Censorship on the March

Today, you can’t get to The Oatmeal, or Dinosaur Comics, or XKCD, or (less importantly) Wikipedia. The sites have gone dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act, America’s attempt to censor the Internet to reduce copyright infringement. This is part of a remarkable, distributed, coordinated protest effort, both [...]

The Fight For Internet Censorship

Thanks to Danielle and the CoOp crew for having me! I’m excited. Speaking of exciting developments, it appears that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is dead, at least for now. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has said that the bill will not move forward until there is a consensus position on it, which is to [...]

Transparency, Internet Freedom, and IP

On Saturday, January 7, at 8:30AM (yes, that’s early, bring coffee), I’ll be speaking on a panel on Governmental Transparency in the Digital Age, run by the National Security Section of the AALS. It’s in Delaware Suite B on the lobby level of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. In addition to having painful flashbacks to [...]

Breaking the Net

Mark Lemley, David Post, and Dave Levine have an excellent article in the Stanford Law Review Online, Don’t Break the Internet. It explains why proposed legislation, such as SOPA and PROTECT IP, is so badly-designed and pernicious. It’s not quite clear what is happening with SOPA, but it appears to be scheduled for mark-up this [...]

Six Things Wrong with SOPA

America is moving to censor the Internet. The PROTECT IP and Stop Online Piracy Acts have received considerable attention in the legal and tech world; SOPA’s markup in the House occurs tomorrow. I’m not opposed to blacklisting Internet sites on principle; however, I think that thoughtful procedural protections are vital to doing so in a [...]

Threading the Needle

Imagine that Ron Wyden fails: either PROTECT IP or SoPA / E-PARASITE passes and is signed into law by President Obama. Advocacy groups such as the EFF would launch an immediate constitutional challenge to the bill’s censorship mandates. I believe the outcome of such litigation is far less certain than either side believes. American censorship [...]

Choosing Censorship

Yesterday, the House of Representatives held hearings on the Stop Online Piracy Act (it’s being called SOPA, but I like E-PARASITE tons better). There’s been a lot of good coverage in the media and on the blogs. Jason Mazzone had a great piece in TorrentFreak about SOPA, and see also stories about how the bill [...]

De-lousing E-PARASITE

The House of Representatives is considering the disturbingly-named E-PARASITE Act. The bill, which is intended to curb copyright infringment on-line, is similar to the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act, but much much worse. It’s as though George Lucas came out with the director’s cut of “The Phantom Menace,” but added in another half-hour of Jar Jar [...]

How To Encourage Piracy

Major League Baseball has made me a pirate, with no regrets. Nick Ross, on Australia’s ABC, makes “The Case for Piracy.” His article argues that piracy often results, essentially, from market failure: customers are willing to pay content owners for access to material, and the content owners refuse – because they can’t be bothered to [...]

Policing Copyright Infringement on the Net

Mark Lemley has a smart editorial up at Law.com on the hearings at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Viacom v. YouTube. The question is, formally, one of interpreting Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. 512), and determining whether YouTube meets the statutory requirements for immunity from liability. But this [...]

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