what happens if SOPA passes?

BEWARE TO THE PISHING SITES!

otm

lol

Geoff Taylor, BPI

The attacks by hackers on the FBI, Department of Justice and creative industry and the recent protest by tech companies against new anti-piracy laws have exposed the dirty underbelly of the internet piracy economy.

Anonymous accuse governments and the creative community of being "tyrants" for trying to prevent them stealing other people's work. This illustrates the extremism of much of the anti-copyright movement.

Not only is it morally wrong to justify taking someone else's work for nothing, it ignores the simple truth that anything of value, including entertainment, takes time and money to create. One would hope that such naive views would carry little public influence. But they have some very powerful allies.

Under the guise of fighting for their vision of an "open internet", some Silicon Valley behemoths have launched a high-profile campaign to oppose new US laws to tackle major pirate websites. As publicity stunts for this campaign, Wikipedia closed for a day and Google "censored" its doodle, asking their users to oppose the legislation.

These large corporations argue that blocking access to some mass piracy sites amounts to Chinese-style censorship of free speech and will "break the internet" - ignoring that other types of illegal sites are routinely blocked, and people will always be free to express their points of view through the millions of perfectly legal websites that don't infringe copyright.

But is the tech community's opposition to tackling piracy motivated by principle - or by profit?

Many consumers see digital theft as a kind of victimless crime - musicians and film stars have loads of money, right?

In fact, most musicians earn less than the national average income and everyone who works in the creative sector, from roadies to mastering engineers, is negatively affected by piracy. But the money that downloaders save by taking music, films and books for nothing is flowing silently into the pockets of large tech corporations.

Online hosting services pay users to upload the most popular files and charge freeloaders for faster downloads.

Search giants earn billions from online advertising, with searches for illegal free music and films a major driver of traffic.

Broadband providers charge users for all the extra bandwidth they consume downloading stuff for free.

The internet advertising industry earns commission from the ads on pirate sites, and brands reach a huge audience cheaply.

This is the hidden internet piracy economy.

Most of the internet companies that benefit from this routinely claim that they don't support piracy. They may well be sincere. Yet they consistently oppose every new measure to tackle it, and offer up no effective alternatives of their own.

Long term, this cannot be the way forward.

Apple's former chief executive, the late Steve Jobs, understood that the creative and technology industries should be partners, and that consumers benefit from better quality services as a result. Spotify and others have taken up the mantle and there are new examples to welcome, with Google and some ISPs launching their own digital music services.

But if we want a digital economy that works, the big players on the internet need to kick their addiction to the money flowing from piracy. Like Steve Jobs, they need to show that they value other people's creativity as well as their own.

Geoff Taylor is chief executive of the BPI - the trade body that represents the British recording industry.

THAT'S what I was worried about i.e. dipshits like that guy tarnishing all of us with the terrorist brush

silicon valley behemoths like wikipedia

Region blocking destroys his entire argument about paying for content btw, given geoblocking is the catalyst for a huge amount of piracy

But is the tech community's music/movie industry's opposition to tackling piracy motivated by principle - or by profit?

Anyone else see the move just a couple of days ago to retroactively extend the copyright of many public domain works?

THAT'S what I was worried about i.e. dipshits like that guy tarnishing all of us with the terrorist brush

Way early in this thread I commented on the Homeland Security connection in all this, and how it was upsetting. Nobody really gave a shit then.

WHAT NOW BOOTCHES

Way early in this thread I commented on the Homeland Security connection in all this, and how it was upsetting. Nobody really gave a shit then.

We gave many shits, we just didn't have a fresh quote to back it up.

btw I was thinking baout that guy being from something called the British PHONOGRAPHIC Industry

http://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-fights-shutdown-with-former-bill-clinton-attorney-120121/

Yesterday one of the “Mega” employees informed TorrentFreak that MegaUpload has hired top attorney Robert Bennett to lead the defense.

Bennett is best known for defending President Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal.

The New York attorney also represented other big names including Senator John McCain and President of the World Bank Group Paul Wolfowitz

“We intend to vigorously defend against these charges.” was Bennett’s only comment thus far, but fireworks can be expected in the weeks to come.

Agreed. Given that the US charges were based entirely on the fact that some MU servers were on US soil, I'm curious as to whether their legal counsel will argue that all activity of servers outside the US cannot be entered as evidence in the case. Legal geekdom aside, this case promises to be more colourful than that for the Pirate Bay.

from what i understand, if someone (esp if that someone is a foreign entity) is given a subpoena to provide documentation (server logs etc), they must provide

brb downloading popcorn

DennisThePerrin#
Sen. Al Franken supports SOPA. He wins the Michael O'Donoghue Steel Needles With Real Sharp Points Plunged In His Eyes award.

‎"All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files you have uploaded personally."

My current project is on Dropbox, worried tbh

End of days for the mp3 blog.

"All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files you have uploaded personally."

― I Love Pedantry (D-40), Sunday, January 22, 2012 1:40 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

!

Dropbox should be okay for now (at least I really hope so, I use it for work all the time) since it never really seemed to catch on with filesharing blogs like filesonic and megauplaod did.

I can't even access filesonic at all now.

They're likely running the digital equivalent of flushing the powder down the toilet.

ha ha!

End of days for the mp3 blog.

I pray they don't take down mediafire, which is what I use. Over the years I've built a collection of dozens of my recordings and hosted them there, and I'd be super pissed if it all went away.

the advantage mediafire has is that they don't allow particularly large files.

So does this concentrate around searchable upload sites? For instance, wetransfer.com has become really popular (well, in my circle at least), but there you upload something and get a link through email. Others can't search through the files. Is that the new distinction?

Neither filesonic nor megaupload were searchable. Links to files on those sites were posted by the uploader (and frequently reposted) to filesharing blogs. Those links were picked up by the search engines, google, filetram, filestube, etc. Wetransfer links could be treated the same, though given the low profile of the host, probably wouldn't be picked up by the engines.

Wow. All this without new legislation.

http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/65920166.html?thread=11378137254#ixzz1kECktCvF

Pretty big win for the RIAA and MPAA anyway, huh?

Damning:

Chris Dodd went on Fox News to explicitly threaten politicians who accept MPAA campaign donations that they'd better pass Hollywood's favorite legislation... or else:

"Those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,"

Pretty big win for the RIAA and MPAA anyway, huh?

Huge, but temporary imo

Shutting down Megaupload would have been a short-term win. Getting most of Megaupload's competitors scared enough to shut down their own sites looks like something more. It won't stop torrenting or the low-key sharing of content but it's not going to be as easy for my next door neighbour to type "adele album .rar" into google and be listening to it five minutes later. Dedicated filesharers will continue but it might stop a percentage of the people doing it because it's convenient and hassle-free.

can't they just move the servers to senegal or something and not have to worry about the Feds?

xp yeah, it'll stop one distribution channel. As long as the demand exists, other channels will be developed.

Temporary or no, its pretty huge for them to knock down one of the giants hard enough to scare a number of their peers into hiding.

Oh, definitely. Arguably the biggest shock wave since Napster.

sharivari otm

it's not going to be as easy for my next door neighbour to type "adele album .rar" into google and be listening to it five minutes later.

this is probably for the best. the past few years of file-sharing have been at times glorious but also fucked up and excessive. the amount of music i was able to get a hold of in a small amount of time on something like soulseek ~5 years ago was incredible, and is still more than i could ever need. it'll be hard to see the new heights in convenience/speed reached by mediafire, megaupload, rapidshare go, but it's not as if music nerds don't have a vast cornucopia to fall back on

True dat. Completely coincidental, I bought two CDs last week.

fwiw, I think the scariest portent of SOPA was/is the implications for sites like wikileaks. one could reasonably conclude that the internal memos of a corp are protected by copyright, and that a hosting site would be targeted for releasing them

otfm, and most likely one of the main reasons the US govt was prepared to toe the SOPA/PIPA line for so long.

(censor the internet, claim it's about protecting jobs)

also some agent provocateur could easily bring an otherwise legit site to its knees just by sneaking in some copyrighted media. It's a kill switch for any site with user generated content

fwiw, I think the scariest portent of SOPA was/is the implications for sites like wikileaks. one could reasonably conclude that the internal memos of a corp are protected by copyright, and that a hosting site would be targeted for releasing them

(isn't this what Scientology did?)

This US govt petition link appears to work: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/investigate-chris-dodd-and-mpaa-bribery-after-he-publicly-admited-bribing-politicans-pass/DffX0YQv?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl

I bet there are a lot of people frantically downloading and burning stuff they weren't going to bother with just now, just in case.

i wondered why slsk was a little busier than usual

slsk is still a thing? haha

i'm not worried about adele.rar disappearing from a filesharing site, i'm fine with that. but this really freaks me out because, as noz pointed out on twitter, of all the music legally uploaded by its creators (including myself here) that can potentially just completely disappear when these sites go down, especially in corners of the musical landscape less interested in permanent archiving.