Both of these pieces of legislation are harmful to the internet itself, to innovative business and will not achieve what their sponsors say they will. There are precise ways to prevent foreign websites from pirating US content and they are already written into law. There already ways to prevent counterfeit physical products. We do not need overly broadly written bills which conflate three different areas of law (physical, digital and technical).

You can read more at:

EFF.org SOPA Action page
AmericanCensorship.org
SopaStrike.com
“SOPA” Tag at Techdirt

Techdirt and the NY Times both report: Louis CK: Over $1 Million In Sales In Just 12 Days For DRM-Free Download.

This should be reported as yet another in the long list of projects which work because artists have used the CwF + RtB (“Connect with Fans and Reason to Buy”) model.

Yup, Connect with your Fans and give them a Reason to Buy seems so obvious to us, but we still have to endure the content industry telling us that we should pass SOPA/PIPA because it protects artists.

Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy.

And all on the say so of the content industry.

ISPs have said that they will not cut people off, and we are talking about a “six-strikes and you’re throttled-or-something” regime… but even the French 3 strikes law eventually involved the judiciary.

More coverage on ArsTechnica: Major ISPs agree to “six strikes” copyright enforcement plan.

Ars also has a breakdown of The six ways you can appeal new copyright “mitigation measures”

Joe Karaganis, program director at the Social Science Research Council and vice president at the American Assembly discusses their report “Media Piracy in Emerging Economies.”

And another good write up about it here http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/03/29/the-best-report-ever-on-media-piracy/

After the recent arrest of a man for owning a site which merely linked to potentially infringing content, TorrentFreak has a well reasoned look at some of the constitutional issues surrounding the recent domain name seizures:  5 Reasons Why the US Domain Seizures Are Unconstitutional | TorrentFreak.

The American people, through the nation’s library, will receive a post-holiday gift of vintage sound recordings from one of the world’s largest recording companies. The Library of Congress and the Universal Music Group (UMG) announced today the donation of more than 200,000 historic master recordings—many long out-of-print or never released—to the Library’s Recorded Sound Section, which has more than 3 million sound recordings in its collections.    Universal Music Group Donates Recordings to Library – The Library Today Library of Congress.

Note, though, that Universal retains the commercial rights and the copyright.  So it seems as though the Library will do the digitizing, saving Universal a huge amount of money, and Universal gets to sell any of the results it thinks it can. Given that re-issue decisions are made on a standard cost/benefit basis, it seems that now that a substantial portion of the cost is assumed by the Library, Universal is more likely to try for commercial releases of items previously assumed to be marginal. So, overall, probably a net positive.

Also,  apparently no Chess or Motown yet. While they are both owned by Universal, it appears that they are not included in the deal.

NYT coverage here: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/arts/music/10masters.html

NPR coverage here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/01/10/132803768/200-000-recordings-donated-to-library-of-congress (includes the statement “only 14% of pre-40′s music is commercially available today”. Which fits closely, of course, with Sturgeon’s Law)

But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content.

Op-Ed Guest Columnist – Ten for the Next Ten – NYTimes.com

This treaty is supposed to deal with anti counterfeiting (starting with things like handbags) but has expanded to include a chapter on the internet. Looks like they are trying to get the hated DMCA rolled out around the world. It also looks like they are trying to insert a “three strikes and you’re out” provision for alleged file sharers. Of course, most file sharers are “caught” by extremely suspect technological means.

And this is all being done in complete secret.

You are not allowed to know what the various provisions are. You are not allowed to have input on what the law will be. This is a classic case of backdoor legislation, just like the DMCA, which was imposed on the US as a part of conforming to the WIPO Treaty. When an interest group cannot get laws passed in their own country, they get it into an international treaty and then turn around and say “Sorry, duly elected representatives of a sovereign nation, it’s a treaty, we have to abide by it…” US companies tried to push ACTA style provisions onto the rest of the world through WIPO a while back but were roundly rejected, so now they want to give it its own infrastructure and enforcement code.

Let’s not forget that this is a copyright treaty. It’s not about life and death stuff like spies and nuclear secrets and terrorism. It’s about copyright. Who (what, when, where, how) gets punished for making a fake Prada hadbag, or a fake Rolex, or filming a movie with a cam in a theatre. It’s about making money off those transgressions. So why are we not allowed to see the proposed provisions of the treaty? Are people’s lives in danger if I know what the new rules will be?

And how will it affect the countries which have not volunteered to be part of it? Will they be told, at some point, “Sorry, you are not living up to “world standards” as regards copyright, so we won’t be helping you out with development aid”. “No anti-retrovirals for you, you are sending too many movies (badly filmed, with awful sound) to be sold on the streets of NYC”.

EFF on ACTA

Short vid of Geist explaining ACTA to date