Active Users:186 Time:19/05/2024 05:27:22 PM
Re: There seems to be some overlap. - Edit 1

Before modification by DomA at 18/01/2012 08:14:19 PM

I am not sure what, if any, legal repercussions there would be a to a site or its operators if it "facilitated" people obtaining or distributing the blueprints for an MX missile, but under the proposed legislation would impose significant criminal penalties for that as surely as for facilitating mpeg downloads.



SOPA/PIPA have nothing to do with this. It's not a matter of increasing national security at all.

You don't seem aware the US judicial system is already fully equiped to deal with all the examples you've produced. If the Pentagon gets hacked and secret data stolen, it's espionnage. If a US company gets hacked and its proprietary data gets stolen, it's espionnage. Laws already exist for all this, and extradition treaties between several nations are in place. The US government could already sue Google if it considered it helped disseminate state secrets, if it so wished.

The proposed legislation is meant to protect American commercial interests (at the detriments or risk to other American and non-American business interests). Trademarks, copyrighted images, music, movies and so on. It does so by allowing corporations to get websites blacklisted, or deprive it of their sources of income from advertising, all without even a law suit and proven guilt. It threatens all the American Internet giants like Google, Facebook You Tube and so on (could even make some of them move out of the US to nations where they would be less vulnerable. The US are currently the world leader in web development and this is an important economical sector, SOPA/PIPA would seriously endanger that.

There's so much opposition to it worlwide including from within the US (and not the least from Silicon Valley) isn't because people are against stopping piracy of cultural products, it's because it gives the US corporations way, way too much power as the two projects as they stand are full of backdoors to abuses, censorship, or violations of freedom of expression, and violation of "fair use". And it's all up to the sites, not the US corporations which claim copyright violations, to take the measures to prove in the US they are not guilty. Considering the business ethics in foreign countries of many of the US major cultural corporations, and with all the lobby groups in the US that would like nothing more than an opportunity to censor information on the internet and could very well find ways to do this abusing SOPA/PIPA, it's all very troubling from the foreign front, all the more since the means to go around the new legislations are already emerging (and it's nothing good, for anyone).

The MPAA and co. already have tons of tools under US law to protect its copyrights. It just managed to have a UK guy whose site merely posted links, not actual content, to pirated American content extradited. It doesn't need SOPA/PIPA for this, not in most foreign nations. Everybody knows its main targets with SOPA/PIPA are rogue nations where pirates are out of reach for US corporations and which don't recognize US copyrights, from which most of the piracy cases originate, China above all. It's a very high risk and high price to pay to curtail piracy of Disney movies in China, especially when you consider that so far the MPAA is not even able to demonstrate losses from actual lost sales because of piracy.

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