that person and/or the geographic location from which that person transmitted to DMN the written comments described in Definition G, above.

Emphasis mine.

Yep, don't even need said statement to be on your own website to be evidence. If Grooveshark didn't decide to attack DMN, it'd make for a fine statement about the stupidity of the record labels... But I guess this way we also see how easy it was for them to get a subpoena for that information. Information that anyone on the web would know is not readily available unless explicitly requested from the user.

--

In a nutshell: Record labels use anonymous blog comment as evidence, company gets subpoena to demand name, address, and telephone number of commenter.

[Angua]

Is there anything on how congress itself was affected yesterday? Were there lots of calls to them in protest? Did petitions get significantly large?

[Steax]

Is there anything on how congress itself was affected yesterday? Were there lots of calls to them in protest? Did petitions get significantly large?

The only number I can offer you now is that Google's petition got to 4.5 million in it's day off. "Several hundred" showed up on San Francisco's city hall. Also happened in New York. (via the WSJ)

I also found this amusing:

One advertisement from Hollywood's supporters appeared Wednesday online and on a billboard in New York's Times Square. The advertisement began: "What to do during an Internet blackout" and suggested the public read books, watch movies or listen to music.

--

Also, TED joins the battle. Regardless of how terrible SOPA/PIPA are, it's kinda awesome to see everyone from the internet join together in some sort of massive war.

[KnightExemplar]

But then Rachel Maddow was talking about SOPA also in a favorable light:
http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/ ... pa/6jkc92x

How was that at all favorable to SOPA? She explained the facts in a pretty neutral manner; if anything, her presentation was slightly slanted against SOPA.

EDIT: Maybe this is unfair, but it seems to me like SOPA is one type of barometer to detect whether or not politicians are interested in helpful policies or bulletpoints provided by the entertainment industry. I think any reasonable person who assesses the data available will conclude that SOPA is a bad idea; the reason you have so many people standing against it across the aisles is because there are people who oppose bad ideas on both sides.

Strange, i saw it as pro-SOPA. Although... I was "primed" by this segment:

http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/ ... 51f843||||

In this segment, she very clearly speaks favorably about SOPA. Contrast her with Dodd or other clearly anti-SOPA players (The video right after my first link).

----------

EDIT: Oh, for your EDIT: Rachel Maddow describes this as a "Big Money" and "Fat Cats" problem. But conservative sites call them "Afraid of Competition on the free and open Internet". I'm just enjoying the contrast and how conservatives / liberals mold the message to their base.

[Angua]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16623831 Apparently some us officials are withdrawing support! Hurray

[emceng]

I don't watch TV news, but the local newspaper coverage was pretty much non-exisistent. It was a sidebar article, 3/4 of which was about what sites were down and what you should do instead, since you can't spend your time there. Then one paragraph on the bill, with virtually no information. I'll see if there's anything more in today's paper. Also, FU Senators. Both from my state support it.

[Chen]

I hope that kid wins appeal- what the fuck kind of fucking shit ruling is that? The judge is a complete fuckhead. And so is whoever in the US is requesting their extradition: fuck you, whoever you are. Seriously though, fuck that judge. If I was a UK national I would be even more fucking pissed than I am now reading that.

The treaty in question is the problem. There's a thread on it in the SB forum, but it doesn't seem likely he'll win his appeal. The UK really needs to modify that treaty so its at least properly symmetrical.

[The Great Hippo]

Strange, i saw it as pro-SOPA. Although... I was "primed" by this segment:

http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/ ... 51f843||||

In this segment, she very clearly speaks favorably about SOPA. Contrast her with Dodd or other clearly anti-SOPA players (The video right after my first link).

Are we watching the same videos? This one is even more anti-SOPA. She dissects the big money interests, and speaks in neutral/positive terms about the power of internet activism.

[JudeMorrigan]

In this segment, she very clearly speaks favorably about SOPA. Contrast her with Dodd or other clearly anti-SOPA players (The video right after my first link).

I can't watch videos at work, but the way you've worded that seems to suggest that you're calling Dodd an anti-SOPA player. How in tarnation does that work?

[Роберт]

In this segment, she very clearly speaks favorably about SOPA. Contrast her with Dodd or other clearly anti-SOPA players (The video right after my first link).

I can't watch videos at work, but the way you've worded that seems to suggest that you're calling Dodd an anti-SOPA player. How in tarnation does that work?

I think by pro-SOPA, KnightExempler means pro the SOPA protests. (I.E, anti-SOPA.) So I think he's saying the opposite of what he means.

[Griffin]

http://www.vice.com/read/pipa-supporter ... violations

Todays hypocrisy example

[LaserGuy]

I'm following the media response to this blackout with growing amazement. And with 'media coverage' I mean the total lack of. I don't know how things are in the US, but here in The Netherlands no news source seems to give it more than a few lines at most. Even those newspapers that are considered of high quality. The few lines they do write are mostly about how not every editor of wikipedia agrees with the boycot. Not a word about why, or about SOPA itself.

I don't believe in conspiracies, but I'd almost start believing in them from this coverage. How can all newspapers collectively ignore such a huge and important issue?

It's had surprisingly significant coverage in Canada. A summary of the coverage is here.

Spoiler:

SOPA and PIPA may not be Canadian laws, but the protest associated with them generated significant Canadian media coverage. On a remarkable day that saw many U.S. politicians pull their support for the legislation, Canadian coverage included:

Canadian Press - Canadians join website blackout protest against SOPA
National Post editorial board: How not to stop online piracy
CBC - Canada would feel effects of U.S. web-piracy laws
Montreal Gazette - SOPA and PIPA laws would affect Canadians if passed
Postmedia News - Proposed U.S. Internet law met with concern, darkness
Globe - Facing online protest, U.S. lawmakers retreat on piracy bills
Global TV
CBC The National

I appeared on two CBC shows to discuss the developments:

CBC's Lang and O'Leary Exchange (47 minute mark)
CBC Newsworld

For those who aren't familiar with Canadian media, the Canadian Press includes the highest circulation newspaper, the Toronto Star, and the Globe is the second-highest. Postmedia News is a conglomerate that owns about half a dozen major newspapers and numerous local ones. The CBC is the national broadcaster.

[edit]Canadian newsmagazine Maclean's discusses the issue in the context of XXX ripoffs of well-known movies (SFW).

[Griffin]

http://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-shut-down-120119/

MegaUpload has been destroyed. Maybe not DIRECTLY relevant to SOPA, I think its worth mentioning since its the same basic sort of situation.