Something a number of my friends might be interested in knowing about.

[xaq_the_aereon]

Last night I learned about something known as SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act. (Link goes to a copy of the entire bill, just a heads up.)

At first glance, it's meant to, oddly enough, stop online piracy. (Good luck with that crap.) Opponents, however, claim that it would give the Government the power to censor the Internet in much the same way that China and Iran are known to.

Groups supporting it include the MPAA, the RIAA (which immediately raised a red flag with me given the last time I recall hearing about them), and Pfizer. Groups against it include pretty much the entirety of Silicon Valley.

I'm still reading through the bill so as not to make an uneducated opinion, but already I think it's a bad idea. What you guys come to think about it, I'll leave to you.

Comments

[davidn]

Why do you have to be so reasonable, unlike the rest of the reactionary Internet ;) I haven't read it either at this point, as there is... rather a lot of it, but online piracy is still a crime that absolutely nobody knows how to deal with. So is online anything, really - one case was cited during my degree where someone had broken into a company's database and pulled out thousands of passwords and details, and they couldn't get him on "theft" because the company's data was, after all, still there...

And I'm not even sure what I think about it - it's such an accepted part of the Internet that you can just go on to Youtube and look for just about any television programme from the past, or song from any album, and it's just there - I do it myself with the programmes from my parent's old videos, and gratefully download heaps of British television each week from torrent sites (unavailable through any other channels) - I know that these two things are blatantly illegal, and yet I've never had a problem with it.

Anyway, they tried something rather along the same lines in Britain - it doesn't really work.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

I won't deny being occasionally guilty of doing the same, though I do save that as a last resort for when there isn't a viable, legal, not-screwing-a-company-out-of-money option available. If I can get a song off iTunes or the artist's personal website, I'll forfeit my soda for the day to balance the costs. If I can't...c'mere MP3!

I can definitely see the problem with that case you mentioned...by the old pre-web definitions of crimes, about the best they could get him on, I think, would be plagiarism.

Hack into a company, copy top-secret information, sell it for millions....get held back a semester as punishment. *woop-de-doo finger whirl*