MetaFilter posts tagged with coica

Scientists boycott Elsevier

jeffburdges — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:55:55 -0800

The Cost of Knowledge lets scientists register their support for a boycott of all Elsevier journals for their support of SOPA, PIPA (tag) and the Research Works Act (previously, WP, MLA, UK, Oz, etc.). It appears the boycott was inspired by Field's medalist Tim Gowers' recent comments describing his personal boycott of Elsevier journals. Elsevier has always been amongst the most hated academic publishers, largely due to their incredibly high prices (pdf).

"Because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys."

jeffburdges — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 04:47:41 -0800

Cory Doctorow's 28C3 talk The Coming War on General Purpose Computation (abstract, transcript) warns that "the coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race." Doctorow treats legislators relatively sympathetically asserting that "information technology confounds [their] heuristics" about whether regulation has unconscionable side effects, comparing regulating computation or networking with regulating the nature of wheels. A few choice quotes : [18m08] "an appliance is not a stripped-down computer, it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box" [19m30] "attempts to make a network that can't be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments." .. "In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo, citing research that SOPA would probably work, because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argued that these measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in America, too!" [20m05] "copyright is just not important to pretty much everyone" [22m50] "The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial, when compared to the calls for action that our new computer-embroidered reality will create." [24m55] "there will be judges in the American South and Mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their jurisdiction printing out sex toys." [25m29] "Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really really important to make sure that computers can't execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat their lunch." [26m28] "as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship" I hear Doctorow's book Little Brother contains the unabridged version. Ironically, Belarus criminalized using foreign websites and Spain passed SOPA-like legislation a couple days after his talk. In the same vein, The Un-Internet by Dave Weiner at Scripting News discusses about tech companies trying to take control away from users, taking Apple to task for leading a new "push to control users" through their App Store. "Once [Apple] took the power to decide what software could be distributed on their platform, it was inevitable that speech would be restricted too." Doctorow similarly criticizes the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) which restricts newer PCs to only running signed operating systems, noting that "repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from OSes unless they have covert surveillance operations." ¹ And Thom Holwerda concludes that Richard Stallman Was Right All Along. ¹ LinuxBIOS/Coreboot coauthor Ronald Minnich says "[the UEFI authors] make no secret of the fact that a 'core value' of EFI is the preservation of intellectual property related to chipset programming and internal architecture." (see also lwn.net and linuxfoundation.org)

On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

jeffburdges — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:00:39 -0800

American Censorship Day is an internet protest against the oft-renamed Stop Online Piracy Act. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is increasingly being viewed, not merely as copyright lawyers buying themselves a meal ticket, but as an internet border around the U.S. or a political blacklist tool. (previously) At least, it's less market unfriendly than the internet kill switch, which Senator Lieberman has championed ever since the Arab Spring. There are two interesting organizations I'd never heard of among the backers of American Censorship Day, the Participatory Politics Foundation, who run OpenCongress, and Fight For The Future, who added a little levity with Free Bieber.

Nomen est Omen

jeffburdges — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:00:19 -0800

The U.S. House of Representatives has drafted their version of Senator Leahy's Protect IP Act, renaming the bill the E-Parasites Act. Among other changes discussed previously, the bill now makes internet service providers and websites liable for activities of their users that infringe upon copyrights, effectively overturning parts of the 13-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

COICA Round Two

jeffburdges — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 23:27:04 -0800

Senator Leahy's Protect IP Act would require that U.S. ISPs impose an 'internet death penalty' upon domain after merely a preliminary injunction from a U.S. court that suspects the site of being 'dedicated to infringing activities', even if the domain's owner had never been notified and was not subject to U.S. jurisdiction. There is concern that the legislation would fragment the DNS system and facilitate DNS spoofing by obstructing DNSSEC (pdf). There is also an open letter opposing the bill signed by 108 Law Professors who study intellectual property law. Leahy's previous attempt called COICA died in committee in 2010.

COICA

hippybear — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 14:32:07 -0800

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) has started to be fast-tracked through the legislative process. This bill would create two blacklists (without due process) of domains which ISPs would be forced to block, based on alleged copyright infringement. The RIAA claims that such websites put Americans at risk (but doesn't state exactly what the risk is). Wired Magazine calls it the "Holy Grail of intellectual-property enforcement." The EFF has started an online petition against it and is encouraging internet engineers to speak out against it. Longer analysis from American University's Washington College Of Law. TechDirt examines historic tech which would have been banned under similar legislation had it existed.