Knowing that there is some copyrighted stuff on RyPN.org; RyPN could possibly be shut down for good because of Censorship, if this bill is passed. This link: http://www.mozilla.org/sopa will tell you more about the bill. Click "Take Action Now" and fill out the box to the right on the next screen. Thanks for helping out. Hopefully the bill will be rejected.

I didn't post this as a way to start a debate about politics, I posted it to make others aware about the whole situation.

Eh, that legislation is already bought and paid for by our corporate overlords, there's no point in fighting it...

Can somebody clearly explain what this is about? I gather it is a way to control copyright infringement by effectively shutting down websites which have had a copyright claim made against them. Will such a claim have to be proven in order to have action taken against the defendant? Will linking constitute a copyright infringement? Why not just let a copyright holder seek justice on his or her own? After all, the law is there for anyone who wants to enforce it.

Is this just a pretext to reign in the free-ranging exchange of information on the Internet?

Here's a link to one side of the issue:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-ron-w ... 97305.html

Well that side makes a lot of sense to me. In another thread, we were talking about government regulations. This expansion of copyright policing sounds like an excuse to create more regulations.

Well, in the interest of "equal time," here's the viewpoint from a different (i.e. libertarian) corner of the political sandbox, equally condemnatory:

http://volokh.com/2011/11/04/how-about- ... hollywood/

Just to clarify, when I said it makes sense to me, I did not mean that I agree with the concept. I only meant I now understand what is being proposed. And as I understand it from both links, I see similar objections in both of them, and I thoroughly oppose the SOPA laws.

I would like to see something from those who are promoting this heavy handedness to see how they frame their argument.

And as bad as this seems just on the face of it regarding copyright enforcement, it has slippery-slope written all over it.

In the interest of equal time, Sandy, I'd like to point out that both linked articles are in opposition to the proposal. You owe us one or two in support of it.......assuming there are any such on the internet, although given the likelihood of unintentionally violating a copyright somewhere no article by a supporter would likely be published online.

dave

Frankly, I owe you nothing. I simply find the Huffy Post (derided in some camps as the "Puffington Host") to be a left-leaning equivalent of Breitbart, Fox News,or the like, so I felt it important to show that even those on the "right" can find things to hate about this.

If you want to find defenders of such copyright enforcement, I would suggest you start with the Disney Company, generally regarded as the largest driving force between extension of copyright protection (in the name of continuing protection for the character of Mickey Mouse and affiliated imagery), and also Righthaven, a copyright holding company founded in early 2010, which entered into agreements from its partner newspapers after finding that their content has been copied to online sites without permission, in order to engage in litigation against the site owners for copyright infringement.

You may have some trouble with the latter. At last report, the company's assets are being confiscated by the US Marshals Service due to expired debts from legal fees to a successful defendant. (Just do an Internet search for the sordid details.)

You know, when copyrights first started in the U. S., they were limited to like 17 years. It's only been in the last 50 years or so that major corporations have been able to get the laws changed to allow their work to be protected nearly in perpetuity.

I was just listening to a discussion of this, and among the more incredible aspects of this stuff is that doing a Google search subjects one to a use of service agreement, and anyone under 18 can't legally enter into said service agreement. So, does that mean that every high school student doing term paper research on Google is violating the law?

This proposed law is crap (that's a legal term, you know <g>). It used to be that there was such a thing as "fair use" which allows authors to quote each other's work, or a filmmaker to use a clip from a movie in a documentary without having to either get permission or pay for the use of a larger work. Justin Beber got his start doing covers of songs and posting them on YouTube. So, even though he now generates millions and millions of $$ for the music industry now, he would have been prosecuted under this proposed law. This means that those really great dissolve shows at EastRail, WinterRail, and SummeRail are illegal as well if they use copyrighted music in their sound tracks. Better watch out for spies from ASCAP in the audience at shows!

This sounds like a Department of Homeland Security division for the copyright office.

This is an extension of something we already have, called a DMCA "takedown notice".

COMPLAINER: Hey ISP, here is a takedown notice, your client's web page infringes my copyright.
ISP: Okay, we removed that web page. That means we have no liability. We told our client too. Usually.
CLIENT: Hey, ISP, here is a counter-DMCA, vouching that my page is legal. Put it back up.
ISP: Okay, the page is back up. Liability is on you, client.
COMPLAINER: Hey ISP, we said to take the page down! Wanna get sued?
ISP: The client vouched. Can't sue us, sue him.
(which usually doesn't happen)

Now, some years back, a nudie glamour-shot site called "Perfect 10" found a lot of hobby websites were copying their content. Quite often, the site was a "forum" where in a few threads, people were naming and often posting their favorite models. They went to war, and they used the DMCA Takedown as a weapon of mass destruction. They did mass web searches for their model's names, such as "Naureen Zaim". This searched the text "Naureen Zaim" only and said nothign about a photo, or whether it was of Naureen Zaim or even whether it was Perfect 10's photo. They issued takedowns that listed hundreds of URLs on hundreds of sites, clearly operating in mass. -- But their special trick was to issue takedowns on entire sites. My guess is if they found 2-3 infringing URLs on one site, they assumed the entire site's purpose was to infringe. I spot-checked this, and was not impressed, I thought I was seeing a lot of largely innocent sites that they were trying to wipe out for vain reasons. IMO, the DMCA law never intended whole-site takedowns.

That is exactly the intent of this new law.

As with Perfect10, copyright owners will "nuke first, ask questions later", wiping important sites off the map. The other thing the law seems to remove is the "counter-DMCA" ability to undo the damage (though it never REALLY un-did the damage; your reputation with your ISP was still strained by it.)

What it will NOT do is stop abuse. Serious abusers register thousands of throwaway domains - it only costs like 7 cents to get a throwaway .CN domain, and you can even go without domains and use addresses like 216.92.131.257. Because of this, abuse-fighting is always a game of "whack-a-mole" unless you really know what you're doing.

Thats close,

Copy rights were originally planned to last for 75 years or the life of the rights holder, later the copyright and trademark office dropped the "life of the holder" stipulation. The only way a holder can get the full 75 years is to file his/her "extension applications" to continue the protection. Most of the steam locomotive and railroading companies copyrights expired long before thier 75 years. This was because the holders saw no advantage in filing extensions to protect technology that no one wanted anymore anyway.

Much of the written material, blueprints, manuals, etc.. that the majority of rail fans think is still enjoying copyright protection, in fact is not.

Patents were supposed to be protected for a period of 17-years, plus the 3-years it took, and still takes, to get the patent application completed and approved, so the process was setup for 20 years protection from the initial filing date.

I believe that patent protection will go from the current 20 years to something like 30 years in the near future. This is do to many considerations, but the slowing pace of technology in some areas, and the extreme change in others, world markets stealing patent data, the cost of high tech research and production and everything else are all causing a political push for that extension to happen. If it gets to a bill, consider it a done deal.

Loco112, your history of copyrights is out of whack.

The original duration of copyrights before 1978 was 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. However, the summary at this website says it best:

http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/duration.html



Feel free to also peruse the largely accurate Wikipedia article on the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_ ... ension_Act The Wikipedia article briefly mentions the argument that the bill's primary sponsor, the Disney Corporation, was interested exclusively in protecting the copyright on its star character, Mickey Mouse.

However germane to the operation of RyPN this topic may be, and however much I may agree with the topic title, the discussion has gone "off the rails". Take it elsewhere. There are a hundred forums more appropriate to this issue. Topic is now locked.