Hacker News Reader

Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

SOPA specifically (without actually naming it) calls out addons.mozilla.org for the whole mafiaafire thing -- so under SOPA, this add-on wouldn't be allowed to stay up.

"[T]his version targets software developers and distributors as well. It allows the Attorney General (doing Hollywood or trademark holders' bidding) to go after more or less anyone who provides or offers a product or service that could be used to get around DNS blacklisting orders."

Second paragraph: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/11/hollywood-new-war-on-s...

(Disclosure: I'm a developer on addons.mozilla.org; EDIT: Changed the post to add a source)

View on HN

SOPA has not yet passed, it is not yet the law and I hope that Mozilla leaves it up for now. The DeSOPA program is meant to discourage passage of the bill by showing congress how easily it can be circumvented, so if it is removed after passage so be it. The link is:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/desopa/

[add-ons mozilla base URL ] (slash) en-US (slash) firefox (slash) addon (slash) desopa (slash optional)

in case it is filtered.

Disclaimer: I developed it

I didn't mean at all to imply Mozilla would be taking it down; just that the government wasn't happy with the mafiaafire add-on and has included text in SOPA specifically targeted at making add-ons like this "illegal". Just another reason SOPA is bad :)

It's been shown in court that source code is free speech, protected by the First Amendment (cf. Bernstein v. US, Junger v. Daley). I don't want this to get to that point, but that could be a way of getting around it.

Some might argue that speech telling you how to commit a crime is not protected speech, but the Anarchist Cookbook is legal to possess as well.

Dammit Jim, I'm a hacker, not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

Counterexample: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_v._Reimerdes

China blocks sites, everyone uses a VPS. If peoples favorite sites start going down, i'm pretty sure the majority of users will start working out how to get around the block, and those that don't probably weren't as frequent users anyway.

You have to remember, for a lot of people their online experience ends at facebook, youtube and hotmail. Sites like reddit, stack overflow, digg, all have audiences that generally don't use IE and will also be able to find a way around a SOPA block. Sure, these sites will lose a lot of traffic, but SOPA will FAR from kill them.

Of course, with SOPA they won't just take the one addon down, but the entire domain.

In which case I'm sure "someone" will post it uuencoded to every forum operated by any subsidiary of companies supporting SOPA.

Or something to that effect.

They'll have fun moderating every scrap of user generated content they want to make use of or shut all their forums down, and still, circumvention tools will be everywhere.

If this passes, not only will they find people will create tons of tools to make circumvention easier than ever, but darknet efforts redoubled and work to make the net in general more censorship resistant explode; and people doing their worst to ensure it'll be harder than ever to stop piracy.

Except that there's already laws that say building circumvention devices is a felony.

And with that other bill, where the US can arrest anyone, anywhere, anytime, it's not good enough to not be American.

The legality isn't stopping people from copyright infringement, so why would it stop them from working around blatant censorship? If anything, something as drastic as SOPA is likely to make breaking these laws even more socially acceptable, which is bad news for its supporters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com