Edit: Any frustration expressed below through the choice of wording and/or font parameters is directed to the MAFIAA and the american political system. Just wanted to clarify that my intention is not to direct my frustration at members here, in case anyone misread anything.
The following is a relatively lengthy reply to Acton's post which goes "in-depth" (relative to the discussion here) into the workings of SOPA. If you would like a TL; WR (too long; won't read) summery of my 'analysis of sopa', here it is:
TL; WR:
SOPA is a complete joke. A very bad one at that. One that, if it were comedy, would probably result in rotten tomatoes and sharp eating utensils being thrown at the comedian delivering the joke in question.
It WON'T stop piracy.
It WILL cause collateral damage.
It CAN be EASILY abused.
It IS stupid.IIts worst; I getting tired of misinformation and panic of the anti-SOPA folks. The of the largest myths are that it will break the internet and it censorship. The internet will be fine I fell it will not affect the DNS or physical of the net. The only sites that will be affected are those who are violation of copy right laws. Google and Ebay would come around and change their TOS before being forced to close. Second it is not censorship since it is the copyright owner not the Government to initialize the complaint. People will still be free to produce political speech but there not right to unauthorized use without permission, furthermore some like Time Warner and Viacom will be strict others like Hub(?) (Think My Little Pony ) and Funimation will be more relaxed. It will be the holder not government who decides to pursue legal action against foreign websites.
Ok, I'm not really sure where to start with this, so I'll dissect it line by line. I'm not a lawyer or professor of law, but I've done web development and management professionally (in the music industry to boot, and have directly dealt with copyright violation on the internet with regards to my client's work), and have dealt with copyright law quite a bit in the past as one of the admin of the Transcendence (For clarification, that is
http://transcendence-game.com ) community, as well as in a summer job.
"The of the largest myths are that it will break the internet and it censorship."
Personally, I've never heard anyone say it would break the internet, and its not going to "Break the internet" in the sense of causing the internet to cease functioning as intended on its most base level (blacklisting is done DNS-side on the level of domains). And while yes, I agree that the sentiment of "SOPA == Internet apocalypse!!!!111!!11!one!1one!!1" is silly, I do so for a very different reason:
SOPA won't work. - see last paragraph for explanation. That still however does not fix the facts that its:
1) Stupid. (It
will fail to achieve its intended goal; any pirate worth his virtual salt and his dog (and social networking friends, and email contact list, and the cats of all those people) would know all the easy bypasses of SOPA by... about... oh, say, a couple months ago.)
2) Has the potential for serious fallout. (It can create wide-reaching effects which inconvenience legitimate users, while ironically doing little to hinder piracy)
3) Its method of operation is in fact a form of censorship.
"The internet will be fine I fell it will not affect the DNS or physical of the net."
Ok, I'm not entirely sure what this sentence is trying to say. I believe a more accurate translation would be "The internet will be fine; SOPA does not affect DNSs or the physical infrastructure".
Although it is correct that SOPA does not affect the physical infrastructure, it is also like saying "SOPA will not affect your car". Its irrelevant: SOPA does not have any direct dealings with internet infrastructure, the postal service, personal transportation, or the price of tea in china.
On the other hand, saying that SOPA does not affect the DNSs is completely false; SOPAs main method of operation is by DNS-side blacklists. What it does is - with a simplified explanation - basically require the DNSs to prevent a connection to a blacklisted domain from being established.
"The only sites that will be affected are those who are violation of copy right laws."
You do not understand how SOPA intends to function. SOPA "works" (I say "works" because from a technical standpoint, it doesn't actually do anything than provide a *very* slight inconvenience to copyright violators, and a hassle to everyone else - more on this later) very much like youtube copyright complaint filing (which I think works in a horribly stupid way). On youtube, someone can file a copyright complaint against a video, and (presumably by showing some basis for it) it will then get removed. However, this has led to a number of incidents (most infamously regarding the original Nyan Cat video) where someone who was not the copyright holder filed complaint against a video that the actual copyright holder had no qualms about, resulting in a removal (the copyright holder in question eventually did manage to get the video reinstated, but not until after they had already taken undue blame for the removal of the video). In fact, many sites hosting user-uploaded content use a similar method. To be quite frank, I was alarmed at how easy it would be to fraudulently require removal of material, as I have had to request content removal from multiple sites on multiple occasions, and found many of them did not even bother to validate my identity (I had left contact information, and only one ever responded asking for credentials). This is a "guilty until proven innocent" process, although not explicitly required, is generally "promoted" by the way the DMCA and associated Safe Harbor legislation works. However, this is something that pertains specifically to individual items of content uploaded by website users. SOPA functions at the level of entire domains: not at the level of individual units of content; not at the level of individual users; not at the level of subdomains. Meaning, it is entirely plausible for someone (even if they were a 'valid' copyright holder), to request a domain blacklist, and it would be blacklisted until shown that the primary intent of the content was not copyright violation (or presumably, remove the content, if user-uploaded). Fraudulent blacklisting would be relatively easy to perform; I would frankly not be surprised if some larger sites secretively blacklist themselves over highly dubious infractions (such as a search engine providing a link to a copyright-infringing website, which technically does fall under SOPA, the last time I checked) to make a point, even though I don't actually expect things to come to that. Even when the complaint is filed by a legitimate copyright holder, the system can still be easily abused, or even misfire in the case of 'mistaken identity' (such as when content being used under fair-use terms is misconstrued as a violation of copyright, or when something that is legitimately allowed may be taken action against because somebody didn't get the memo about it).
"Google and Ebay would come around and change their TOS before being forced to close."
This doesn't make sense in the context of a SOPA discussion. They cannot change TOS agreements to get around SOPA, based on the way it functions, as explained previously. I'm honestly not even sure what you were trying to get at here. With regards to Google, they also have their own domain name servers, and thus would (theoretically - this is google afterall; they have gotten away with "Corporate civil disobedience" before) have to comply.
"Second it is not censorship since it is the copyright owner not the Government to initialize the complaint."
Clearly, you do not understand what censorship is. [Edit: To clarify, this is meant in a matter-of-fact way, not in a condescending sort of way]
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censoring (Censorship was defined as the "practice of censoring", so I didn't bother linking it)
"People will still be free to produce political speech but there not right to unauthorized use without permission, furthermore some like Time Warner and Viacom will be strict others like Hub(?) (Think My Little Pony ) and Funimation will be more relaxed."
Again, this statement implies that you do not understand what censorship is. Furthermore, some companies have it as policy to over-react to any potential copyright violation (often in the name of "protecting the brand", which to some extent is 'legitimate' under the current legal system (For an example of what happens if one does not protect their brand, see Kleenex). That doesn't make it right by any extent, but merely 'less wrong', in my eyes).
"It will be the holder not government who decides to pursue legal action against foreign websites. "
Its not merely foreign websites, but domestic ones as well. Furthermore, SOPA affects only domestic DNSs. This brings me to the point of why it would only mildly inconvenience pirates, and would be a much greater irritation to legitimate users.
When a domain has been blacklisted, for whatever reason, under SOPA, the domain name servers will simply not provide the IP needed to connect between the client and the server. Which means that there are two relatively simple ways to ignore it: 1. using a foreign DNS, which will not be required to blacklist domains under SOPA (As they are outside US's/SOPA's jurisdiction), 2. using an IP to directly connect to the server, which will bypass the need for a DNS. Also, on the side of the website managers, they could rely on multiple domains, so if one were to be blacklisted, others would continue to function. If anyone attempted to block these methods, because they are umbrellas covering even more legitimate uses than the umbrella of domains, which themselves cover large enough swaths of legitimate uses for blacklisting to be seriously controversial, would essentially be political suicide (Death by internet backdraft: as wisely quoted (And foolishly ignored) by the company Ocean Marketing (
https://www.google.com/search?q=ocean+marketing - see oceanmarketinginc.com for the quotation on their main page), "Your brand is no stronger than your reputation- and will increasingly depend on what comes up when you are googled." -Allan Jenkins).
For the majority of software pirates (both the civil disobedience kind who do it in protest against the MAFIAA, and those who simply wouldn't have bought it anyways), this is just another hurdle easily surmounted with a quick search (theoretically needed only once, to get the IP of a foreign DNS). In fact, the real pirates probably have their contingency plans all worked out by now, and couldn't care less what happens (the ones who pirate it anyways).
For the majority of average users (who probably don't have an inkling of what a DNS is), finding the solutions to circumventing the issues that can arise (be it due to shady copyright complaint filing, to over-extensive or over-zealous complaints taking out entire user-driven sites over the infractions of single users, to legitimately needing the same services as the pirates for non-copyright infringing reasons (legal in the united states anyways, which is what SOPA concerns)) is going to a be very big challenge for them. Even if most pirates may not actually be all that "technologically literate" (or, well, quite frankly, literate at all (these are mainly the "wouldn't buy anyhow" group, which would appear to have an average age of 10 years)), a simple how-to guide (with pictures considerately included for the illiterate 8-year-olds!) on the innumerable places that cater to them will point them in the right direction, telling them exactly what to do. Meanwhile, the average user is unlikely to come across these, and blindly wander around until they can eventually get help from someone.
TL; DR:
If you are reading this, you have either read through the whole post and are reading this simply to see what I wrote, or you somehow managed to skim over the whole thing and miss the summary at the top in the bold-red-text TL; WR. >.>