COICA still alive

November 15, 2010 1:11 PM

The "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act" (COICA) is back on the Judiciary Committee's schedule. This bill would create two blacklists (without due process) of domains which ISPs (in the USofA) would be forced to block, based on alleged copyright infringement.

When last we left it, COICA was delayed until after the midterm elections.

Now it's on for this Thursday's Executive Business Meeting of the full Senate Judiciary Committee.

Supported by
Motion Picture Association of America
US Chamber of Commerce
Screen Actors Guild
Viacom
International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States

Opposed by
Center for Democracy & Technology
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Distributed Computing Industry Association --via

It'll be held in Dirksen 226 @ 10:00 A.M. Eastern and audio might be available at captiolhearings.org (operated by C-SPAN and requires a RealMedia player) or at the WEBCAST link on the meeting notice page.

posted by morganw (41 comments total)

I'm sure we can count on Congress to do the right thing.
posted by entropicamericana at 1:16 PM on November 15, 2010

What exactly would be to stop just about everyone from jumping to whatever proxy service bypasses this stupidity?
posted by stenseng at 1:17 PM on November 15, 2010

I wrote about it when it was delayed. It seems to me that they're just going to drive the creation of a more decentralized DNS/request system. If it's solid enough for a government to grasp, it's too solid.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:25 PM on November 15, 2010

A bunch of law professors have already argued that it's unconstitutional on both First and Fifth Amendment grounds. It's hard to see how they might be wrong.
posted by valkyryn at 1:25 PM on November 15, 2010

At a glance their name looks too much like CLOACA, which would make more sense, being the thing that dicks hide behind, and shit comes out of.

And I see that someone in the other thread already noticed the same thing.
posted by quin at 1:38 PM on November 15, 2010 [3 favorites]

Is this where I would report Facebook, YouTube, and Bing?

...oh.
posted by ardgedee at 1:40 PM on November 15, 2010

And, thus, when the motion picture industry inevitably goes the way of Radio, we will have a bunch of laws in place that will block ISPs for whatever reason the government wants.
posted by Joey Michaels at 1:41 PM on November 15, 2010 [6 favorites]

For a country supposedly built on liberty and freedom, it always amazes me how willingly we slip the shackles on as long as there's a halfway believable reason.
posted by crapmatic at 1:43 PM on November 15, 2010 [3 favorites]

For a country supposedly built on liberty and freedom, it always amazes me how willingly we slip the shackles on as long as there's a halfway believable reason.

As long as there's money and power at stake, someone will be offering the shackles to another for some measure of "safety" or "greater good."
posted by filthy light thief at 1:51 PM on November 15, 2010

argued that it's unconstitutional on both First and Fifth Amendment grounds

So is the DMCA if you don't allow it's exemptions on trafficking in circumvention technology for research and interoperability to function. Yet here we are. Before a case can make it to the Supreme Court, a whole lock of screwing up the Domain Name System is going to take place.

My senator on the Judiciary is a co-sponsor. I wrote to tell her she's wrongheaded and that this won't even work for her #4 contributor. Can I trade in my Feinstein for a Feingold?
posted by morganw at 1:55 PM on November 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

valkyryn: It can still cause a lot of harm before it gets stricken down, and that's if it does.
posted by JHarris at 1:58 PM on November 15, 2010

morganw: I can't imagine there are a lot of constituent letters being written in support of legislation like this. "Oh yes please, block me off from websites."

If this stuff got more air play there's no way it'd pass. Of course, big media is the greatest supporter of this legislation.
posted by JHarris at 2:17 PM on November 15, 2010

DemandProgress.org has a nice FAQ about the bill, as well as a petition to sign and donation options. It's run by none other than Aaron Swartz.
posted by yaymukund at 2:27 PM on November 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

"On Thursday, President Obama gave a speech to the United Nations that (not surprisingly) covered a lot of ground. But the bit that caught my eye concerned his commitment to a free and open internet without censorship"

From Techdirt
posted by mmrtnt at 2:30 PM on November 15, 2010

The thought struck me that a tiered internet would simply be a commercial version of this.
posted by Xoebe at 2:31 PM on November 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

It's unfortunate that the TSA debacle is going on right now, because this too is very important.

Lots of bad things could come out of this. Let's say the next content sharing startup gets labeled as "dedicated to infringing activity" (say if 10% of their content is suspect) and large corps like Google to mess around with grey area business models and get away with it because it's only say 0.5% of their activity.

And you can BET there will be multiple DNS roots, this time totally out of our control and in wide use.

And you can forget about alternative app stores like Cydia.

I'd urge anyone who plans to ever publish any sort of content on the Internet to write or call their Senator directly. I published a sample letter on our company blog.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:40 PM on November 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

By the way, everyone, now's not a bad time to consider donating to CDT or EFF... you know... for the holidays.
posted by Inkoate at 2:59 PM on November 15, 2010

write or call their Senator directly.

My Senator is Dan Inouye. Nice guy, but he's still trying to figure out how to work the damn remote to the color tv. Not the best ally in this particular battle.
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:01 PM on November 15, 2010

My Senator is Dan Inouye. Nice guy, but he's still trying to figure out how to work the damn remote to the color tv. Not the best ally in this particular battle.

Actually, this matters relatively little. You're not actually trying to convince Senator Inouye that COICA is bad policy (although it is), you're trying to convince his staff that do handle tech/IP policy (and who probably have a decent grasp of the background of Internet and intellectual property law) that there will be a backlash back home if Senator Inouye votes the wrong way. You are trying to tell them that this is something constituents care about. Right now they're pretty sure that the content industry (who gives their boss money every six years at least) gives a shit. The only reason your Senator would vote against them is if he or she thinks that its either bad policy or that it might hurt them at the polls.
posted by Inkoate at 3:09 PM on November 15, 2010 [2 favorites]

Oh, believe me, I've already written to him about this (and Net Neutrality) and he and his staff leave me with the impression that they're kind of willfully ignorant about tech issues as they relate to first amendment issues.

Also, he just got re-elected and he's something like 104 years old, so I don't think he's focused on another term.
posted by Joey Michaels at 4:21 PM on November 15, 2010

I know I should just go read it but.....are they planning on doing this by domain name only, or will connections addressed directly to the IP associated with the domain (in your DNS server's most recent update) be blocked as well?
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:10 PM on November 15, 2010

I'll be happy to contribute to a bounty to get all of the Federal Government's IP addresses blacklisted by whatever means necessary. 8)
posted by MikeWarot at 6:21 PM on November 15, 2010 [4 favorites]

Public Knowledge has a good summary of the bill's negative consequences.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:46 PM on November 15, 2010

I've maintained a home web server on a .org domain since 1998, and I wonder every time I read something like this how long it will be until it's illegal, either directly or effectively, for me to maintain a (physical) server at home. The idea that we could get on the internet's equivalent of the no-fly list makes me think it's not going to be that much longer.
posted by immlass at 8:09 PM on November 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

Donated to DemandProgress, tomorrow I'll look over things and hopefully be able ot hit EFF too.
posted by paisley henosis at 8:10 PM on November 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

MikeWarot: I'll be happy to contribute to a bounty to get all of the Federal Government's IP addresses blacklisted by whatever means necessary. 8

I know what you mean, but honestly I think some kind of DDOS retaliation / 4chan thing would be the worst possible response to this; that will only *prove* to them that they need some stupid draconian shit like this.
posted by paisley henosis at 8:13 PM on November 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

Ok... so we sit and nit-pick them when they have anything that looks suspicious and harass them off the net.


Alternatively, we wire up our own mesh based net, with peering gateways to the original internet.
posted by MikeWarot at 8:32 PM on November 15, 2010

This seems connected with US efforts to enforce draconian copyright enforcements (eg ISPs disconnecting people on receipt of complaint) in the ACTA treaty negotiations.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:36 PM on November 15, 2010

I emailed both of my senators, both senators from the state I grew up in and 3 senators on the committee, who really *really* won't care. Oh well, worth a shot.
posted by paisley henosis at 9:42 PM on November 15, 2010

odinsdream: "Congress is going to do their best to make the US a technological wasteland"

FTFY
posted by symbioid at 10:43 PM on November 15, 2010

CONGRESS HAS NOTICED YOU ARE ATTEMPTING TO USE FREEDOM. DO YOU WANT HELP REDUCING THAT?
posted by DU at 4:58 AM on November 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

My bet is on thepiratebay.org being the first entry on that list.
posted by mr_silver at 9:13 AM on November 16, 2010

More like Combating Legitimate Online Action (and Counterfiting) Act
posted by Zalzidrax at 9:32 AM on November 16, 2010

"Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave o'er the land of the--"

"Nope."
posted by Sys Rq at 1:26 PM on November 16, 2010

Don't email senators. Write letters. Email is pretty much ignored. Actual letters on paper? One letter is the equivalent of like 3,000 emails in terms of impact. Because people don't write letters unless shit is really important.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:47 AM on November 17, 2010

Don't email senators. Write letters. Email is pretty much ignored. Actual letters on paper? One letter is the equivalent of like 3,000 emails in terms of impact. Because people don't write letters unless shit is really important.

Actually, this is the exact opposite of what I was told when I called my senator a couple of years ago about something.

I was told that phone calls are tallied, but generally are kept short and aren't regarded very highly.

I was told that physical mail has to pass through all manner of screening and security before it reaches the senator thanks to that little anthrax scare nearly a decade ago, and that most senators aren't keen on receiving mail from random people any longer.

I was told that email is the best way to communicate with the senator, that there was a staffer devoted to tallying emails and delivering a sampling of the best written ones on any position daily to the senator's desk... in EVERY SENATOR'S OFFICE.

Perhaps I was misinformed, but that's what the person I spoke to in both the local and DC office of my senator told me. (I called both because I wasn't sure I had not simply been given the brush-off by the local office.)
posted by hippybear at 12:06 PM on November 17, 2010

So the vote was 10am this morning, what were the results?
posted by paisley henosis at 1:06 PM on November 18, 2010

Pirate-slaying censorship bill gets unanimous support

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) sets up a system through which the US government can blacklist a pirate website from the Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid online ad networks from working with the site. This morning, COICA unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee.

posted by Rhaomi at 2:40 PM on November 18, 2010

The industry is well aware that "censorship" doesn't go down well with many Americans, so it has been playing up the "free speech protections" in the bill lately.

You know, the surveillance- police-state would be frustrating enough without actually cribbing Orwel's vocab cards.
posted by paisley henosis at 2:48 PM on November 18, 2010

Don't email senators. Write letters. Email is pretty much ignored.

Twitter 'em. Seriously. They're all glued to the Crackberry.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:00 AM on November 19, 2010

From: Aaron Swartz, DemandProgress.org
Subject: VICTORY!

Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to send the Internet blacklist bill to the full Senate, but it was quickly stopped by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) who denounced it as "a bunker-buster cluster bomb" aimed at the Internet and pledged to "do everything I can to take the necessary steps to stop it from passing the U.S. Senate."

Wyden's opposition practically guarantees the bill is dead this year -- and next year the new Congress will have to reintroduce the bill and start all over again. But even that might not happen: Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Hollywood's own senator, told the committee that even she was uncomfortable with the Internet censorship portion of the bill and hoped it could be removed when they took it up again next year!

This is incredible -- and all thanks to you. Just a month ago, the Senate was planning to pass this bill unanimously; now even the senator from Hollywood is backing away from it. But this fight is far from over -- next year, there's going to be hearings, negotiations, and even more crucial votes. We need to be there, continuing to fight.

posted by paisley henosis at 5:00 PM on November 19, 2010