Stop SOPA From Becoming Law

[Kalbuth]

Neither Sony, nor EA and Nintendo, explicitely dropped support.
EA's name , and the TV / Blue-Ray Sony branch, appeared in a letter asking members of the congress to act against piracy (without ever mentioning explicitly any bill).
Then, on the actual list of SOPA bill supporters, these companies were not present, making people jump to the conclusion they "dropped their support".
But :
* None of the 3 companies explicitly explained their position
* The 3 are part of the Entertainment Software Association, and guess what? This association is on the list of SOPA supporters.

This "Sony dropped SOPA support" is just a PR move, perhaps not even at the initiative of Sony themselves, but as I see it, they are part of a group supporting SOPA, and don't say anything about it? => they support SOPA

EDIT : A source found about this : http://techland.time.com/2012/01/03/...-sopa-support/

[Hamma]

The chances of Sony or any other company that publishes music and such dropping support of SOPA is somewhere between slim and none.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing...o-protest-sopa

^^^ That would be just awesome.

[Hamma]

It will also draw attention to SOPA by average people who haven't a clue that it is even happening.

[Firefly]

Once it gets passed it will never be repealed. They may draft nullification clauses but it will remain on the books forever. Just like how buttsex is illegal in South Carolina.

[Crator]

<---- See, that would be censored in Cali then...

[Zulthus]

Idiot politicians. Everything is all their own agenda now. All they want is money, money, money, and a side of control. They're like diapers. They need to be changed regularly or the whole house (country) starts to go to shit.

[PoisonTaco]

The worst part about this legislation is that if it passes it will have ramifications across the world. I mean I'm pretty sure America isn't the only country that uses the internet.

[Crator]

The changes proposed will only affect DNS in America. Meaning, Internet connections provided by American ISPs will basically have their DNS servers hijacked by the government so they can manipulate the system to block any domain on the Internet, whether they be in America or not. The way in which this affects sites outside the US is that Americans could be blocked from using them.

[basti]

Originally Posted by Hamma

The chances of Sony or any other company that publishes music and such dropping support of SOPA is somewhere between slim and none.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing...o-protest-sopa

^^^ That would be just awesome.

Ohh, interresting.


Now we just need to get this out to the internet, and make sure everyone tells the guys that we stand behind them if they pull the plug for a day.

[Kalbuth]

Originally Posted by Crator

The changes proposed will only affect DNS in America. Meaning, Internet connections provided by American ISPs will basically have their DNS servers hijacked by the government so they can manipulate the system to block any domain on the Internet, whether they be in America or not. The way in which this affects sites outside the US is that Americans could be blocked from using them.

The way in which this affects us european is that it sets up an example for our own stupid govts to follow, and worst, US is pushing it to every other countries :
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...censorship.ars

[Crator]

That's interesting, I didn't know about that Kalbuth... Thanks for sharing... While I agree that piracy for the music/movie industries need something to help them, I don't think that the current SOPA bill is the answer.

I wouldn't be opposed to a filter on the Internet that uses an identification and tagging system. So before the content can be available to look at it must be scanned for piracy purposes and then tagged appropriately. If the specific content is deemed to have been pirated, then block just that content, not the whole site. Not certain if that's possible and how exactly they could force everyone to use these filters but it would be the step in the right direction with this I think.

[Kalbuth]

Originally Posted by Crator

That's interesting, I didn't know about that Kalbuth... Thanks for sharing... While I agree that piracy for the music/movie industries need something to help them, I don't think that the current SOPA bill is the answer.

I wouldn't be opposed to a filter on the Internet that uses an identification and tagging system. So before the content can be available to look at it must be scanned for piracy purposes and then tagged appropriately. If the specific content is deemed to have been pirated, then block just that content, not the whole site. Not certain if that's possible and how exactly they could force everyone to use these filters but it would be the step in the right direction with this I think.

OUCH! What??!!
That's just technically impossible, unless you put in the hand of your ISPs, and government, a tool to listen to everything you send and receive over the Internet. Absolutely everything you do will be scanned and available for these 3rd party, your ISP (a private company) and the government (based on the fact this would be based on ... laws , one can guess the government will require access to those data).
This is the equivalent to permanently put every phone calls under scrutiny and being recorded for potential future needs by your government. Do you imagine anyone asking for every phone call to be recorded "so that we can catch terrorist calls"? Would you really be OK with that?
What you propose is exactly that (and exactly why I'm fighting against these kind of measures)
But because it is technically rather hard to explain, IP holders and governments can push laws going toward this kind of solution absolutely unnoticed. I'd go as far as saying that their goal is to use Intellectual Property to push for Internet control so that they can have total control on it. IP holders are just tools.

[Kran De Loy]

Originally Posted by IDukeNukeml

I disagree, I don't believe there should be any type of governmental control over the internet in any way whatsoever. This paves the way for something simliar to the SOPA act to be passed without raising any alarms in the future, a type of gateway.

If they want to stop online piracy, there are several complex fixes that can be done. Stop selling CD's of your music, make everything digital, when is the last time one of you bought a CD?

Encrypt Itunes MP3 files so that the device it's playing on requires a token key to decrypt and play the music. (yes you can dub it over with in/out but it will only be at 96k bitrate.) This alone would drastically decrease the piracy of Mp3's.

Do the same exact thing for software, will take a lot of work and support staff for the people who constantly format their frackin machines... but it would be extremely difficult to crack a game's exe if it had it's own hardware encryption.....

OR............ since USB DRIVES are becoming a standard, have a 64mb dongle come with the software... and i know i'll get flamed out of the fucking barn for this one.... Having usb dongles REQUIRED to be plugged in for the software to run is very very cheap and ultra effective and to my knowledge, other than making a physical clone (with the encryption software) of said USB dongle, it can't be hacked. Ever... and it doesn't have to be per game, it could be an "EA" dongle, you open it up and add your key to your email address that stores that token key on the usb drive and yeah.........

It's work, a lot of work, but instead of blocking the entire fucking internet off, maybe the COMPANY that doesn't want THEIR shit stolen should intervene somehow and stop crying like fuck faced canadian babies to the government, and fix it.

There are ways to fix this without having the government involved.

Edit: No offense to canadians aye.

Can't copy the DRM USB whatever then someone will just find a way to by-pass it.

As the saying goes, "Locks only keep honest people honest." In this case meaning it is impossible to stop or even slow down a pirate that knows what he's doing and how to circumvent it.

The best solution to stopping or slowing down piracy is to outdo the pirates. Providing a better and safer service than any illegitimate provider is capable of will take away their users.

This in mind and it's an easy concept that has actually been in use for hundreds of years for merchants, "My competition is being successful, I want his customers so I'll do what he does only better than he does it." Whats the one thing that an illegal merchant can never guarantee beyond all doubts? Legitimacy. That in mind the proper holder of the copy righted material, all he needs to do it exactly the same as the pirate and he will already by default be better than the pirate.

No need to make up some new better marketing scheme. No need to secure all your products. No need to worry about stealing their ideas because they are pirates and they are already outside of the law.

Edited: Oh I should mention that I'm talking from the experience of Ubisoft's uPlay and other DRM shenanigans.

[Kran De Loy]

Originally Posted by IDukeNukeml

Not DRM's, Token key technology + conventional CD key technology + email address access. They would literally have to have someone's email address, a copy of THEIR dongle and a copy of the encrypted token key on their machine. I don't doubt there may be SOME way to defeat it, but I just can't possibly see how.

Technically wouldn't anything that is made to check a consumer's copy is legit could be considered Data Rights Management?

Anyway, if it's a multiplayer game that requires you to be online like an MMO then I doubt the development company would need to have customers use a dongle system like that since with all the information having to go through their servers they could do almost anything to check to make sure you have the correct copy and then change it at any time without any requirement to notify the user base. This by itself would greatly reduce the amount of pirates willing to take risks in stealing the game. (not so much hackers, but there are far less capable hackers in the world than pirates anyway.)

If it's anything that can be done via LAN or singleplayer there is literally NOTHING that could stop a unscrupulous and knowledgeable person from finding some way around the issue that wouldn't also at the same time completely screw their legitimate customers. Which is a core problem with Ubisoft's horse shit when uPlay forced people to be actively online to play From Dust and almost all of their other recent titles even when a company rep posted on their forums that it would be a 1 time only check. If you weren't online ALL THE TIME for this single player game that it would close the game down immediately losing all unsaved progress and it still did nothing to even slow down the pirate community. Probably only encouraged it, actually.

[Kalbuth]

Well, good thinking on the dongle or whatever USB thing, problem is :
It's easy to have a software emulating presence of the USB drive (see any CD emulator on the market).

What if : 1 guy buys title, and bundle the title along with his secret key in a downloadable content, anyone able to mount his key will be able to read the file. File paid once, used by many.
knowing the key is like a fingerprint, content owner will be able to trace back to original buyer, which in turns will mean :
* the system to deliver the key has to be able to track every customer, making it heavy, not easy to use, etc... ie, quite the opposite reaction to pushing out content that is easily available to customer (which would be a sane reaction against piracy, instead of spending even more precentage of product costs into protection measures)
* the illegal distribution circuit will go underground, to avoid being caught. That usually means it will benefit illegal 3rd parties making profit out of it.

We've had a very similar case here in France.
Illegal copies were distributed via free peer2peer softwares. They issued a law where a 3rd party, private company was able, by checking who's sharing what file (it's a publicly available information in torrent trackers and such) to ask (after several warning) an ISP to simply block customer Internet access (and such user would be unable to get Internet access via other ISPs, the list of banned users is shared amongst ISPs).
Initially, all this was simply bypassing any form of Justice involvement. It was an automatic process between 2 private companies leading to user Internet acces blocked, without any way for the customer to check if charges are true, how it was proven, and to try to defend his case.
It was fortunately deemed not conform to our Constitution, and now, the last stage of it (ie, cut of Internet access by ISP) must now go through judiciary process, and be properly judged, with possible defense by the customer.

You know what happened? French internet users stopped using peer2peer to share illegal content. Did any money go back to artists and such? Not a dollar. what happened? People subscribed to 3rd party file sharing solutions (MegaUpload and consorts) to share their trafic, because no 3rd party company can yet spy on customer trafic toward these file sharing clusters, and so they can't get caught.
These MU offers are not anymore free for customer, so they are paying something.
The money IP holders wanted is going into MegaUpload pocket

EDIT : I work in a ISP, and the whole trafic shift from peer2peer to filesharing solutions is very visible for us, we consistently lost trafic between ISP since the bill passed, something which had never happened before (and trafic between ISP is typical of Peer2Peer), and trafic toward rather new actors on the market (Leaseweb, Carpathia Hosting) grew at insane rates. These actors are hosting companies hosting .... MegaUpload servers ...

They strengthened their security, made all very complex (and the whole things costs tons of money), with zero good effect, and their target is now hiding from them spending money on ways to evade them.
The next step for them will eventually to spy on every communication, and people will begin to encrypt and use VPN (for a cost, of course).


It's counter productive, and the worst of it all, is that all the bills that are forced on people in every country have 1 thing in common : they evade completely their local Justice system. It's always some specific technical system set in place which bypass any independant judge who could be on the way and use both point of view (the victims AND the "thief"). This makes you wonder what are the real motives behind all this. It's not about protecting IP (because none of the measures will work, and they know it), it's about control over what happens on Internet.