The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has prefaced a renewed interest in site-blocking legislation to combat piracy. Will things be different this time? When the internet industry killed the antipiracy bills SOPA and PIPA in January 2012, I was a newbie blogger but guessed at the time that those parties had totally blown their wad on that campaign. First, there was ...
Rumors have come to my attention—okay it was splashed all over Twitter—that an event was held yesterday called The Untold Story of SOPA/PIPA. “Defeating SOPA/PIPA didn’t happen overnight,” says the EFF’s promotional page for the event. “Advocacy groups like Public Knowledge fought long and hard for years to raise the alarms about these censorship efforts.” Where does one begin? By ...
photo by tomasmikula Because today is the five-year anniversary of “Blackout Day,” the day millions of users were suckered into doing the internet industry’s bidding for no good reason, the always-relevant BuzzFeed offers us a missive published by the organization ReCreate Coalition called “12 Things You Can Do Because Congress Protected Internet Freedoms,” by which they mean backed off the passage of ...
The recording industry last week filed suit against a new music platform called Aurous. With a Spotify-like interface, the app is designed to search, retrieve, and play music files, whether they’re stored on legal platforms or on BitTorrent sites around the world. And according to early reports, the primary function is the sourcing of pirated media on BitTorrent sites, leading ...
At last count, the EFF has over 40 attorneys on staff* and lord only knows how many communications minions. So, if this organization is going to maintain its loose relationship with reality, they might at least take a meeting and invent some fresh exaggerations. But no. SOPA is just too provocative a buzzword to let go. And as part of ...
