but the letter needs to be updated for two bills, SOPA and PIPA, that are
close to passing through US Congress now.
Stanford law school CIS (Center for Internet and Society) had a panel on SOPA
a week ago.
What's Wrong with SOPA?
12/7 - What's Wrong with SOPA? | Center for Internet and Society
That's got a link to the talk on youtube: 2 hours.
I thought it was very good. (I'm may be biased. I live in Silicon Valley,
not Hollywood.)
The handout also has a link to a white paper on the DNS issues.
htp://bit.ly/sZBJbd
Security and Other Technical Concerns Raised by the
DNS Filtering Requirements in the PROTECT IP Bill
Authors:
Steve Crocker, Shinkuro, Inc.
David Dagon, Georgia Tech
Dan Kaminsky, DKH
Danny McPherson, Verisign, Inc.
Paul Vixie, Internet Systems Consortium
My opinions (US centric):
Everybody agrees that Hollywood has problems with getting ripped off.
The bill should be dumped rather than patched until it is good enough. (If
you are a cynic, you would propose that the really terrible parts of the bill
were put there so that the good guys would focus on getting them removed and
ignore the parts that were only bad.)
Technically, it won't work. (Spammer's have lots of practice creating
domains faster than people can black list them and/or hiding in legitimate
domains.) See URL above.
Technically, the unintended consequences are nasty. (at least the ones we
can see) Our legal quirks are already hurting US based cloud servers.
PATRIOT Act clouds picture for tech - POLITICO
Internationally, it's shooting ourselves in the foot. Hillary Clinton is
on record as saying the Internet should be open. If China did something like
this we would make fun of them. If we block their domains, they can block
Google and such. (They are undoubtedly better at it than we are. Google
gets a lot of its income from offshore.)
There is no due-process. The AG could take down Google. There is already
a good example of the government taking down a legitimate domain without
being willing to provide any justification:
Breaking News: Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All
Due Process, Hide All Details...
Breaking News: Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details… | Techdirt
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/08225217010/
breaking-news-feds-falsely-censor-popular-blog-over-year-deny-all-due-
process-hide-all-details.shtml
This whole mess is a wonderful example of why many citizens are cynical
about Congress. It looks like the MPAA/RIAA can buy whatever they want.