Solaris17so you were in high school using FTP servers with all your friends? or school in general? I call BS Thats would be like no bro dont hand me that floppy i dont want to get busted by the feds. instead lets all go home and ill set up a VPN because were 17 and totally think like that.

As for usenet and news groups in general I dont condone that. It makes 0 sense when trying to argue mega upload. people that use usenet and other groups for "downloading" wether it be for a corporation or a web site is still stealing. You wouldnt be downloading it if you already owned the software right?

Drone

www.pcworld.com/article/248552/petition_seeks_probe_of_mpaa_bribery_over_sopa.html#tk.hp_new

Solaris17so you were in high school using FTP servers with all your friends?

erockerWe weren't using FTP servers but we were using some pretty bad drugs, hanging out in the park, going to punk shows.. It was way better than doing anything on the internet. CD-R's didn't really come to be yet so we were just dubbing tapes. Nobody cared.

qubittsk erocker, you were a bad boy. ;)

erockerI certainly will not. :)

GreenwaldSOPA opponents were confused and even shocked when they learned that the very power they feared the most in that bill — the power of the U.S. Government to seize and shut down websites based solely on accusations, with no trial — is a power the U.S. Government already possesses and, obviously, is willing and able to exercise even against the world’s largest sites.

They have this power thanks to the the 2008 PRO-IP Act pushed by the same industry servants in Congress behind SOPA as well as by forfeiture laws used to seize the property of accused-but-not-convicted drug dealers.

This all reminded me quite a bit of the shock and outrage that arose last month over the fact that Barack Obama signed into law a bill (the NDAA) vesting him with the power to militarily detain people without charges, even though, as I pointed out the very first time I wrote about that bill, indefinite detention is already a power the U.S. Government under both Bush and Obama has seized and routinely and aggressively exercises.

It’s true that SOPA (like the NDAA) would codify these radical powers further and even expand them beyond what the U.S. Government already wields (regarding SOPA’s unique provisions, see Julian Sanchez’s typically thorough analysis). But the defining power that had everyone so up in arms about SOPA — shutting down websites with no trial — is one that already exists in quite a robust form, as any thwarted visitors to Megaupload will discover.

(1) It’s wildly under-appreciated how unrestrained is the Government’s power to do what it wants, and how little effect these debates over various proposed laws have on that power. Contrary to how it was portrayed, the Obama administration’s threatened veto of the NDAA rested largely on the assertion that they did not need a law vesting them with indefinite detention powers because they already have full power to detain people without a trial...

That’s more or less what happened with the SOPA fight. It’s true that website-seizures-without-trials are not quite as lawless as indefinite detentions, since there are actual statutes conferring this power. But it nonetheless sends a very clear message when citizens celebrate a rare victory in denying the Government a power it seeks — the power to shut down websites without a trial — only for the Government to turn around the very next day and shut down one of the world’s largest and best-known sites.

(2) The U.S. really is a society that simply no longer believes in due process: once the defining feature of American freedom that is now scorned as some sort of fringe, radical, academic doctrine. That is not hyperbole. Supporters of both political parties endorse, or at least tolerate, all manner of government punishment without so much as the pretense of a trial, based solely on government accusation: imprisonment for life, renditions to other countries, even assassinations of their fellow citizens. Simply uttering the word Terrorist, without proving it, is sufficient. And now here is Megaupload being completely destroyed — its website shuttered, its assets seized, ongoing business rendered impossible — based solely on the unproven accusation of Piracy.

there are difficult and weighty issues that would have to be resolved to prove they engaged in criminal conduct. Megaupload obviously contains numerous infringing videos, but so does YouTube, yet both sites also entail numerous legal activities as well.

The Indictment is a classic one-side-of-the-story document; even the most mediocre lawyers can paint any picture they want when unchallenged. That’s why the government is not supposed to dole out punishments based on accusatory instruments, but only after those accusations are proved in an adversarial proceeding.

Whatever else is true, those issues should be decided upon a full trial in a court of law, not by government decree. Especially when it comes to Draconian government punishments — destroying businesses, shutting down websites, imprisoning people for life, assassinating them — what distinguishes a tyrannical society from a free one is whether the government is first required to prove guilt in a fair, adversarial proceeding. This is a precept Americans were once taught about why their country was superior, was reflexively understood, and was enshrined as the core political principle. It’s simply not a principle that is believed in any longer, and therefore is not remotely observed.

Glenn GreenwaldIt’s behavior like Chris Dodd’s that makes it rational not only to be cynical about our political culture, but outright jaded. What makes Dodd’s shilling for this censorship law so galling is that, during the 2008 presidential campaign, he postured as the candidate who would devote himself first and foremost to defending core Constitutional freedoms and civil liberties.

Now, a mere three years later, he is peddling his influence in Washington — assembled during his 35 years in Congress — on behalf of a bill that, as several law professors in The Stanford Law Review recently wrote, “not only violates basic principles of due process by depriving persons of property without a fair hearing and a reasonable opportunity to be heard, it also constitutes an unconstitutional abridgment of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment” (Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe has argued the same).

Furthermore, one of the bill’s chief Senate sponsors is a liberal Democrat from Vermont, Pat Leahy, who during the Bush years flamboyantly depicted himself as a stalwart defender of Constitutional liberties — and whose “top 3 campaign contribution sources [are] lawyers, entertainment industry, lobbyists.”

Those industries are, of course, also major donors to Leahy’s House GOP counterpart. It’s all redolent of how Howard Dean quickly converted himself from a righteous presidential candidate who inspired large numbers of young Americans into little more than a paid shill who exploits his political celebrity by reciting the script of whichever political interests are paying him the most.

In the face of pervasive, sleazy conduct like this, it’s not only tempting to be jaded about partisan activism: it’s rational. Watching Chris Dodd and Pat Leahy join equally compromised Republicans in crusading for an Internet censorship bill ... reveals most of what one needs to know about how the political class functions and who owns and controls it.

In his SOPA advocacy, Dodd has resorted to holding up Chinese censorship as the desired model, mouthing the slogans of despots, and even outright lying. Like virtually all extremist, oppressive bills backed by large industry, SOPA and PIPA have full bipartisan support.

Industry-backed measures do not die even when they prompt massive public opposition that appears to prevent them. They simply slink away to re-tool and return when the opportunity is right. That will definitely happen with SOPA.

alexsubriI wonder what right does USSA have to go to another country and shut them down? How would we like it if China shut down our ISPs/.com's?

forbesFew people have heard of ACTA, or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, but the provisions in the agreement appear quite similar to – and more expansive than – anything we saw in SOPA. Worse, the agreement spans virtually all of the countries in the developed world, including all of the EU, the United States, Switzerland and Japan.

Many of these countries have already signed or ratified it, and the cogs are still turning, with the final real fight playing out in the EU parliament.

The treaty has been secretly negotiated behind the scenes between governments with little or no public input. The Bush administration started the process, but the Obama administration has aggressively pursued it.

Indeed, we signed ACTA in 2011.

According to critics, ACTA bypasses the sovereign laws of participating nations, forcing ISPs across the globe to act as internet police.

Worse, it appears to go much further than the internet, cracking down on generic drugs and making food patents even more radical than they are by enforcing a global standard on seed patents that threatens local farmers and food independence across the developed world.

forbes• ACTA contains global IP provisions as restrictive or worse than anything contained in SOPA and PIPA.

• ACTA spans virtually all of the developed world, threatening the freedom of the internet as well as access to medication and food. The threat is every bit as real for those countries not involved in the process as the signatories themselves.

• ACTA has already been signed by many countries including the US, but requires ratification in the EU parliament.

• ACTA was written and hammered out behind closed doors. While some of the provisions have been taken out of the final US draft, plenty of unknowns still exist. It’s not nearly clear enough how the agreement will affect US laws.

Nor is this the only international agreement in the works.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are “other plurilateral agreements, such as the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), which contains a chapter on IP enforcement that would have state signatories adopt even more restrictive copyright measures than ACTA. Similarly, negotiations over TPP are also held in secret and with little oversight by the public or civil society. These initiatives, negotiated without participation from civil society or the public, are an affront to a democratic world order.

Jason MickVI. Selective Enforcement -- How Corporate Interest Write Their Own Rules

Such selective and nonsensical enforcement is common in Washington, D.C. these days. With over $1.9B USD in 2009 [source] funneled in special interest "lobbying dollars" (bribes) to federal politicians, the mess in Washington D.C. is very reflective of the "do as I say not as I do" nature of the federal government's new rulers -- special interests, including corporations.

For example all of this talk about piracy comes from an industry that has pushed Congress and its foreign peers to create laws that allow big musical labels to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from independent artists yearly. Under the current law a big media house can "claim" an independent work as its own and start selling it. The rights holder then has to "prove" that the work is theirs, an arduous process that can take years, as they lose precious revenue.

Big media steals hundreds of millions in copyrighted works annually.

erockerFunny.. I'm going to see a movie in between my appointments today.

erockerNot likely. I won't know until I get there.