Just to point out.

The technology to bypass this kind of censorship is being developed by opensource activists who believe freedom of information is a worthwhile cause.

Passing this bill will affect many people who don't have the technical skills to setup services which can bypass the censorship, but it will not stop anyone who really wants to break the law.

It will affect the majority by stifling public discussion and freedom to associate with others online. It will not prevent the majority of illegal activity at which it may be aimed.

Agreed, Orathaic. I think it would have pretty big collateral effects on a lot of websites, though, even if p2p sharing went on undisturbed.
This of course just goes to why it's so bad. Ramped up government control over speech and lots of negative side-effects without actually solving any problems.

Now, is the law actively blocking sites, or just narrowing/widening the bandwith according to corporate wishes?

I thought it was the latter...

And I'm OK with corporations controlling how long things take to load (fre enterprise and all that, bandwith is a fair source of revenue, imo) but yeah, outright censorship is a firewall too far, so to speak...

@obiwan, you're referring to net neutrality, but this law is to allow actual blocking.

I'll add that another problem is the felony it institutes for piracy. I think it is very damaging to the law and to society to make things felonies that the people don't actually consider that bad, and which millions of people do. E.g., marijuana laws.

If the people passing these bills were smart enough to know it wouldn't be effective, they wouldn't be politicians.

Check out the following text from the bill, Obi:

"A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order, including measures designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) from resolving to that domain name’s Internet Protocol address. "

Just a snippet of course.

Hang on, if this gets passed, does it mean that all I need to do to perform a mega troll on a website is to post a sinister link, thereby blocking all US citizens from accessing the site? If so, where do I find an illegal link?

lol @ dD.. sign me up too.. I can troll every site that disagrees with me off the internet!

I didn't check out the bill, semck83, but from what I see it looks like a copyright and domain name protection act. Its preventing websites from redirecting you automatically from legitimate website to their spoof site. For example, preventing www.dell.com from resolving to del.com or some sort of variation of the spelling of a legitimate corporate website. If you note the language of the section you posted, it says "infringing site" meaning that it won't censor random websites for lulz, but will prevent websites that try to lure legitimate traffic from a real site onto its spoof site.

Apparently, a lot of big companies are against this, too (for different reasons, of course).

http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/17/2567793/sopa-ad-nyt-twitter-facebook-google-oppose

Could it really block TOR as the site suggests? That would be some serious shit, even Chinese internet disidents can cover their backs with it.

This law is still in comittee and will never even make it to the floor for a vote. Of course, the fact I said that means congress will prove me wrong. :-)

I think it would be overturned by the court as it violates free speech to block *any* site. Taking over a domain for criminal actions (like the JD did with some of the poker sites) is one thing, but blocking an outside site like the law proposes to allow is definitely a violation of free speech.

if its the same technology China uses my brother got onto FB while we were in China last August.

So as Orathaic said, those who want to bypass this law can, while average law abiding citizens wont, so it wont prevent anything it could possible hope to achieve.

You are incorrect, goldfinger. First of all, that doesn't even make sense. Why would dell.com send you to another site? Second, the part about "measures designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) from resolving to that domain name’s Internet Protocol address" is talking about what an ISP must do IF a website infringes the act (by allegedly breaking copyright law).

For example, say times.co.uk broke copyright law. Then US ISPs would be instructed to change their DNS so that when an American entered times.co.uk, it did not resolve to the correct IP address for the Times.

It is a copyright protection bill, yes, but it is a vastly over-aggressive one, allowing sites to be shut down for minimal infringements. In addition, it creates a federal felony offense for internet piracy.

I suggest you do check out the bill before continuing to interpret it. The text is here:

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/text

@Draug: It's possible that that would happen, but not necessarily so. The problem is it does require that the website have broken the law; indeed already some websites have been shut down for piracy. This would just make it easier, and overturning it would require a federal court to realize that taking down an entire website because some section of it led to copyright violations is a violation of free speech.

As for getting out of committee, Draug, that may well be right, but the bill does have quite a few sponsors, for whatever that is worth.

But the sponsors all come from the same side of the aisle. Special committees prefer bilateral sponsorship versus minority party only.

That's not true, Draug. There are fifteen Republican and 10 Democratic sponsors. In what world is that all from the same side of the aisle?

The info I had said 13 co-sponsors total and only 3 were democrats, making it pretty much a one-sided bill. But if the count has gone up and it become more bilateral, then we do have some fears.

Gotcha, sorry. I'm getting my information from here:

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show

Yeah, I have since foudn that the numbers of sponsors has roughtly doubled and many of those came from the other side of the aisle.

I got a long email back from my Senator that was non-committal and sounded very much like she plans to support it long term.
I'm afraid this is the kind of thing that tends to pass with large corporate pressure unless people really organize and are outraged. (Think the Disney act).

Luckily, corporate pressure is *against* this one.

Corporate pressure is for this one. Sony is one of the major backers of this bill. @semck83 I got some time to read it more thoroughly, and you are correct. It is still copyright protection, but is directed against pirating websites who are based in foreign countries in order to avoid the copyright laws of the United States. I mean, in a strictly legal sense this law is just an internet enforcement of the Lanham Act of 1946 (maybe off by a year or so on that)

But yahoo and google and microsoft msn and go daddy are against it for fear their foreign subsidiaris could get blocked.

Right, because the law would require ISP's to block them and for all add sources to pull their adds from the websites. Google doesn't want to damage its main revenue source

The point is these are also corporations including the largest in the us: microsoft.

@Draug, there is some corporate pressure against it from specific sectors, but it's not true to say that corporate pressure is against it overall. Quite the contrary. The massive entertainment industry are soundly behind it, and if you really doubt which side business as a whole is on, just note that the US Chamber of Commerce is supporting it.

@goldfinger, yes, it is in some senses implementing prior laws against copyright violation. However, in the context of the internet and the powers the government currently has over it, that's somewhat like saying that a law to allow the government to come into your home and go through your things to look for stolen property is just implementing prior laws against theft.

@Draug - Apple has a larger market cap...so it depends on your definition of "largest" I suppose

How is it invading private property though? The Internet is public domain, is it not? Its more like the police strolling around a store, noticing they're selling contraband, and shutting down said store

Well, it would seem in the Fortune 500 that apple is 35th and Microsoft 38th. I guess Apple is a bit bigger. But when Yahoo and Microsoft are both against you, that's two huge players.

When it comes down to it, I still think Microsoft and Yahoo would bring a suit against the law as unconstitutional and the Supremem Court would hear it and agree that it was inhibiting free speech.

@goldfinger, I did not mean to suggest that it was invading private property. I just meant to suggest a logical analogy: just because you support an old law does not you mean you suggest the establishment of vast new powers to enforce it.
@Draug, as mentioned before, the entire entertainment and media industries, including the RIAA, networks, etc, are for it. That's more than jus tApple.
As for the Supreme Court -- it's _possible_ they would strike it down as overbroad, but it's always a mistake to count on that. If there's a bill currently before Congress that you oppose, it's always a better plan to work for it being defeated now than to count on the Supreme Court striking it down. The Supreme Court is too random on narrow cases like this one.