I have no issue with prosecuting theft, and as you state, there are plenty of laws on the books, and mechanisms in place to be able to handle it.
I disagree on your statement about censorship. If someone posts a fair use clip on a website parodying the MPAA or the RIAA for instance, all they need to do is file a complaint to paypal/CC processors and that site's ability to collect donations or conduct business online will be shut down until they can get a court order to have it turned back on, and if they find a sympathetic ear at the federal level the DNS for that site can be shut down. All without due process of actually finding the party guilty or any violation other than offending someone with on-staff lawyers willing to file the paperwork. There were plenty of cases on youtube where content creators had their content taken down because it was copyrighted (by them). While inconvenient there were also other places you could place your content in the mean time. But if they can reach into your own hosting and have payment processing and even DNS shut off indefinitely you are talking about giving someone the ability to put your business on financial hold without any real accountability. And you can potentially do it to people and corporations over which you have no legal right to due so. US IP laws are not global IP laws, yet it would be possible for someone to shutdown DNS to a non-US site operating legally within their own nation. If you think this is a good thing, turn it around, how would you like foreign IP laws to now apply to your corporation and intellectual property (say those of Sweden). And in the mean time all someone has to do is start posting IP addresses for thepiratebay.org and others to circumvent the DNS block and who have they really stopped? Payment processing? The online poker sites had circumvented that for years. With the rise of bitcoin there will be even less entry to barrier for those that want to operate on the grey/black market of IP. In my opinion all it really does is allow less than scrupulous companies to bully dissenting/alternative viewpoint companies and individuals with even less due process than before. On 11/17/11 4:12 PM, Butch Evans wrote: > On Wed, 2011-11-16 at 21:08 -0800, John Thomas wrote: >> What is everyone's take on this? >> http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2011/11/sopa-internet-piracy-bill-criticized-as-internet-censorship/ > My take is that piracy should be punishable by jail time. We have laws > against such things already. The technology is there to detect the IP > of the offending party, there are laws in place that permit law > enforcement to request end user information from ISPs and there is no > need for yet another law to do what is already in place. I think that > if enough people go to jail for theft, it will grow MUCH less common. > As for the censorship idea...I think people need to get a life. Theft > is illegal and those crying censorship should focus on THAT. > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
