House takes Senate's bad Internet censorship bill, tries making it worse | Hacker News Reader

House takes Senate's bad Internet censorship bill, tries making it worse

arstechnica.com

164 pointsevo_910 comments

Freedom of speech is fast becoming inconvenient for groups that depend on "managing democracy."

TLDR: Takedown notices can be sent to payment processors and web advertising aggregators to shutdown revenue sources to sites which the entity sending the notice deems infringing. However, "ISPs and payment processors get the green light to simply block access to sites on their own volition—no content owner notification even needed."

This is absolutely not the TLDR. It's this and it's so much worse. I'm in DC right now trying to put a stop to this.

Everything about the DMCA and safe harbor gets thrown out the window. These folks even have the audacity to redefine the word "including" to mean "including but not limited to" which is pretty shady.

There are people more capable than me who are writing about it -- Start with http://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=protect+ip

A lot of people are in your debt for putting up a fight, so thank you. But I can't help but think that petitioning congress is a losing battle when they don't have our best interests in mind. If there's a remedy for our quickly-eroding freedoms, I think it will be technological and cultural more than it will be legal.

It will be all of the above. Please don't eschew the political/legal aspect out of defeatism or any other reason. Its predecessor COICA was defeated, this one can be too.

It takes money, and it takes time that I'd rather spend building my company, but it's super fucking important.

And I am positive that I am making a difference and that my actions will directly lead to this being dragged out longer, being amended to make it more palatable (less bad), or in the best but least likely case, being killed.

Being killed isn't really the goal by the way, the entertainment industry has been doing this long since before the Internet (they thought the VCRs would destroy the movie industry). The goal is to help alleviate some of their specific concerns with specific legislation, rather than broad strokes that impact all of us widely.

The DMCA wasn't great, but it hasn't been that big a deal for us to work with and still build great companies.

America Fuck Yeah! Save the Mother Fucking Day yeah.

The point of America is that this is not law yet, even though lawmakers want it to be.

It shows that the DMCA and Patriot act were not an aberration, were not an anomaly that would be rolled back; but the shape of things to come, part of a trend. Note the use in the title of the words "back" and "worse than ever". This is not a one-off.

That's a trait of pretty much all first world countries. In places like Switzerland the people could actually vote such nonsense away if they wanted to.

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