SOPA and independant game projects.

[zwzsg]

You don't need SOPA to blackout domains without trial:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... cebook.ars

[dizekat]

dize: proxies and VPN will be illegal (and all unknown traffic will be blocked)

i guess i didn't really make myself clear in my first post; it's not so much the blocking of pirated material that bothers me but the blanket statements like you mentioned at the end of your last post similar to "protecting the public health" and the like; this opens the door for them to do what they did to wikileaks any time they like, and without the affected party having any type of recourse available

a reminder : it's legal for me to download whatever i like in my country, as long as i don't share it, however, i am within the sphere of influence of the united states, which will be interfering with MY rights and freedoms, even though i live in a different country altogether.

and no, i didn't pirate your game. any indy game i want to play, i will buy, because i understand the difference between feeding a hard worker and feeding a corporation (i suppose this is a completely different discussion altogether but i would like to at least state my viewpoint)

will the impact be less for you? yes, because you'll still be able to connect to sites without routing through the united states. however, since payment services are international corporations, and all of them have at least ties to the united states as a whole, this puts your business in peril... if your site/company was taken down tomorrow for a copyright infringement (false of course) would you have the resources to fly to the united states and plead your case in the courts there?

SOPA changes absolutely nothing about possibility of false copyright infringement lawsuit, and changes very little about the impact of such lawsuit on any legitimate business. And no, the site would not be taken down on the mere claim of copyright infringement. Per SOPA, the ISP or payment processor or Google or whoever merely need to request from me (and receive) a counter-claim of no copyright infringement. And that's it. Why demand such a silly thing? Well there's those people (megaupload etc) who don't even claim that they aren't helping infringe copyright, they claim their participation in copyright infringement is not wilful, it's all user's fault, they're just a general file service. Those people are put in peril if they have to claim that they are not infringing copyright.

And it is the fact of life that anyone could be falsely accused of a crime and have to go to court. This goes for all laws, not just copyright law. You could be falsely accused of murder in US on fabricated evidence.

SOPA really uis just summarizing existing situation and existing case law.

[smoth]

http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rouge ... Letter.pdf
LOL Mitch Landrieu is backing sopa. I asked on his facebook profile, "why are you supporting it"

[KaiserJ]

SOPA changes absolutely nothing about possibility of false copyright infringement lawsuit, and changes very little about the impact of such lawsuit on any legitimate business.

completely false copyright claims can be made under SOPA, without any chance of getting in trouble regardless of if their claim is incorrect (exactly like DMCA)

counter-claims however, if falsified, put you in danger of perjury, and must be made five days after the initial complaint. DMCA counter claims are notoriously poorly accepted and seldom work, as ISPs are generally fearful of the government and will immediately block and remove the site.

under SOPA companies handling your payments / ad revenue are NOT required to recoup you for your losses. even if your counter claim goes through, those companies obligated to act against you are not obligated to help you, and you will need to litigate (i'm sure we're all familiar with stories of mastercard and paypal and other payment services withholding funds)

i should note dize... i'm not saying this stuff in the context of "if this goes through, you WILL be served" because i'm sure your site is legit, and you're a good guy so i doubt you have any enemies who would be making fraudulent claims.

i only live one country over, and the idea of having to go to trial in the USA scares the crap out of me... even if i did win my case i am not affluent enough to afford the massive legal fees incurred by hiring lawyers for US courts.

just another way for companies to step on the little guy. what i object to the most, is the USA failing to recognize the jurisdiction of ICC

anyways. im not convincing anyone, i'll stop

[PicassoCT]

Well, my vote goes to the pirat party. Hope im not the last guy caught and jailed for drinking before the prohibition ends.

[smoth]

I am not fond of piracy but find that arresting shipmakers is the wrong way to stop it.

[Forboding Angel]

Why wait for SOPA?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... cebook.ars

[dizekat]

SOPA changes absolutely nothing about possibility of false copyright infringement lawsuit, and changes very little about the impact of such lawsuit on any legitimate business.

completely false copyright claims can be made under SOPA, without any chance of getting in trouble regardless of if their claim is incorrect (exactly like DMCA)

DMCA claims are under penalty of perjury as well. It's just that in practice some anonymous ass can send them.

counter-claims however, if falsified, put you in danger of perjury, and must be made five days after the initial complaint.

When you aren't an 'anonymous' non-existent operator of a piracy site, which for all intent and purposes in fact belongs to it's ISP itself.

DMCA counter claims are notoriously poorly accepted and seldom work, as ISPs are generally fearful of the government and will immediately block and remove the site.

Examples of it happening to a site which was not, in fact, infringing copyright? The DMCA I think doesn't even require to notify the author and give any 5 days, by the way.
edit: i have a plenty of examples of it not happening btw... e.g. rebecca black's friday was generally disliked; surely a lot of trolls sent false DMCA notices, and nothing happened (till she DMCA'd her own video).

(i'm sure we're all familiar with stories of mastercard and paypal and other payment services withholding funds)

Precisely. This is the current status quo, which SOPA doesn't change.

i should note dize... i'm not saying this stuff in the context of "if this goes through, you WILL be served" because i'm sure your site is legit, and you're a good guy so i doubt you have any enemies who would be making fraudulent claims.

The fraudulent claims are always a possibility, and no paypal is not required to recoup the losses when they freeze your account.

I don't know about the current status quo with sites that 'endanger public health' albeit I would guess it is probably rather shitty as well.

The way I see it, the current status quo is quite shitty. Currently, only the (small-ish) legitimate businesses - those that do not anonymize themselves, those that have valuable brands and customer relations - can get hit with the stick of law. The paypal can refuse to process your payments, or hold the funds - that is the de-facto situation right now. The SOPA makes it stricter with the intention so that the piracy sites may get some stick too. At same time, SOPA, compared to current situation, does not seem to change anything about the risks that legitimate businesses face.

There's a plenty of false DMCA trolling as it is. If anything SOPA would somewhat standardize the response to the trolling, to be more equal for large and small businesses. Currently, the medium or big business doesn't face ANY problems from DMCA trolling, the pirates don't suffer any from DMCA either, while small fish suffers all the scary things outlined in SOPA, voluntarily imposed by companies such as Paypal. Hell, PP doesn't even need to be DMCA-trolled in the first place. They just seize funds to earn interest.

[luckywaldo7]

A 23-page paper outlining the unconstitutionality of SOPA by Laurence Tribe, that I CBA to read in its entirety:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/75153093/Trib ... -12-6-11-1

[Forboding Angel]

Call your congressman while there is still time!

Act Now: Call Congress right away
This week is do or die. The only way we can stop this bill from passing this week is by melting Congress's phone system with calls from constituents: We want every member to get one call per minute all week long.

http://americancensorship.org/

[KaiserJ]

yup, tomorrow is the day of truth.

[smoth]

we'll see what happens.

[scifi]

btw judgment day is here 15 december

take action against foreign “rogue” websites that traffic in stolen and counterfeit American-made films, television shows, music, and other goods, threatening jobs and local economies in cities across the country.

Since when does the thing of us versus them, took over american politics??

[smoth]

because punishing people with draconian laws is going to stop people from burning dvds and selling them on the streets of china..

idiotic law.

[Forboding Angel]

Since when does the thing of us versus them, took over american politics??

Since Bush said "Either you're with us or against us."

I'm sure he said that with the best of intentions, but that sentence changed the thinking on a ton of issues for the worse.

[smoth]

they are not voting on sopa just marking it.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201112 ... sopa.shtml

http://judiciary.house.gov/news/12142011%20SOPA.html
The key scope narrowing they are doing is effecting foreign sites...

[scifi]

I was sceptical about this bill but now.................
God man, its just to me they lost all reason when they said this.

to combat foreign rogue websites. Companies like Google have made billions by working with and promoting foreign rogue websites so they have a vested interest in preventing Congress from stopping rogue sites.

“In August, Google paid half a billion dollars to settle a criminal case because of the search engine giant’s active promotion of foreign rogue pharmacies that sold counterfeit and illegal drugs to U.S. patients.

Even if this was true, witch is speculating A lot.
Its no way to justify a bill.

They havent given any plausible reason, or justification, the basis for this bill is "America is under attack".

When you legislate over these "kinds" of things, you must take in consideration the whole internet, how things work, how diferent sites correlate between each other. How can websites internationaly can be brougth down by Internacional laws, not American ones.

Thats the biggest problem, lack of common laws that each country has to fulfill. Take for instance the pirate bay, once they were in Sweden, now theyr in the netherlands or smth. They dodge countrys with strict laws.

[hoijui]

from 17 Nov 2011, opensource.com article about SOPA

http://opensource.com/law/11/11/whats-b ... 000TxMnAAK

[Forboding Angel]

TotalBiscuit finally weighs in.

http://youtu.be/JhwuXNv8fJM

[luckywaldo7]

Official list of corporations supporting SOPA: http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rouge ... orters.pdf