What Does the Public think about SOPA?? Let's ask

The SOPA is just wrong. They are basically taken away freedom of speech from the internet. There are less hate speeches on the internet than anything else. True lots of pirating but stupid. This shouldn't happen


                        ----Issac


its SOPAthetic.
        
                    -- Meghan

• I believe our government does mean good but many liberals in this country feel the must start an argument. I disagree with the fact that we are a free country yet we are being censored. I believe the bill will be recalled because of the many unhappy citizens.
• 
  Matt

  No, our bought politicians' opinions are swayed too easily by corporate lobbyists. If anything, Google and Wikipedia's opinions have just offset the pro-censorship propaganda of Hollywood and the music industry. I was opposed to SOPA and PIPA long before Google and Wikipedia took a stance on it too.
• 

  litre

  How so? If you are really interested, you can find the actual law everywhere, read it and form your own opinion. I am just fine with the lenghty post by WMF General Counsel G. Brigham http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/13/how… and have no reason to believe they are overreacting about it.

  • 18 hours ago

Ron Paul is for the US Constitution and against the neo-conservative / socialist movements that are more commonly referred to as Republican and Democrat parties. Modern elections are all about buying votes with money stolen from the national treasury or campaign contributions given in return for special favors. Think I'm wrong? Why don't you read the US Constitution and an essay about Col Dave Crockett, "Not Yours to Give."? 

Both MSM parties (republicans and democrats) are heavily reliant on emotion. (the voters are a jury that has proven to be incapable of making logical decisions) 

I look up bills on govtrack.us. I can also see the bill sponsors and voting record of senate and congress. 

At least w/ SOPA King B Hussein Obama will not need to sit and wait w/ his internet kill switch. It will be done automatically. In addition please consider this;

FEMA camps and NDAA are the real thing. (just like an Orwellian Utopia) You'll be gettin' the eff out of dodge to avoid some kind of urban uprising because of a disaster or emergency and about 30 or 40 miles out of town traffic will stop. Military stormtroopers will walk through stopped traffic and warn people to stay in their cars. When you get to the roadblock ahead you will be told to get out of your car (leave your keys and belongings in the car and DO NOT bring any weapons.) Then you will wait in a holding area for a bus and go to one of their internment facilities for in-processing. Hopefully you will not get to play any of their games (waterboarding, solitary confinement, etc) But don't worry, 6 fully staffed waterboards means you won't have a long line to wait in.

NDAA (just signed into law by Barack Hussein Obama) will be used to authorize the whole thing, Did you read the book or see the movie "1984"? That's what it is. It allows any federal agency to declare an emergency and use the military forces to impose martial law. What they are doing in the mid east (door to door searches without warrants or any due process whatsoever) is only a rehearsal of what they have in store for us here. This is an article I wrote for another section.

Do the police need a warrant to search me or my property? Under aspects of the US Constitution, all persons are protected from unwarranted searches and any other form of arbitrary harassment. Unfortunately modern courts have misinterpreted the intentions of the founding fathers who authored the US Constitution and Bill of Rights to give the police the power at their discretion to use "probable cause." Police should not be allowed to lawfully act on suspicions or whims, and any action against any person should be deemed unconstitutional. This also includes any electronic surveillance such as wiretaps, directional mics, etc. Of course under aspects of the "Patriot Act" they will claim that it is to protect us from terrorists. They also claim that states need to implement a REAL ID program so that sheeple can be digitally mapped for easy identification to once again... protect us from terrorists. Meanwhile, the southern border is wide open to basically let in whoever wants to come for whatever reason. 

The fact is this; the enforcement of drug and firearm prohibition has allowed the government to turn this country into a pig powered police state and everyday it is becoming more and more like the USSR. You might like all of this "protection" but personally I prefer to protect myself. If you are the kind of person that wants to give up your liberty for security then please go somewhere else like China or N Korea.


           -- Loefa

ThePiratebay.com's Opinion on SOPA & PIPA Please Read. IMPORTANT!

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012. PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture. Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever. So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they're all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it's all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules. The reason they are always complainting about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It's all based on the fact that we're competition. We've proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We're just better than they are. And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations. The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we've stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means "trash" in Swedish. The word PIPA means "a pipe" in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you'll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown. SOPA can't do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we'll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really. To fix the "problem of piracy" one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they're creating "culture" but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they're fat. In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he's complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world - because he's jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you'd get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News. Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can't access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that. THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

8 Political Reasons to Stop SOPA & PIPA

My post from earlier today, 8 Technological Reasons to Stop SOPA & PIPA, discussed the legitimate technological problems with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These bills are supposed to be an attempt at stopping online piracy, but as I mentioned yesterday, they will not work but will instead cause harm to the speed, reliability, security, and safety of the Internet. There are also political reasons this legislation should not be supported. Here are eight of them: SOPA and PIPA will not stop piracy. It’s even a stretch to argue that they would impact it at all. I explained how earlier, but the technical details aren’t important to today’s point. If proposed legislation will obviously not accomplish its stated purpose, it should never pass. This one point alone should be enough for your congressman and senators to oppose it. In case it’s not enough, keep reading; I have seven more reasons. SOPA and PIPA mandate censorship compliance. When a domain name is seized by the government, ISPs are forced to comply with the censorship. There is no option of appeal for the ISPs; they must comply. The method of seizing domain names lacks due process for the accused. These bills take a “guilty until innocent” approach to Internet censorship. If the site that has been seized is truly not violating copyrights, the owner can follow a process to get his site restored, but this process is backward from what the Fifth Amendment would require. Voting for legislation which so obviously ignores the Fifth Amendment would be a violation of the oath of office for any legislator. SOPA and PIPA contradict the safe harbor rule. I’m no lawyer, but current law creates a safe harbor for ISPs. Basically YouTube isn’t liable for copyrighted material you upload, as long as they take it offline at the request of the copyright holder. If this legislation passes, it will make YouTube responsible for the content its users upload, which means that YouTube could be gone from the Internet with one complaint of copyright violation. SOPA and PIPA will damage entrepreneurship. The risk of investing startup capital for a new company will be too great; it could be completely lost overnight. Where would we be without the companies that came from the dot com era? I know where I’d be: unemployed. We can’t risk killing the entrepreneurial spirit in America’s small business minds. The Attorney General is a qualifying plaintiff. Suppose people who comment on my site have an avatar of a copyrighted character. Suppose Eric Holder doesn’t like what I have to say about him. He would be able, without the request or support of the copyright holder, to have my web site’s domain seized by court order. This is too much power for government to hold. SOPA and PIPA set a precedent for global Internet administration. This one is really scary. Yesterday I talked about how easy it was to bypass the efforts of a SOPA/PIPA domain seizure by using servers outside of the United States for DNS queries. The next logical step would be for our government to start pushing for a global Internet management process where all DNS servers would be subject to censorship law. A United Nations type effort for censoring Internet sites would effectively kill the Internet. SOPA and PIPA are about Internet censorship, not online piracy. I’ve used the word “censorship” several times in this post – and not by accident. This legislation is about our government having the ability to step in and forcibly seize a web site so that people in the United States are unable to read its content. Putting restrictions on what people can read or publish is nothing more than censorship. This legislation hinders free speech and is in violation of the First Amendment. Online piracy is definitely an important issue, but it’s not an issue that can be solved with government regulation. It’s a service problem. Think about how iTunes saved the music industry with the iTunes store. It made music easy to buy, and people bought it. To stop piracy, copyright holders need to deliver the content in ways where the pirates are willing to pay for it. A government takeover of the Internet is not the solution to this problem. I hope you’ve found these posts enlightening and informative. Please use them to stress to your congressman and senators that this legislation must not be passed. There is no reason for any member of Congress to vote in favor of this legislation. Emphasize these points when you call. Let them know you’re paying attention. We absolutely must stop these bills from becoming law.

8 Technological Reasons to Stop SOPA & PIPA

There’s legislation in the House and Senate right now that is very troubling to me. In the House, it’s called the Stop Online Piracy Act (abbreviated SOPA); in the Senate, it’s called PROTECT IP (or PIPA). The goal of the legislation is to stop online piracy, which is definitely a problem. The Senate will be voting on it later this month, and for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been in awe at the absurdity of this legislation while trying to find a proper way to respond to it. Here at Uphold Liberty I’m a freedom loving, Constitution defending, small government guy who writes my own personal opinion about politics (which, for the record, may or may not always be the view of my employer). My day job (the one that actually pays bills) is as a systems administrator for a very large company. I’ve spent the vast majority of the last 13 years since my college graduation dealing with the technology of the Internet, and I know it quite well. My career in IT and my fondness for liberty make me one of a relatively small number of political bloggers qualified to address this issue from both the technological and political points of view. Today I am discussing the technological issues around this legislation; tomorrow I’ll post the political problems with it. This weekend I spent a lot of time poring over this legislation, blog posts, and white papers about it. I made my own notes and then merged my concerns of this legislation with those I found elsewhere on the Internet. This post is a fairly exhaustive list of the technological problems with SOPA and PIPA. When a domain is seized, the pirated content still exists on the server. Additionally, it can still be accessed by its IP address. There is nothing, outside of draconian national firewall rules, that can be done to stop Americans from accessing this content. SOPA and PIPA can be easily circumvented by sending DNS traffic to DNS servers outside the United States. This legislation gives the government authority to hijack the DNS record of web sites suspected of piracy. Using international DNS servers would completely thwart every attempt at stopping piracy online. Making this change is as easy as changing your computer’s network settings or installing a browser plugin like DeSopa. ISPs will not be able to proactively identify denial of service (DoS) attacks. Large companies and ISPs monitor their DNS traffic. One of the reasons for doing this is to identify problems on the network. DNS traffic that flows out of the normal trend can be an indication of a problem. With all of that traffic going to servers outside of the United States, ISPs will not be able to monitor it, and DoS attacks will not be recognized and stopped as quickly as they are today. SOPA and PIPA break security efforts that have been added to DNS. The way DNS works is, quite honestly, brilliant; security (not an issue at the time) was left out of the initial designs, and over the past several years, developers have been working to secure DNS queries. The solution is called DNSSEC, and the DNS queries (to get the IP address of a web site) are digitally signed. When the government seizes a web site, it would change the DNS record for the site. This new record would not be digitally signed, meaning SOPA and PIPA would void the security fixes for DNS that programmers have been developing for years. Innocent, non-targeted sites could be inaccessible because of virtual hosting. ”Virtual hosting” is when a hosting company uses one IP address for multiple web sites. It’s extremely common. Uphold Liberty is on my own dedicated server, and I use virtual hosting to provide hosting for some of my friends’ sites. Once a site is seized by the government, blocking further traffic to that site (one of the differences between SOPA and PIPA) would have to be done by IP address. Blocking web traffic to an IP address will block all web sites hosted at that IP address. The Internet will get slower. Many sites, large and small, use global server load balancing (GSLB) and content distribution networks (CDNs) to make their web sites faster. This is done with DNS by answering users’ queries with IP addresses of servers geographically close to them. For instance, if a web site’s images are on a CDN, a user in Atlanta would want to request those images from a server in Atlanta, rather than one in Los Angeles. GSLB and CDNs make this possible. When users’ DNS is moved internationally (as mentioned above), the speedy delivery service will break. For example, users in Atlanta who request a site using a Toronto DNS server would get an IP address of a server geographically close to Toronto instead of the optimal Atlanta server’s IP address. The result is a slower Internet browsing experience. Seizing one domain could also break services provided to other domains. For all of my domains, I host my own web sites, but I use Google for email. If Google’s domains that provide me with email services are seized, my email will no longer work. Beyond email services, this extends to DNS queries which use CNAME records for name resolution. As mentioned earlier, hosting images for a web site is very common. Usually a CDN’s server name is long and cryptic, and it is common for a site to use a CNAME record so that a name like “images.upholdliberty.org” always resolves to the CDN’s server name. A site owner who does this would see his web site break (no images would appear) when the CDN’s domain is seized. Foreign DNS servers can open users up to security threats. When you use a DNS server, you trust it to give you the right IP address for the requested web site. If you use a DNS server you just happened to find posted online, you won’t know if it’s managed by trustworthy people or not. It’s very easy for a server administrator to give forged results for DNS requests. The risk? You go to ebay.com, amazon.com, or your bank’s web site, but it’s really just a site designed to look like what you wanted and collect your passwords. The bottom line on this issue is that the proposed legislation will not have the intended effect of stopping online piracy, but it will most definitely have a negative impact on the speed, reliability, security, and safety of the Internet. I urge each of you to call your senators and congressmen today and demand that they oppose this horrible legislation.