Click here to find out more! In wake of online protests, Germany refuses to sign ACTA anti-piracy treaty

Some big news this morning from the front lines of the debate over how to regulate online piracy. Germany, which had said it would follow along with the rest of the European Union in support of ACTA, (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), has decided not sign the treaty, according to an Armenian news website citing government sources.
Much like the response to SOPA in the United States, online activists in Europe have been able to generate vigorous pushback through petitions and blackouts of certain sites. And while the movement against ACTA began on the internet, protests are being held in 60 Germany cities tomorrow.
While 22 out of 27 members of the EU have signed on to ACTA, many are now changing their tack in response to the public outcry. “I signed ACTA out of civic carelessness, because I did not pay enough attention,” said the Slovenian ambassador to Japan, Helena Drnovsek Zorko, who had signed. “Quite simply, I did not clearly connect the agreement I had been instructed to sign with the agreement that, according to my own civic conviction, limits and withholds the freedom of engagement on the largest and most significant network in human history, and thus limits particularly the future of our children.”

If the feds can shut down Megaupload, why do we need SOPA?

For more than a year, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America have argued that existing laws were insufficient to deal with the problem of "rogue sites" hosted overseas. They've been pushing bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act as essential weapons in the fight.
But evidently, American law enforcement didn't get the memo that they were powerless against overseas file-sharing services. The day after the Internet's historic protest of SOPA and PIPA last week, the United States government unsealed an indictment against the people behind Megaupload, one of the largest sites on the Internet. Four senior Megaupload officials were arrested in New Zealand on Thursday, and officials seized millions of dollars in assets.
As we reported Thursday, the FBI worked with authorities from New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, the UK, and the Phillipines to catch the defendants and seize their assets. Law enforcement officials froze accounts at banks based in Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the Phillipines, and Germany. The feds also seized numerous servers, cars, pieces of artwork, televisions, and other assets. The list of seized assets in the indictment was six pages long.
So if the US government already has the power to arrest people and seize assets in places as far away as Germany, New Zealand, and the Philippines, are the new enforcement powers sought by content companies even necessary? We posed that question to two people on opposite sides of the SOPA debate. Cara Duckworth is a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America. And Julian Sanchez is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and an occasional contributor to Ars Technica.

Beyond domain seizures

Duckworth told Ars that "under the 2008 PRO IP law, the federal government has the authority to shut down US-registered sites that are overwhelmingly dedicated to piracy—sites with a .com or .org domain. So Megaupload.com falls within US jurisdiction." She argued that new laws are needed to deal with sites at domain names not under US control, such as .hk or .ru.
But Sanchez argued that the seizure of the megaupload.com domain was a fairly minor part of the government's offensive against Megaupload. "If you're really interested in shutting down an illegal enterprise that is located overseas, shutting down one domain or another is a lot less effective than getting your hands on the people and subjecting them to penalties or jail," he said.
By itself, seizing megaupload.com would have simply caused the site to move to megaupload.tv or megaupload.ru, he said. It was the government's ability to lock up Kim Dotcom and his lieutenants, and to take their servers and freeze their bank accounts, that took the site down for good.
We pressed Duckworth on this point, and she suggested that the Megaupload operation may not work as a good model for counter-piracy operations in general. "Law enforcement cooperation for US criminal investigations may not go as far in certain countries such as Russia and China where they have lax copyright laws and a huge piracy problem," she said. In addition, countries like Russia will also not extradite their citizens.
It's true that many countries won't help the US with such investigations (note that the countries involved in investigating Megaupload are all traditional US allies), but sticking your rogue site in such a country comes with its own set of problems. Sanchez pointed out that Megaupload's business model depends on hosting large volumes of user-submitted material without scrutinizing their contents. That business model is unlikely to work well in repressive regimes. For example, he said, it's true that the Iranian government would be unlikely to help the FBI take down an Iranian version of Megaupload. However, he said, "I hear there was quite a lot of pornography on Megaupload."
A similar point applies to China. "If you try to create Megaupload in China, SOPA would be the least of your worries," Sanchez said. China requires websites based inside its Great Firewall to comply with a comprehensive censorship regime. It would be difficult to comply with those rules while maintaining Megaupload's anything-goes philosophy to file hosting.
For rogue site operators, the trick is to find a country with great Internet infrastructure, weak IP enforcement, and little censorship. But finding all three is tricky, as shown by the fact that Megaupload actually leased hundreds of servers within the US to provide a good experience to US residents despite the obvious risks this posed.

Diplomatic pressure

Moreover, while relations between the US and countries like China and Russia can be frosty, Sanchez said it's not true that the US government has no leverage there. For example, in 2007, the Russian government shut down AllOfMP3, a notorious source of unauthorized copies of major-label music.
Sanchez pointed out that the Chinese government does conduct periodic crackdowns on traditional, physical piracy, often under pressure from the US. Shutting down a website like Megaupload would be a much easier job than clearing Chinese markets of merchants hawking bootleg DVDs.
"This is a familiar story," he told Ars. "The whole international intellectual property system has basically been operating on treaties, on diplomatic pressure. This is how we've been working internationally to have a stable IP system for decades. So I don't know why that suddenly doesn't work" for rogue sites.
Disclosure: I'm an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, an unpaid position.

Photograph by Erwyn van der Meer

 

Internet wins: SOPA and PIPA both shelved

Just hours after Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) announced he was delaying a vote on the PROTECT IP Act, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act, followed suit and announced he would be delaying consideration of the companion legislation.
“I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy," Smith said. "It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products."
"The Committee will continue work with both copyright owners and Internet companies to develop proposals that combat online piracy and protect America’s intellectual property," Smith continued. "We welcome input from all organizations and individuals who have an honest difference of opinion about how best to address this widespread problem." (He may want to check out our thoughts on the matter.)
Even former Senator Chris Dodd, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, seemed to concede defeat. "With today’s announcement, we hope the dynamics of the conversation can change and become a sincere discussion about how best to protect the millions of American jobs affected by the theft of American intellectual property," he said in a statement. "It is incumbent that they now sincerely work with all of us to achieve a meaningful solution to this critically important goal."
The ideas present in both SOPA and PIPA may return, but both bills in their present form—and with their present names—are probably done for good.
A key figure in the fight against SOPA was Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). Issa had planned to use his perch as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to highlight the flaws of SOPA's DNS blocking provisions. He was planning to hold a hearing featuring the testimony of actual technical experts, something that had been mysteriously missing from Smith's hearings on the bill. Wednesday's Internet protests were originally scheduled to coincide with the hearings. But Issa scrapped his hearing after receiving assurances that the DNS provisions would be dropped from SOPA. The broader protest went forward anyway.
"Supporters of the Internet deserve credit for pressing advocates of SOPA and PIPA to back away from an effort to ram through controversial legislation," Issa said in a Friday statement. "Over the last two months, the intense popular effort to stop SOPA and PIPA has defeated an effort that once looked unstoppable."
"Postponing the Senate vote on PIPA removes the imminent threat to the Internet, but it's not over yet," Issa continued. "Copyright infringement remains a serious problem and any solution must be targeted, effective, and consistent with how the Internet works."
arstechnica

Twitter Reacts to SOPA’s Burial

The Internet rejoiced Friday after Rep. Lamar Smith (R.-Texas) said that he would indefinitely pull the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) from consideration “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”
Smith’s announcement came two days after a web-wide blackout protest in which some of the Internet’s most popular and prominent websites censored content, calling attention to SOPA’s potentially devastating effect on Internet freedom and creativity
Twitter users declared victory after Smith’s retreat on Friday, crediting the mass action by activists and ordinary web users alike for the change in course. While similar legislation will undoubtedly set off future rounds of contentious debate in Congress and among the public, Friday was nonetheless a moment of optimism for SOPA’s opponents on Twitter.


“SOPA Is Dead” trended nationally on the network. Politicians, digital advocates, artists, celebrities and popular parody accounts joined the celebration. Many simply expressed joy, but others emphasized the need for sustained vigilance and continued pressure on elected officials.
It was the culmination of an extended public battle over SOPA since the bill was introduced in October. GoDaddy felt the wrath of Internet users in December when it was included on a Congressional list of official SOPA supporters; the company soon reversed its position after vociferous backlash.
Support for the bill quickly eroded over the past week, and the growing momentum was regarded as a powerful example of the web’s populist reach. Then Smith’s significant backtrack on Friday signaled SOPA’s ultimate demise — at least for the foreseeable future.
What do you think about the death of SOPA as we knew it? What were your favorite tweets from Friday? Let us know in the comments.

Could SOPA Rise From the Dead?

The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act may have been the two most hated bills in recent legislative history and now they’re dead. Or are they?
Congressman Lamar Smith “postponed consideration” of SOPA after the Senate postponed the similar PIPA legalization. Does a postponement mean death? Is tabling a bill the same as sealing it in a mahogany box and burying it six feet underground?
“I think that it is dead,” said SUNY Geneseo Political Science Dept. Professor and Chair Jeffrey Koch, Ph.D. But then he added, “It’s dead for the rest of the year. Especially in an election year; anything that generates this level of controversy.”
To understand the legislative process, Koch explained, one needs to know that most bills fail. They’re assigned to committees and then they die a rather quiet death. In fact, most legislators who introduce bills already know this, though Koch thinks its unlikely the authors of SOPA and PIPA thought their bills would die right away.
So the bills are dead and unlikely to return in 2012. What makes Koch think they could rise from their murky graves in 2013 or beyond?
“There are bills that do come back,” he said. In fact, “Many bills that do become laws were introduced in many previous Congresses.” He cites health care as an example: Congress has been wrangling over health care legislation for almost a century. And as we all know, a health care bill did finally pass both chambers; President Obama signed it into law in 2010.
It’s simply not unusual for bills on certain issues to get “introduced again and again and again over time,” Koch told Mashable.
Similarly on the topic of these SOPA and PIPA bills, he said it’s unlikely that they’re dead for all time. The reality is that while most people enjoy the openness and ubiquity of the Internet, piracy is real, is costing people money — and this means, Koch said, “I can’t imagine that it’s going to go away so easily.”
Still, legislating a global entity like the Internet is no simple task. Piracy can start far outside U.S. jurisdiction and, Koch told us, “U.S. law can only reach so far.”
Professor Koch offered no opinion on the contents of the bills — but agreed that they were hard to read, and needed a simplified version.
“They’re written in a very technical legalese,” he said. “That has been the case for quite a while. Most bills these days are that way. Particularly if they do deal with something that is a technical issue, and there are a lot more bills like this as society has become more technical and the issues become more technically complex.”
To review, then: SOPA and PIPA are dead, but only in the way a zombie is dead.
They or something like them will rise up again in 12 months. The new bills may even start dragging themselves around the halls of congress right after the November’s presidential election. Future versions will likely try to address the same persistent issue of piracy, and they will be just as hard to read and understand as today’s “dead” versions of SOPA and PIPA.
 by Lance Ulanoff Mashable

Senator Reid: PIPA Vote Postponed

The anti-SOPA Day of Protest ripples continue to spread. On Friday morning, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) put the brakes on a PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) cloture vote. The vote was originally scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 24.
“In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT IP Act,” said Reid in a statement Friday morning.
In a cloture vote, the Senate decides whether or not to end debate on a bill and bring it forward for a final up-or-down vote. For such a vote to be successful, three-fifths of the Senate (or 60 Senators) must vote in the positive.
Sen. Reid previously said that “we need to work on this and we’re going to — I will hope we can have a manager’s amendment when we get back here in a week or 10 days and move forward on this. It’s important that we try to do this on a fair basis and I’m going to do everything I can to get that done” during a Jan. 15 interview on NBC’s Meet the Press.
On Wednesday, major websites such as Wikipedia and Reddit went dark to protest PIPA and its sister bill in the House of Representatives, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Facebook and Google, which came out against SOPA and PIPA in a public letter written late last year, provided users with information about the bills and contact information for elected officials. Google also launched an online petition, which gathered over 7 million signatures by Thursday morning.
SOPA and PIPA made it into the CNN-Southern Republican presidential debate Thursday night, with each candidate denouncing the bills to some extent.

Supporters of the two bills consider PIPA and SOPA necessary new tools in the fight against online piracy and copyright infringement. Opponents claim they give excessive power to copyright holders and the federal government, and that they risk making the Internet slower and less secure while also stifling online freedom of speech and digital innovation.
Do you think it’s good that the Senate is taking more time to consider PIPA? Let us know in the comments below.
by Alex Fitzpatrick Mashable

SOPA Is Dead: Smith Pulls Bill

Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, said on Friday that he is pulling the bill “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”
“I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy,” Smith (R-Texas) said. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”
Smith also released the following statement on Friday:

“We need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products. “The problem of online piracy is too big to ignore. American intellectual property industries provide 19 million high-paying jobs and account for more than 60% of U.S. exports. The theft of America’s intellectual property costs the U.S. economy more than $100 billion annually and results in the loss of thousands of American jobs. Congress cannot stand by and do nothing while American innovators and job creators are under attack.”
“The online theft of American intellectual property is no different than the theft of products from a store. It is illegal and the law should be enforced both in the store and online.
“The Committee will continue work with copyright owners, Internet companies, financial institutions to develop proposals that combat online piracy and protect America’s intellectual property. We welcome input from all organizations and individuals who have an honest difference of opinion about how best to address this widespread problem. The Committee remains committed to finding a solution to the problem of online piracy that protects American intellectual property and innovation.”

The move comes after widespread protest on the Internet on Wednesday by Wikipedia, Reddit and others. The sites signaled their displeasure with the bill by going dark. That day, several Congressmen dropped their support for SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA. The latter bill has also been taken off the table for now.


“In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT IP Act,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in a statement Friday morning.
Smith’s stance comes just two days after he told The Wall Street Journal that he didn’t plan to back down on SOPA, telling the newspaper he expected to “move forward” with the bill in February.
by Todd Wasserman Mashable