Copyright, Infrastructure, Legal, Regulation

Why Concurrent Media did not go black today

by Sweeting • January 18, 2012 • 1 Comment

Legislation There were, as best I could tell without an engineering degree, sound engineering reasons to oppose the DNS-blocking provisions of the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act. An enforcement mechanism that relied on maintaining a security hole in the Domain Name System, just as Internet engineers around the world were implementing a long-awaited fix for that hole, seem pretty self-evidently a bad idea. Especially so since the enforcement purpose itself could be so easily defeated by the simple expedient of typing in IP addressed directly.

There were also, again as best I could tell, serious ideological and societal implications that flowed from that enforcement strategy. Insofar as DNS blocking in the U.S. would encourage the adoption of alternative systems for resolving IP addresses, which were not subject to U.S. jurisdiction but which more

SOPA slips away

by Sweeting • January 14, 2012 • 1 Comment

Legislation You knew something was up when both Lamar Smith and Patrick Leahy, respectively the chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, each issued statements Friday (Smith, Leahy) saying they would remove the DNS blocking provisions from their own signature anti-piracy bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, and PROTECT-IP in the Senate. On Saturday, the rest of us found out what was up when the Obama Administration posted a statement on the White House blog saying it would not support any legislative measures “that tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS).”

And with that, the copyright industries’ biggest prize was lost.

Stopping SOPA still a long shot, and yet…

by Sweeting • January 10, 2012 • 0 Comments

Copyright Opponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act over at Reddit, the crowd-sourced news aggregator, are trumpeting their role in getting the high-profile Congressman and conservative hero Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to, apparently, flip-flop on his support for the bill. In a statement issued Monday, Ryan said that, “While H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act, attempts to address a legitimate problem, I believe it creates the precedent and possibility for undue regulation, censorship and legal abuse.” As a result, he added, “I do not support H.R. 3261 in its current form and will oppose the legislation should it come before the full House.”

Ryan had been targeted by activists at Reddit largely because of his high profile. They launched “Operation Pull Ryan” last month and endorsed his Democratic challenger, Rob Zerban, in an effort to deny Ryan reelection in 2012 over his “support” for SOPA. Zerban, in fact, was quick to praise Reddit in a post on the site Monday calling Ryan’s seeming change of heart, “an extraordinary victory” that will “send shock waves…throughout the establishment in Washington today.”

Concurrent Media