SOPA and the Zone

[surfcowboy]

Just a note on today's protest. If SOPA were to be passed and a judge choose to do so, the Zone could be shut down over us posting pics, videos and songs that aren't "ours" legally.

It's unlikely, but so is the government taking our guns and we still protect that right.

I'm not a fan of piracy, but in my opinion, SOPA is the wrong answer and a bit too over-reaching for my comfort level.

I hope they re-write it to better present the spirit of the law, stopping foreign piracy of US copy-written materials, but as is, it scares me. Too much power and too easily abused.

[Easy Rider]

And I thought it just so we didn't post stuff like this?   

[Tecpartner]

And thats why I wear my glasses on the water.

[pdxmike]

There has to be a limerick in there somehow.

[surfcowboy]

There once was a man of the water

Who was caught with an old surfer's daughter,

T'was the PDX bloke, so quick with a stroke,

To go where he hadn't have oughta

[soulpaddler]

 

[PonoBill]

Actually it's written to obscure. I tried to read the bill to get an idea of what they intended to do. I'm usually pretty good at dredging through legal mumbo-jumbo, but SOPA threw me. Then I read PIPA and it's worse.

One of the weirdest provisions is how the remedies work. There doesn't seem to be any any need to tell someone that they are in violation of the act, unless they are being sued--at least as far as I can tell. The AG can just cut off payments being made to the offending site and get it's DNS and search blocked. And if you fight the lawsuit and lose (and you certainly would under the terms of the bill), you get to pay the other side's legal costs.

I might have that all wrong, I was really going in circles reading it.

Given the wide range of things this would seem to make enforceably illegal (what we do here on the Zone is theoretically illegal already, though a lot passes muster as fair use) it would seem to be an extremely powerful tool to shut down any site that someone with big pickets wanted gone.

[headmount]

Number 12 on the far left looks like the winner to me...

Whoops guess I strayed off the point of the thread.

[pdxmike]

There once was a man of the water

Who was caught with an old surfer's daughter,

T'was the PDX bloke, so quick with a stroke,

To go where he hadn't have oughta

surfcowboy--you shouldn't be doing video stuff--you should be writing screenplays.

Personally I was thinking more along the lines of things rhyming with "glasses".

For instance:

Lasses with glasses have very nice....

...eyesight.

[PonoBill]

I'm kind of impressed by number 4, though she looks like if you dropped her she'd bounce.

[PonoBill]

Take a look at the young lady on the right, and see if you don't think the instructions were "hold your number over your head".  She must have taken literal translation lessons from PDX.

[808]

Bill nice catch that is SOOO great. 

[Strand Leper]

SOPA,

It is all a step in the creation of the bureaucratic state...

What do I mean?

In France for example, it is considered dirty to be new money.  It is considered dirty because literally the only way that a person can achieve to real new money is to have violated the law... because there are so many laws that no one can comply with them all.

It is evil... an amazing threat to liberty... and I have been doing some fairly intensive lobbying against it for the past few weeks...

Before I even read it... yes I read it... It failed one of my key litmus tests... Chris Dodd is for it...

Yes copyrights need to be protected... and companies are managing to protect them... it is a pain in the ass... but they are managing...

These same companies that are lobbying so very hard for economic rent and the ability to "lawyer" out of business any website that they do not like are also trying their damnedest to position themselves for growth in the soon to be expanding Chinese consumer market... where there is no such thing as intellectual property, and therefore no such thing as indigenous entrepreurship (aka progress)...

Ahhhh irony... but it is illegal to bribe a foreing government official ... but perfectly legal to bribe our own... in a manner of speaking...

[PonoBill]

Once again, I may be reading this wrong, I'd have better luck if it were written in Sanskrit, but it looks like not only do the "plaintiffs" get to shut you down, sue you without much recourse on your part, make you pay for their legal fees if you fight their actions, and assess damages based on views, not actual revenue, but they can even take your domain name!

[surfcowboy]

Pono, I'm doing some research on it for clients and that's exactly the problem, it's too wide open and you don't know if you're in trouble til you're out of business.

It's basically up to a judge and it feels like a really big stick to hand them.