Writing in the Huffington Post, Leslie Harris, the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology, accused Senator Chris Dodd of promoting Internet censorship through rogue website blocking. Harris wrote that Senator Dodd "...directly (and apparently favorably) compared the Internet filtering contemplated in two controversial U.S. anti-piracy bills to Chinese Internet censorship... It is hard to find a benign headline for his remarks. How about 'MPAA to Google: 'You did it for China; now do it for Hollywood''?"
This is a cheap shot at Senator Dodd, which is starting to become pretty common stuff from Google surrogates like the Center for Democracy and Technology. It appears designed to deflect attention away from the core issue in the rogue sites legislation -- the public is being endangered by bad actors on the Internet and U.S. companies are profiting from it.
No one knows this better than Google -- or rather, Google stockholders -- because the company just paid a $500,000,000 million forfeiture with the stockholders' money for promoting the sale of counterfeit drugs and controlled substances online. And more importantly -- signed a nonprosecution agreement
Harris argues from a faulty premise by conflating "censorship" with Senator Dodd's appeal to Google to do the right thing and block rogue sites in search results. If Google's $500,000,000 drug fine is evidence of anything, it is evidence that the company does not want to do the right thing unless it is threatened with criminal prosecution.
A demonstration of Google's ability to block rogue sites from search results was when it inadvertently blocked the Pirate Bay from search. Rather than acknowledge that the Pirate Bay has been criminally convicted of copyright infringement and that a responsible U.S. company should not help bad actors, Google assured users that the Pirate Bay would be right back in search as soon as possible.
All Senator Dodd was asking was that Google do to the Pirate Bay intentionally that which it had already done inadvertently.
But if a company will promote the sale of drugs until they are threatened with criminal prosecution, why would you think that same company wouldn't contract willful blindness for stealing movies, too? This has nothing to do with "China." This has to do with cold hard cash, and by the looks of things, a lot of it. Which is no doubt why if you search for "buy oxycontin online no prescription" in Google right now, you will get the helpful Auto-complete for "buy oxycontin online no prescription cheap."
Google apparently wants to make rogue sites a fight between Silicon Valley and "Hollywood" (whoever that is), not a frank discussion of its own cavalier attitude about the public health as enunciated by Chairman Lamar Smith at the recent SOPA hearing. Hence the cheap shots.
It's no surprise that this kind of fallacious rhetoric comes from the CDT, however. The CDT recently got a $500,000 payment from Google as part of the Google Buzz settlement--the more remarkable because CDT was referred to in court papers as a group that lobbies or consults for Google to which the court did not note an objection. There are many connections -- all of which could be cleared up one way or another if CDT disclosed its donors.
This is not the first time we have heard this "censorship" spin from CDT. In the last Congress, a group of "humanitarians" signed a letter that essentially told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee if they voted for COICA they would undermine America's bona fides as a bastion of free expression.
You see, if rogue sites legislation was passed, Robert Mugabe would no longer look to the U.S. Congress for guidance before he hanged the insurgents, Al Zawahiri would not seek inspiration from the crusaders, and the Haquanni network would not check in with the DOJ before doing its evil deeds. At least according to the humanitarians.
Although, in a strange coincidence, large chunks of the humanitarian letter were taken nearly word for word from a talking points memo written by -- CDT.
This "censorship" line is singularly unpersuasive. But don't believe me, believe Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Secretary Clinton recently wrote in an Oct. 25th letter:
The protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights on the Internet is critical for the United States, for its creators and inventors, and for the jobs it promotes and the economic promise it provides. There is no contradiction between intellectual property rights protection and enforcement and ensuring freedom of expression on the Internet.... The rule of law is essential to both Internet freedom and protection of intellectual property rights, which are both firmly embedded in U.S. law and policy.
And that is exactly the point.
When Google's stock price sank after it announced the $500,000,000 drug forfeiture, one commentator noted that investors may be losing confidence in whether Google can support the legality of its revenues -- and for good reason. Cheap shots won't change the facts. A half billion here and a half billion there and pretty soon that's a lot of money. Where there's smoke, there's fire and it smells like a fire in the house of Google.
Mark Lemley, David S. Levine and David G. Post: Don't Break the Internet
As Sundialsvc4 said, Google is an INDEX.That means that they take what is already on the internet and make it searchable.Let me ask, do you know that under the SOPA bill, Google&Facebook could be wiped off the internet for hosting a link to a Facebook page? How you ask? Well, let's say that this particular Facebook page has a video of the user's daughter in their family room. In a two second portion of the video, the camera shows a TV which is running a two second clip of Harry Potter.If the bill passes, this small infringement allows our government to destroy the largest social networking site on the internet.I don't know your political views, but I do know that this loss of a website means the loss of over 3000 jobs.
Ultimately I feel like you have NO_IDEA what you're talking about.You were probably given a bit of cash under the table by some lobbying entity to write an article full of propaganda.
Google's stated purpose is to =index= what is =already= =there.= It is one of the most popular indexes but by no means the only one.
Forty years ago, the "index de jour" was the AT&T Yellow Pages. Are you saying that AT&T, Inc. should be legally liable to prosecution if you discover that your spouse used the yellow-pages to find "an evening's entertainment?"
Would you have said that AT&T would be corporately responsible for having included a listing, on page 437 of their Pittsburgh edition, for a body-shop business that was actually stealing cars?
No ... but you might advance that legal theory if you wanted to control what could be included in the Yellow Pages and what could not.
The entire premise of your comments here, artfully woven throughout the text so as to beg it all to be "obviously the case," is that a company assumes legal responsibility for what it includes in a public (and largely machine-generated) index by virtue of including it. If that didn't apply to AT&T fifty years ago, it doesn't apply to Google today.
That is censorship. Other examples of false claims:
1. Warner Bros. admitted that it removed files from Hotfile without owning the copyrights. (Warner Bros. vs Hotfile.com)
2. UMG has the ability to takedown videos even if none of its content is actually owned by them. (Megaupload vs. UMG)
3. UMG sued a man for selling personally owned CD's claiming the CD's remain the property of UMG, FOREVER; stating that any CD that a person owns is NOT personal property. They even claimed that any person who THROWS A CD AWAY is committing "illegal distribution". (UMG vs. Augusto)
According to a report by USC and UC Berkeley, written in 2005:
1. 57% of notices sent to Google to demand removal of links in the index were sent by businesses targeting apparent competitors with 41% of all Google notice targets can be classed as competitors of the complainants.
2. 21% of the DMCA notices sent to Google target hobbyists, critics, and educational users.
3. 30% of notices demanded takedown for claims that presented an obvious question for a court (a clear fair use argument, complaints about uncopyrightable material.
SOPA and PROTECT IP are about controlling public interests, subverting civil liberties and stifling competition. Not piracy.
http://m.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/12/pirates-of-youtube-cory-doctorow?cat=technology&type=article
A company called FedFlix takes/buys public domain government made and produced media and makes it available on the Internet. Large media corporations are constantly sending out take down demand notices to youtube to have that media removed, claiming that they own the rights. Get that? Large media corporations taking our media, media owned by the people, and demanding that you can't watch it unless you pay them.
Let's start by adding significant context to your article. Chris Dodd is no longer a Senator. He is the head of the Motion Picture Association of America. What makes the matter even more intriguing is that this former Senator went on record several times to say that after leaving office, he would not become a lobbyist. What happens after leaving office? He becomes the head of the MPAA. The same MPAA which is LOBBYING Congress to censor the internet via the SOPA act and the Protect IP act which would allow the US Government to control what content the public has access to when surfing online(ie- Syria, China, Iran etc.)
Additionally, the two writers of the SOPA bill were former Congressional staffers that now have accepted cushy jobs for the main lobbyists of this bill (Allison Halatae now works for the National Music Publishers’ Association; Lauren Pastarnack now works for the Motion Pictures Association of America). Rather convenient don't you think? Write a bill and then work for its main proponent.
Controlling what the general public has access to is a violation of civil liberties, regardless of who does it. Google was in the wrong for doing it and Mr. Dodd is wrong for requesting it. Two wrongs do not make a right.
2. Perhaps you should look in your own backyard as it is largely American TV shows that are uploaded onto pirate sites by your citizens within minutes of the original broadcast finishing in the U.S.
3. Google had a mandate from the Chinese Government to act in that manner and block sites - also they had a legitimate business reason to do so - 1 Billion customers. Just because the U.S doesn't like the way a country acts doesn't make it wrong.
3. Google can argue against any Bill that will inherently drive up their operating costs and reduce their influence - they are a privately owned company (and since your governmental officials are all backed by various groups and companies I think its a case of pot calling kettle black anyway)
7. Why do you think the average person engages in copyright infringement through piracy in the first place? Because they logically refuse to pay the outdated pricing models upheld by the industry. When the MPAA members start charging realistic costs for digital items then consumers in general will have less reason to download illegal material. Will it stop it completely, undoubtedly not, but those who do it on a mass scale would find a way even if you blocked Pirate Bay.
As for the Google Buzz settlement Castle's post cites as “remarkable,” other recipients included the ACLU, the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Brookings Institution, and the YMCA of Greater Long Beach. All would be quite surprised to hear this makes them some kind of surrogate for Google. For an article that preaches that “[c]heap shots won’t change the facts,” Castle sure throws around a lot of non-factual innuendo.
Full disclosure: this comment was posted by Brock N Meeks, CDT's Director of Communications.
Because of this major flaw, hundreds of thousands of Americans who rely on safe, affordable prescription medications from licensed, legitimate Canadian and other international pharmacies would lose their access to these pharmacies. Americans, especially seniors on fixed incomes and those without insurance, can't afford the exorbitant costs of prescription drugs in the U.S. Yet they can't do without the medications they need to survive. Safe and affordable drug importation is a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of struggling Americans.
RxRights is a national coalition of individuals and organizations dedicated to promoting and protecting American consumer access to sources of safe, affordable prescription drugs. The Coalition is asking consumers to take action now by sending letters to Capitol Hill and the White House encouraging them to oppose SOPA. For more information or to voice your concern, visit www.RxRights.org.
So we have laws where the only people that can possibly trigger any real "protective" actions are the MPAA/RIAA types and large media corporations.
Now, which pirates will be "stopped" (assuming a law can stop this in the first place?) The ones that are directly affecting the bottom line of large media corporations ... the small independent artists will be left high and dry, never able to trigger any kind of legal anti-piracy actions, and will be forced to sell out their IP rights to the big media corporations for pennies on the dollar.
These laws make it so that your either a big media corporation that can have anyone pulled from the Internet with nothing more than an accusation, or an small independent that can't do anything about pirates (probably even harmed as collateral damage in the big media corporation "war against piracy") and left with the only choice of giving up their IP rights to the big corporations.
Nice little game, if you happen to be part of the 1%.
Why should we be for any laws that essentially make us all guilty until proven innocent, and there is no real consequences for making false accusations?
Yes, I go right to the cross-border drugs sales that you apparently thought was a justification for your restrictions on our freedom, because they make a better point. Make no mistake, what we're talking about here is restricting the freedom to shop around, because if this "filtering" *cough* internet censorship *cough* is allowed, where does it stop? You say cross-border drug shopping for the very same drugs I have prescribed for me here should be illegal? Why? So the USGov can protect corporate profits?
We're really done with that.
Now I googled you... you're an RIAA/MPAA lawyer, so this is really not your focus and I know it, but it's also true. I'm guessing that what the MPAA is trying to prevent, as nearly every country in the world has more available, faster, cheaper broadband and more than enough bandwidth to make streaming of video a reality, is for some country that has no obeisance to US copyright law to put their own streaming content servers on at a tenth the cost, and give us a choice.
Even though we offer our creations on legitimate online outlets (throughout the world) for the price of a cup of coffee we are competing against cyberlockers and streaming websites that steal OUR work and offer it up for FREE. Most of their income comes via ads . Pirates make money, ad services make money--those who made the content make nothing.
No matter how you slice it, we are competing against copies of our own work offered online, easily accessed for free.
Google would have no problem lobbying Congress to protect its trademarks and/or patents. Why is copyright not deserving the same consideration?
Those who create for a living deserve to be able to earn a living. It's ironic that we are the enemy when all we are doing is trying to protect our livelihoods. Even "Big" Hollywood exists because of worker bees.
The fact is legit businesses have moved online. It's no surprise that the black-market businesses have too. Time for the laws to catch up.
Legitimate businesses, creating their own legitimate media content have already been taken down by the MPAA/RIAA and their hired goons ... Revision 3 for instance were put under a DDOS attack by a company MPAA/RIAA hired to attack sites that used bittorrent to distribute large files (because it thinks that anyone distributing large files by bittorrent must be considered guilty until proven innocent, so attacking them is their "right".) So Revision 3 suffered for months under a DDOS until they finally tracked down the culprit, and then since the cost of going after the MPAA/RIAA would have put them out of business they had to simply "prove they were innocent" and move on.
The RIAA takes down thousands of instance of legitimate content from youtube daily using a automated detection and take down request generator .. they don't care that they make mistakes and demand take down for content they don't own, or that some content clearly falls under the fair use rules .. the just don't want competition and will use all the powers they have to rightly, or unfairly limit that competition.
Do you really think that if these laws are passed that you will be able to report a pirate site and the government will remove the DNS records based on the word of an independent artist (hell, even an association of independent artists would likely strike out on an attempt of this sort.) The only people who will have any power to have the DOJ act on these kinds of requests are mega rich associations that represent the mega rich CEOs of mega rich media firms .. matter of fact these "mega richies" have a goal to become the only distribution channel for online content, and will probably encourage piracy of small independents to force them to sell their rights (at pennies, or less, on the dollar) to the mega rich media firms.
This bill does far more than you imply with your narrow, ignorant view of its intent. The most glaring example is that SOPA will result in the removal of the fair use provision of DMCA. The best part is how fast "pirates" will be able to either exploit (via DNS vulnerability created by SOPA) or circumnavigate this nonsense (via an alternate top level domain or use of TOR).
SOPA is a sham of a mockery and a mockery of a sham.
We all know politicians don't give a piffle about protecting copyright for movies and video. They want to be able to block YouTube videos of their glaring gaffes and foibles on copyright grounds so the greatest tool against them is removed. This is just a convenient excuse.
Sure they get boocoos of money from the news/media/movie/cable conglomerates they're in bed with, but that's not what this is about. This entire section of the bill is a little more than a ruse to get rid of the Fair Use clause.