CC is Up Today, But Read This...

College Confidential Community
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You may have noticed that some major sites, notably Wikipedia, have “gone dark” today to call attention to the threat posed by SOPA and similar legislation in the United States. (Others, like [Google[/url</a>], have symbolically gone dark by obscuring their logo.) We sympathize with the emotion, but felt that closing CC for the day would harm and inconvenience to our many members and visitors and that the damage would outweigh any benefits. But, please take a minute to read this.

Online piracy does cause harm. Artists in all forms of media lose when their work is distributed illegally. But the current SOPA bill is so broad that it could be used to attack legitimate sites.

Take CC, for example. We have thousands of posts every day, and occasionally someone does post copyrighted content. Maybe an entire article from a magazine or newspaper. Maybe questions from a copyrighted test or study guide. Normally, a member spots these violations and reports them, and one of our volunteer mods removes the content if it goes beyond “fair use.” (Fair use is a nebulous legal term, but extracting a couple of sentences from an article is generally OK.) In the event that nobody spots the copyrighted content and it isn’t removed, the copyright holder can point out the infringement using a specific procedure (DMCA). We respond promptly to all such requests, and ensure that any content meets fair use guidelines.

Under the new legislation, it’s possible that someone who found copyrighted content (or even posted it!) on CC could label the site a piracy site to force a shutdown. If you think that unlikely, note that far bigger sites that publish user content are very concerned (e.g., Wikipedia and Google).

For legitimate sites like CC, the current laws work well. Copyright holders have a defined method to ensure no violations remain, and CC in no way encourages or allows problematic content. If our representatives in the U.S. want to target sites that specialize in or encourage illegal downloads, they need to craft an entirely different kind of bill that targets that kind of site.

We appreciate your participation at CC, and we stayed open for you. But we ask that you contact your representatives and tell them what you think about SOPA. Here are two links:

Wikipedia SOPA page: [url=<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act]Stop”>Stop Online Piracy Act - Wikipedia]Stop</a> Online Piracy Act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia<a href=“Explains%20the%20issue%20in%20far%20more%20detail”>/url</a>
Wikipedia Home Page with search box to find your reps (U.S. only): [url=<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page]Wikipedia”>Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]Wikipedia</a>, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://www.Google.com%5DGoogle%5B/url”>http://www.Google.com)

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Roger, I appreciate your post, but do sincerely wish that you’d have redacted all the portions that might have offended the government or big business, including this post :wink:

A brave new world indeed!

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Your viewing this post has been noted.

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Anytime I read articles that imply the ‘world will end’ if this legislation gets passed…mostly makes me want to do more research to understand BOTH sides of the story. Rarely is anything as one-sided as some make it appear.

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I do think original content creators and artists have a legitimate concern about offshore sites that are more or less untouchable by US law and which openly offer pirated content, Time2. This bill, though, could affect many legitimate sites. The process for US sites works fairly well now, and no expanded powers should be necessary.

More generally, the process sounds too close to the kind of restrictive internet practices we complain about in totalitarian countries.

Ironically, one of the bill’s sponsors was found to have an apparently stolen (i.e., used without the appropriate Creative Commons attribution) image on his own website.

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In terms of efficacy, especially considering the economic impact and risk of abuse of power, the net result of the legislation would be like bringing a knife to a gun fight. It would not achieve the ends it intends to control, just facilitate the off-shoring of DNS :wink:

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US legislation still won’t change what an offshore website does since it is not within their jusidiction. Also sounded like the current legislation wasn’t written comprehending what is technically practical. I am not for or against it, just saying that topics are rarely as one-sided as some who support or oppose something make it sound.

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An analogy to what this law will do: Someone rents a vault in a bank that has many branches through the country. This person puts counterfeit or otherwise copyrighted materials in the vault. Because the bank doesn’t closely check what the person put into the vault (and in the case of the internet, there are bajillions of vaults), the law shuts down the entire chain of banks. Also, there is no trial to prove that the goods are in fact counterfeit. Someone just has to accuse the bank of harboring the materials- no trial, no burden of proof.

This is a poorly-written law that will not address the piracy issue.

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Exactly. Which is why for most people it is a “yawn”…The avg person is so jaded by the drama in Washington, Occupy, raising the debt ceiling blah blah…

Piracey of protected material is an issue–and our first best step is to teach our teens and expect an high standard of behavior–so they know for example that ripping/burning music for free and the illegal streaming movies is NOT ok…
Universities can put into place safeguards in their networks that alert administration of illegal activity. UPenn has such apps in place. Why not put that sort of thing into place at Univeristies, businesses etc…and offer home versions.

Where is the integrity in our communities?

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I agree that it’s poorly written. It’s a bad bill not because it doesn’t accomplish the goal but because it can be easily abused. Just wondering if anyone read the bill find anywhere that it addresses the issues of hacking, for example someone doesn’t like CC and upload copyright contents to it so that it will be shutdown. Also, when payment companies or search engines are required to cut connections with these sites, who’s funding? Do the companies themselves have to pay for that work?
To me it doesn’t address many issues.

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^that’s the problem, the financial burden, liability, and chilling effect on the average ISP, business or individual is extraordinary in terms of cost and complexity, and is completely subject to abuse, and impossible to speedily regulate. AND will not solve the problem. On my planet, ya don’t write laws that can’t actually be effectively implemented or regulated that reduce the subject’s capacity to do business, communicate, or protect themselves from abject abuse :wink:

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Not to mention that even though the law didn’t pass, this week the government shut down a foreign website, megaupload.com, that accounts for 4 percent of internet traffic without anything so much as a trial. Never mind that the vast majority of the content on that site is legitimate.

The United States has been moving farther and farther away from due process for years.

If you’re not upset, you’re not paying attention.

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^^^ Actually, if you read the news articles it was a coordinated effort among law enforcement entities of several countries against a website that encourages the posting and downloading of known copyright materials. Since the web is global, that is really the only kind of enforcement that is effective.

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The majority of the content on megaupload is legitimate. What about all of the users who use the site to host their materials? Tough luck for them? If your neighbor is dealing drugs, does that mean the police get to seize your house too?

Of course the arrests in other countries were made by non-US agencies, but I’m not finding any news articles from google mentioning much beyond the DOJ indictment. I’ve looked at CNN, the NYT, Washington Post, and it’s making it seem very unilateral. The US justified it by saying that some of the site’s servers are located in Virginia. And New Zealand was strong-armed by the US a few years ago into adopting something similar to the DMCA.

This bill is an attempt by the established media groups to protect an outdated business model and shift their costs of copyright enforcement onto others. Piracy might be a problem, but there are many better ways than scorched earth.

This is like last year, when the government shut down a huge number of domains, when roughly 10/84,000 were the correct target. The remainder were small businesses and blogs that had a banner put up saying the domain was being prosecuted for child pornography.

[U.S&lt;/a&gt;. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’ | TorrentFreak](<a href=“http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-shuts-down-84000-websites-by-mistake-110216/]U.S”>U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, 'By Mistake' * TorrentFreak)

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I think most people recognize the fact that copyright holders and owners of copyrights have the right to profit from their words (well,okay, other then the anarchist leaning, mostly young idiots, who tell me things like they can get a book from the library for free, can see a piece of work in the museum, etc…in other words morons) and works. And yes, there is a problem, because the net is international, websites operating outside the US are not subject to US law on the matter. In theory, most countries are signees to international treaties protecting copyrights, but the problem is a number of them (especially China and Russia and other eastern European countries) either turn a blind eye towards such sites or see them as legitimate (put it this way, intellectual property in China tends to be something of an oxymoron). If there was real cooperation on the matter, home countries hosting the sites would act. That would be the best way to handle this.

The problem with the laws in question is they are too broad based, it reminds me of laws they tried to pass on “internet decency”, ostensibly to protect children, a sledgehammer to censor content on the web simply because, for example, evangelical Christians don’t like anyone talking sympathetically about gays or evolution. This law has much the same problem, sites can in effect banned (more on that in a bit) if the justice department gets complaints that a site is hosting copyright infringing works. The real problem is the site under this law doesn’t get a hearing, there is no attempt to see if they are honestly dealing with issues of copyright, if they get a complaint the Justice Department can tell US based Internet providers to filter out the web addresses of ‘illegal’ sites. The problem with this is it assumes a)the complainer is doing so in good faith (such tactics of guilty until proven innocent can be used to shut down competitor sites to those of the complainer, and by the time the ‘offending site’ can defend itself, it often has hurt their legitimate business interests and b) that the site in question has been negligent, when they may not have been, it could be like You Tube where they spend a lot of time trying to stop such illegal activity…

There is another side to this, the cost of doing this on the ISP side, and guess who will pay for that. Because of the way DNS operates (domain name service, i.e the name most of us punch in when we do [dddddd.com](<a href=“http://www.dddddd.com%5Ddddddd.com%5B/url%5D”>http://www.dddddd.com)</a>), it also could mean that a site called foobar.com gets pulled down, that has all kinds of legitimate stuff on it, because someone posted ‘bad’ content. The theory is simple, ISPs would simply remove the dns entries for the sites from their copy of the DNS table, and when your pc loads the dns from them, voila, no connection, but there is a cost in terms of effort and time to do this, the potential for foul ups is great, and the ISP will pass that cost on to us.

The other troubling aspect is this in effect removes the protections ISP’s have had as common carriers (kind of like the phone companies), where they are not required to be responsible for the content their phone lines carry. With the net, this means that a site carrying blogs with ideas some find offensive or stupid cannot be forced to censor it or be sued for libel, since the content is not theirs. By requiring ISP’s to filter DNS’s that are found objectionable for copyright reasons, they are de facto making them responsible for filtering content to their users, and that could set quite a bad legal precedent if it becomes, for example, censoring political speech or adult speech or any other thing someone finds objectionable.

The intent of the law is fair, digital piracy and such is an issue and one that needs to be worked out, but this is like killing a fly with a sledgehammer, difficult to do and causing a lot of damage when the hammer hits the wall.

Opi does have a valid point as well, the whole battle over piracy is not that cut and dried, part of it definitely is that traditional media companies like movie studios and music companies are as usual, living in the past. My brother was involved in setting the HDTV standards, he had more then 10 years with a broadcast network before that, and he said the networks were clueless, they fought HDTV, fought digital broadcasting and didn’t even begin to see the potential of it (yes, including broadening their audience with digital transmission via the then paleolithic net/www), or using their broadcast channels over night as a data transmission source, they all dreamed of 1976 when the big three networks ruled,etc, etc…and same today. Record companies still are trying to keep the CD model live, which is charging 20 bucks for something that costs them 50c to produce at most, or movies at 20 bucks for same reason (take a look as well as the cost differential between blue ray and regular dvd…those extra 15 bucks reflect about 14 bucks additional profit at most). CD’s also force you to buy 20 bucks worth of content if you want only 3 songs, and so forth. Booksellers, even with the advent of e-books, often charge more for e-books then the paperback edition (or in some cases hardcover), even though e-books are incredibly cheap to produce, no paper, no distribution, no returns that are pure loss…

I tunes and the like are great, but even there there are issues, with DRM and so forth, and with streaming movies a lot of content is not available because the owners either refuse to grant those rights, or charge so much as to make it financially undoable. The point is, if you make it convenient to people, most people are willing to buy the content, but media companies go out of their way to basically discourage it in most cases. It reminds me of in the early days of VHS, when movies were priced to rent, not to sell, the companies claimed they would lose a ton of business if they priced them to sell, and guess what? When they started selling movies at 20 bucks or 15 bucks, instead of nearly 100, they found they made a lot more money then they did in the rental market…killed the rental store off, of course, but that was inevitable. And of course, with blockbusters, you have the special edition, directors cut, etc, etc…

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Bear in mind that Hollywood in general started off as a way to avoid paying Thomas Edison copyright fees for the kinetoscope. Not that Edison didn’t steal a whole bunch of his ideas from Nikola Tesla, but hypocrisy doesn’t excuse hypocrisy.