Creeping Internet Control Article #1,346

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/protect-act/


Creeping Internet Control Article #1,346

It’s really weird; every day there is some article about how economic collapse, or in this case totalitarian government control of the internet, or something equally bad is creeping closer and closer, but it never seems actually to get here. The process is so slow that the American people, such as remains of them, don’t even notice or care. It’s like the old story of a frog being slowly boiled to death in water over a fire; the increase in heat is so gradual that no one notices.

Wired.com reports: “Senate antipiracy legislation introduced Thursday would dramatically increase the government’s legal power to disrupt and shutter websites dedicated to infringing activities.”



(However the regime defines “infringing activities.”)

“A major feature of the Protect IP Act, introduced by 11 senators of all stripes, would grant the government the authority to bring lawsuits against these websites, and obtain court orders requiring search engines like Google to stop displaying links to them. The proposal is an offshoot to the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act introduced last year. It was scrapped by its authors in exchange for the Protect IP Act in a bid to win Senate passage.

“Under the old COICA draft, the government was authorized to obtain court orders to seize so-called generic top-level domains ending in .com, .org and .net. The new legislation, with the same sponsors, narrows that somewhat. Instead of allowing for the seizure of domains, it allows the Justice Department to obtain court orders demanding American ISPs stop rendering the DNS for a particular website — meaning the sites would still be accessible outside the United States. Either way, though, the legislation amounts to the holy grail of intellectual-property enforcement that the recording industry, movie studios and their union and guild workforces have been clamoring for since the George W. Bush administration.”

[Long blah blah bah statement from Hollywood glitterati redacted. Basically, file-sharing and movie piracy hits lefty liberals in their wallets, and that’s a no-no.]

Wired.com: “The new bill also gives content owners more rights than the old bill. It would allow rights holders to seek court orders instructing online ad services and credit card companies from partnering with the infringing sites — a power the government is granted in either legislative version.”



(Thus providing yet another endless fountain of revenue for lawyers.)

“Only the government gets the DNS blocking powers. And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already grants rights holders the ability to demand search engines to stop displaying search results linking to infringing sites. Despite the new bill watering down the United States’ reach, the government has been invoking an asset-forfeiture law to seize generic top-level domains of infringing websites under a program called Operation in Our Sites. It began last year, and the Department of Homeland Security has targeted 120 sites.”

Okay, cutting to the chase: “infringement” can mean whatever the government wants it to mean, For example, technically speaking, I am “infringing” on Wired.com’s copyright simply by quoting from and analyzing this article.

This law gives the government the power to seize the domain name and permanently silence any web site that “infringes,” like for example quoting an Obama speech or, like one popular weekly racial podcast, by playing musical interludes. With a little effort almost anything can be legally considered to be “infringement” on someone else’s “intellectual property” and used as yet another fig leaf to achieve political censorship of thought, which is what the Democrats have been after for the past 50 years.

Republicans, to give them what little credit is due to them, honestly don’t seem to care too much about criticism; they simply ignore it and do whatever the hell they want. Liberal Democrats hate criticism and seek to silence it, but both parties want to control and silence the internet because it is a form of lateral communication, directly between people, not top-down communication, and the internet is not filtered by the liberal news media.