SOPA & PIPA (American anti censorship movement)

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Moco Loco

You are truly the ultimate pessimist
I have serious doubts that this will pass. I have yet to meet anyone who is for it or who has not signed that petition. Such a thing would have such a negative effect and change pop culture forever to say the least.

You forget that the US is not a democracy. And after all, all the "good arguments" are not totally thin air - they qare just a smokescreen. Of course "protecting intellectual property to allow companies to continue making good entertainment products" and "preventing online crime" and "stopping child prOnography" will be pulled out. If you are against SOPA, you must be for pirating movies which will lead to movies like Avatar not being made anymore and you must obviously in favour of child prOn! Bur sarcasm aside - this is what happens. A lot of people know little about this and they tend to agree. This is an issue I am quite familiar with as here in Germany the fight has been going on for yome years now. "Intellectual property" is a rather weak card to play in Germany, so they tried it with terrorism and child prOn. After the Internet censorship and the data retention laws (essenially a spying law that records all phone connections and website calls of all people, including geodata) was cut down by activists, the government and companies strafed the country with a massive PR campaign about child prOn, pressing tears from the audience in an effort to get approval. They also magnified "terrorist acts" (like putting a bottle of diesel fuel next to a railway track, burning a police car or even false alarms and bomb threats) in the press. Up to now, we are holding ground and these laws did not pass, but it is a f...ing tough battle and I am not sure we will prevail. We did marches in Berlin and Munich and there were more marches in germany. There was a mass lawsuit at the contitutional court that was successful in averting the law on the grounds of its incompatibility with the constitution. But they reworked the law and try it again.
If you are interested in it, the campaign is called "freedom not fear". One of the main initiates is the CCC, the german "chaos computer club". They do have a yearly conference in Berlin that deals to a large part with the increasing threat of dimishing freedom. I will write a review of the talks from this years conference, the 28c3 (28th chaos communication congress) when I have time and have seen the recordings of the talks that I missed.
One of interest here might be: 28C3: The coming war on general computation (it is about why copyright laws are not the most important things to worry about - because there are bigger threats looming close ahead) and there are some good talks on TOR (e.g. 28C3: How governments have tried to block Tor) . Recordings are available on youtube but you can also find links to the recordings via Welcome - 28C3 public wiki

Originally Posted by Human No More

Remember, if this happens, it will ban sites like youtube or google and ToS for linking to them.

Now finally I can say this: I think this is alarmist!
No but really I do not think they would do that. They would not just shut down youtube or ToS or Facebook just like that. The power of such laws is not in a general assault, but in targetted assaults. So I would much more be worried about what they will make youtube do to allow them to keep online (a direct blocking interface for record companies? Oh I forgot they already have that) - or facebook (give us the stored data on this list of users and their friends please,... or else...). Now THAT would worry me a lot more because to the internetz it will all look normal, but in the background, something else is happening. Also of course I would be worried about this being invoked at certain incidents. We're all laughing at that:

... but this is what this law can provide. A way to take control over internet infrastructure (and as much as I hate it, facebook and youtube ARE information infrastructure) if the times are right. Like it was in Egypt when people decided that they maybe would prefer to have a democracy.