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There's no need to worry about porn sites. One of the amendments proposed yesterday was to instruct the AG to not use any resources protecting the copyrights of pornography producers. I suppose their legal rights aren't as important as the industries that backed this bill.

I missed that, so thanks for highlighting that one. And that's pretty interesting, because I'd imagine that pornography producers are amongst those whose IP is most often stolen. But you're right: according to Forbes, "The [Porn / Adult Entertainment] industry is tiny next to broadcast television ($32.3 billion in 1999 revenue, according to Veronis Suhler), cable television ($45.5 billion), the newspaper business ($27.5 billion), Hollywood ($31 billion), even to professional and educational publishing ($14.8 billion)." http://www.forbes.com/2001/05/25/0524porn.html

The porn industry has grown a lot since 2001. The rationale given for the amendment was that without it, the AG would spend all its time working pornography cases, as they'd be the majority of copyright infringement occurring.

"Most of the copyright abuse is happening in this area... so let's ignore it in favour of the concerns of a larger group of patrons."

Fantastic.

How did they justify it, though? Did they explicitly say that "our industry is more important"?

They just asserted that the government should not be working towards helping pornography producers because the material is distasteful.

At the same time that amendment didn't pass (just to be clear). It was basically a tactic by the anti-SOPA contingent to blur the lines of legality...the pitch was "Why waste taxpayer dollars enforcing pornographic copyright? Vote for this!". I'm don't think it was raised was really a reflection of the lack of desire of the AG to enforce porn copyright...I'd guess not based on the context of it as a defensive, anti-SOPA move.

edit: it was raised by Jared Polis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Polis - who is in the anti-SOPA camp.

> "I suppose their legal rights aren't as important as the industries that backed this bill."

As if SOPA needed to look any worse, now it has the appearance of being a protection racket for the extortion of contributions.

I wonder if that may not turn out to be a flaw/attack vector in SOPA: their attorneys may be able to argue selective enforcement.

Did they reintroduce it? I saw it shot down around 5PMish EST, and rightly so, I suppose, if you believe in SOPA.

Who decides what's porn?

> and porn sites? really?

I don't understand this visceral hatred of pornography. Like it or not, it's an indisposable part of modern Western culture. It fulfills a need that is as old as mankind itself. Why can't we just acknowledge it for what it is instead of sweeping it under the rug?

"I don't understand this visceral hatred of pornography. Like it or not, it's an indisposable part of modern Western culture..."

Why specify Western culture?

Because it's not necessarily a part of all modern cultures. For example, pornography is illegal in many Islamic nations and can be difficult to come by, both online and in real life. In such a culture, the extermination of pornography would have a relatively minor effect on society, making it disposable.

Pornography is not difficult to come by in Islamic nations nowadays (if Pakistan is any indication). Its sold in the same places as other pirated western DVDs, often without the shopowner even realizing that it is a substantively different sort of thing compared to "normal" Western movies, which also tend to feature scantily clad women on the cover. There are also internet cafes with fairly unfiltered access to internet pornography and private rooms.

Pakistan, as a (nominally) democratic nation, is probably not the best example of your average Islamic nation (most of which do not possess democratic forms of government).

In any case, my familiarity with non-Western cultures is rather limited, and therefore I didn't want to unintentionally comment on any others in my initial post.

When you say "islamic nation," are you referring to one with majority islamic citizens, in the same way that britain, america or sweden are "christian nations," or are you referring to islamic theocracies?

It seems you are referring to the latter, but you should be careful bandying around such terms. There are highly secular democracies with muslim populations, such as turkey.

Since I considered Pakistan to be an Islamic nation (as I stated in my previous post), I was clearly using the former definition.

And while it is not impossible for Muslim-majority nations to be secular and/or democratic, it's highly unusual. Moreover, going back to the origin of this discussion, even in secular Turkey, the recent conservative movement there resulted in the banning of pornography in 2004. If you know Turkish, you can read the law yourself here: http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/kanunlar/k5237.html

It's not unusual for a Muslim-majority nation to be secular and/or democratic. It seems odd to go just be the number of countries and disregard the population size. Population-wise, the largest of those countries are Indonesia (pop. 228m, 86% Muslim), Pakistan (172m, 97%) and Bangladesh (162m, 89%). Even if you do go by the numbers and give Bahrain (1m) the same weight as the large countries, the word "secular" pops up often in the list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim-majority_countri...

Well to give another example, pornography is illegal in China.

Making something illegal seems evidence for it being indispensable to many people.

If there were no demand or supply, why make the law?

Making it illegal suggests indispensability. Why make a law for something for which there is no demand or supply?

You suggest exterminating pornography would have a minor effect. If so many people want to exterminate it that they make it illegal (I suspect without checking that at times illegal under draconian punishment) but it still hasn't been exterminated, that seems another argument for indispensability.

But these points are irrelevant to my original question. Why specify Western culture?

Even if pornography were dispensable in some Islamic cultures (whether we label them as Western or not), that doesn't say it isn't also indispensable in non-Western cultures or dispensable in some Western cultures or both.

i was actually saying that because everything loaded from a porn site comes from other servers, so just listing its main hostname will not show anything at all.

Is this really categorically true for porn sites and only porn sites? Otherwise your comment seems rather weird.

> Is this really categorically true for porn sites and only porn sites?

Depends on the entire structure of the site, and no not only porn sites. If you run chrome, hit up your Network Inspector in the dev tools and go to YouTube (or RedTube if you want, it's just about the same) to watch a video. The random video I had in my chrome history loaded from o-o.preferred.nuq04s10.v21.lscache3.c.youtube.com , and all images loaded from *.ytimg.com

If Youtube were to go down and I tossed their IP address into my hostfile, I could visit their homepage, but there's a pretty good chance thumbnail images wouldn't load, and a 100% chance I would not have every single (seemingly dynamic) content server in my hostfile, so none of the videos would load anyways.

Yes, this was my impression.

It's not hatred of pornography. It's hatred of an industry that thrives and profits on suppression, humiliation and objectification of women.

That is a simplistic and sexist view of the industry. It presupposes women have no agency, no will of their own, and that men can control them just by waving some money and the promise of fame in their faces.

I know it's hard to read my comment through the torrent of downvotes (which speaks for itself). However, in it, I've said nothing of free will. For discussion's sake, let's assume we live in a perfect society in which women do porn purely from choice. Total fiction, but let's assume that.

Now, back to my original assertion. Assuming we're all adults here, and are aware of what a modern porn scene looks and sounds like, I challenge you, or any other downvoter, to explain exactly how so is the porn industry not demeaning or not humiliating or does not objectify women.

Doesn't the porn industry demean and humiliate and objectify men, too?

But men are apparently presumed to have more ability to make a choice in the matter, more willpower to resist the things the pornmongers throw at unknown talent.

The funny thing is that, in reality, heterosexual male porn stars are a dime a dozen. If a man isn't willing to do something, they can throw him out and get someone else in time for filming to continue as planned. But the women are not so easily replaceable. First of all, they're in much shorter supply, but also, they have a fan following, meaning there are no alternatives.

You find what you're looking for, in porn as in just about any market.

Besides, you do not have the right to define what is humiliating and degrading for anyone else. You can only define that for yourself.

Right because enforcement never overreaches and never abuses any weapon they are given.

In the meatspace world, see tasers and pepper spray which are only supposed to be used when a gun would have been, so they are less than lethal - then there is warrantless everything these days, or no-knock warrants on the wrong house from a "tip" and they kill your dog for good measure (happens so often it's a cliche already).

On the net see the DMCA mission creep and the thousands of Patriot Act "cannot tell anyone you were served, not even your lawyer" National Security Letters nonsense.

If someone copies the code to crack bluray or something like that to wikipedia - why wouldn't SONY's lawyers use SOPA to take down all of wikipedia for 10 days?

Right because enforcement never overreaches and never abuses any weapon they are given.

i didn't say that, and i realize why the bill is dangerous. but to fear that it's suddenly going to shut down a bunch of popular sites overnight and we have to scramble to revert back to an /etc/hosts-over-ftp distribution of addressing is silly.

we should be focusing on stopping the bill from passing first, rather than worry about how we'll get to the pirate bay in a few months.

"but to fear that it's suddenly going to shut down a bunch of popular sites overnight and we have to scramble to revert back to an /etc/hosts-over-ftp distribution of addressing is silly"

I'm more concerned that unpopular sites will be shut down. Or never created to begin with.

Sorry that wasn't meant to be at you at all - I am just really upset about all this stuff so much lately that I think I better stop watching the news for the rest of the year.

Reality is we cannot stop it from passing, the people in charge of the committee want it to pass so the hearing is just pretend to go through the motions. In some form or another it's going to pass, so start planning.

Just because it passes the committee doesn't mean it will pass the full house and senate votes, and then it has to pass through the President's veto powers. I'm holding out hope that Congress and the President have heard us and won't make it law.

If all else fails maybe we can get it declared to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And even if the Supreme Court fails us, then we just have to vote some new people into Congress and overturn the law.

>then we just have to vote some new people into Congress and overturn the law.

No. Just no. That's so delusional it's not even funny anymore. It doesn't matter who "you" vote into congress, it's the same shit with different assholes. They are ALL corporate sellouts.

What's broken is the current system, where people who have no clue what so ever are allowed to vote on things they do not understand even on a surface level, dismiss the opinions of experts with comments such as "I'm not a nerd so I wouldn't understand" and vote "No" to everything because they've been told to do so.

Stop believing that "the next election surely will change everything". It's bullshit and you should know it. Worse, most people will think that their responsibility is done after voting, sheepishly waiting for the next election where they fall for the same empty promises and banal phrases as they did in the previous election.

Furthermore, even if we get SOPA to be repealed, the same shit will come up not even half a year later in a new disguise, I can promise you that with absolute certainty. As I said, the system is broken, and that is what needs to be fixed. Fighting SOPA and other abominations is just a never-ending battle with the symptoms.

Ok, what do you suggest be done about it? It's easy to complain about how broken the system is. The hard part is fixing it. If you aren't willing to work within the system (i.e. vote, call your representative, run for office yourself, etc...), then what are you going to do?

>The hard part is fixing it.

That's my point. It's impossible to fix it. Representative democracy is broken to its very core. It will inevitably lead to concentration of power towards groups or individuals who do NOT have the interest of the public or the advancement of humanity in mind.

>then what are you going to do?

Exactly what I've been doing anyways: advocate anarchism and technocracy. Only a society focused on scientific progress and advancement of humanity as a whole, centered around knowledge and logic, and opposing all forms of unnatural authority can bring us into the future.

Given how many people in the White House have direct ties to Hollywood, I would count on a signature if it makes it out of Congress.

Exactly. Those sites (the big ones, at least) will not go down without a fight. They have too much to lose.

> only one legal representative sent to the preliminary hearing

I'm not sure if you know how senate hearings work. There's a reason that no other tech companies were at that hearing, and it's not because they all support SOPA.

"and porn sites? really?"

I don't understand this comment. Can you explain it?