Here we go again..... Senators Leahy & Tillis To Team Up To Suggest Destroying The Internet For Hollywood’s Sake https://www.techdirt.com/2022/03/21/senators-leahy-tillis-to-team-up-to-suggest-destroying-the-internet-for-hollywoods-sake/
I guess ten years is long enough that Senator Pat Leahy thought everyone had forgotten about the SOPA/PIPA disaster that he was a leading reason for. Senator Leahy is on his way out of the Senate, and apparently has at least one last gift in store for Hollywood lobbyists (which includes his daughter) who make sure that Leahy gets a role in every Batman film. The latest from Leahy (and Senator Tom Tillis, who seems to clearly want to take over Leahy’s role as Hollywood’s favorite senator), is to introduce a bill to effectively require filters on every website. The bill, going by the Orwellian name “Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies Copyright Act of 2022” (shortened to the SMART Copyright Act of 2022) is extraordinarily problematic. But it’s also been expected for a while. Just last month, the Copyright Office held a giant roundtable on this topic — after being ordered to do so by the same tag team of Tillis and Leahy. As we pointed out both in our submission to the Copyright Office and further at the roundtable, “technical measures” (i.e., filters) have serious 1st Amendment implications that need serious consideration. But, rather than do anything to respond to these concerns (and lots of other concerns raised by participants at the roundtable), Leahy and Tillis rushed out this bill, which was clearly ready long before the roundtable even existed. Leahy and Tillis and the supporters of this bill like to claim that it’s just “clarifying” and improving on Section 512(i) of the DMCA, which mentions “standard technical measures,” but make no mistake, this is yet another attempt by Hollywood to control an internet they’ve always hated. < - > -- Iw mailing list [email protected] http://sticklist.org/mailman/listinfo/iw_sticklist.org
