I understand and even welcome the ability of copyright holders to protect their works from piracy. What I have a problem with is the complete censorship of a website because someone thinks there is infringing material or an infringing link to said material on a website. I have a problem with this because I’ve read about (from reputable news organizations) abuses of the DMCA by large copyright holders and I dread the thought of those same copyright holders having the ability to shut down ANY website WITHOUT due process. I realize that the idea was to target foreign sites that are based on infringement, but in my opinion, the language is too vague and could be misinterpreted and abused. Again, I am for copyright holders being able to protect their works, but I am against SOPA and the Protect IP Act.
I have sent several of these form letters in the past few months and I have received several form letters from you, but I am including a personal message in my letter this time and I hope that you would do the same. I don’t expect to change your mind with my words, but I hope that you would see the concern that people who know what they’re talking about have against these bills, and that you would not vote based upon how much money has been lobbied towards the House and Senate by the MPAA and RIAA.
Historically, the movie and recording industry have opposed VCRs, TVs, and CDs & DVDs because they felt that these devices would be used to pirate material and would consequently put them all out of business. As we can all plainly see, these technologies have not only not put them out of business, but have made them more money than ever.
The technology is not the problem. The problem is those who refuse to adapt to changing conditions and try desperately to cling to their old, outdated business model.
The above is what I sent to my congressman today. It’s quite ironic that, in order to protect one kind of IP (Intellectual Property) they’re willing to destroy a different kind of IP (Internet Protocol).
Edit: I’ve taken this from Tumblr via Wil Wheaton who got it from Fark.com. This is good info about the bills and what they mean.
Stolen from Fark, which has the best SOPA/PIPA protest I’ve seen today:
There’s a new trend in a lot of news sites and blogs nowadays, and it’s very annoying. This whole splitting up stories into 5 or more pages or putting together a “slideshow” of images is annoying at best.
I’m sure there are ways to dynamically load an image when the user wants to see it, or to load more of the text without having to reload everything on the current page.
I really dislike it when an IT type, who isn’t very good at their job and doesn’t know as much as they think (or pretend) that they do tries to tell me that I’m an idiot. The following is an email we received (with any identifying information removed) from a company about one of their employees (whom we contracted to work with us) not being able to send us an email because it kept getting rejected as spam.
Please keep in mind that this is an issue caused by a change in [my company]‘s email security settings. They probably implemented this without fully vetting the consequences of the action. This happens a lot with some clients. When explaining to [my company] why you have to send email through a second party until this is cleared up on their end, it affords an opportunity for us to “teach” them nicely some of the things to avoid doing. If this comes up as an issue with them please ask our network administrator to call the appropriate person at [my company] and have a friendly discussion. It is extremely important to client maintenance that we take a very proactive approach with these types of issues rather than point fingers or always assuming that the problem(s) have been caused on our end. Thanks.
There are a few things I’d like to share with you about this email:
- He automatically assumes that it was OUR email security settings that caused the issue while simultaneously pointing out that they should be proactive and not point fingers or cast blame, without having talked to anyone at my company. All the information he had about the rejected email and the cause for it was from the email itself.
- He very condescendingly tells the email address owner (who works for the same company) that they can use these opportunities to “teach” us about things that we should/shouldn’t do.
- He assumes (incorrectly) that because we are a smaller company in a mostly rural area that we couldn’t possibly know anything about IT
I’d like to point out that the guy who forwarded me this email is a funny guy and knows that we’re not the redneck hicks that the above jackass assumes we are. I’d also like to point out that we have an email appliance that scans our emails for spam content & viruses. The email appliance downloads IP Address blacklists from its parent company (as it should) in order to help block spammy and/or malicious emails. The IP Address that the contractor was trying to send the email from had somehow been put on the blacklist (which is absolutely no fault of me or my company). Of course, this was fixed by adding the email address of the contractor to our whitelist. I had the issue fixed within minutes of him forwarding me this email.
A few days later, a follow-up email was forwarded to me by the nice-guy contractor. it was from his IT department detailing how they had been hit by an infection:
All,
The [regional office] was just caught with a mass-spamming piece of malware that was masquerading as a legit email. The subsequent activity on the infected computer effectively caused the rest of the INTERNET to block our email server.
…
Again as a reminder, we have just sent out the “Network Do’s & Don’ts” so keep them posted nearby your computer for official reference. IT will be keeping a CLOSE eye on our network to try and mitigate any other suspicious activity.
Please, be careful out there.
ah… sweet justice.