Which reps support sopa

Reddit, English language Wikipedia and thousands of others replaced their content with a message about the threat of SOPA and PIPA to their continued operation, and to the future of innovative online services. In this paper I trace the emergence of the resistance on Reddit, an online community with limited formal involvement in digital IP advocacy prior to the SOPA blackouts. In addition to a day—long blackout to protest SOPA, Reddit was involved in a campaign to convince systems administrators to switch hosted sites away from GoDaddy, one of the early supporters of the bill, and in various direct lobbying actions to convince lawmakers to withdraw support.

The submissions cover the period from 7 November to 18 January , the day of the blackouts. The SOPA blackouts were the dramatic in scale and without precedent in their success at bringing to public attention the technically and legally complex issue of digital IP regulation. The global resistance was bolstered by association with the increasingly vocal counter—globalization movement. A decade later, ACTA was negotiated in secret between a small group of developed countries.

When the EU ratified the treaty, protesters took to the streets. In the U. One of these conditions is responding promptly to takedown notices from rights holders, which request that specific infringing content be removed. The other DMCA issue taken up by digital right activists was the ban on creating or making available technologies to circumvent digital rights management DRM limitations.

This time, the response was less civil — having drawn the ire of irreverent, loosely organized hacker movement Anonymous, Sony was subject to a distributed denial of service DDOS attack that took down several of its sites.

Anonymous made their grievances clear in a this excerpt, from a message to Sony posted on AnonNews. As with the spurious takedown notices sent to Google, the risk perceived by digital IP reformers is that deliberate misinterpretation of the law will go unpunished, and that unfortunate and blameless individuals will suffer as a result. In this way, new and popular submissions rise to the top of the list of posts. This incentive that provides a rough measure of community standing as a byproduct of the ranking system.

From a research perspective, rankings provide a useful quantitative indicator of relevance for comments and posts. According to Alexa, Reddit currently ranks th in terms of total traffic globally, and 50th in the U. For comparison, Facebook ranks second globally, Wikipedia sixth and Myspace th. Most users are young, with 75 percent in the 18—44 age range. Males outnumber females nearly , and over 80 percent of users have at least some college education DoubleClick Ad Planner by Google, Prior to the SOPA blackouts, the Reddit community had participated in various acts of individual and collective altruism, including mass donations following the earthquake in Haiti, the ongoing operation of an online suicide prevention service, and various acts of personal assistance Doctorow, This was followed over the next week by links to articles about both the bill itself and the various corporate and political figures opposing or supporting it.

The announcement explained the key issues in the bill as follows:. This act would also force search engines, DNS providers, and payment processors to cease all activities with allegedly infringing sites, in effect, walling off users from them. Concurrently with this announcement, Reddit co—founder Alexis Ohanian posted that he was attending congressional hearings about the bill the following day, and asked users to help formulate his position.

His point of departure was the personal story of the origins of Reddit. The bills threatened business models, free speech, and communities like Reddit. The resulting mobilization involved enrolling new actors, forging new alliances, and developing new tactics. As proposed by Callon, et al. For Callon, et al.

Risk refers to a known event or series of events, which may happen with some probability sometimes statistically quantifiable and about which decisions can be made with a relatively complete knowledge of the range of possible options and the implications of each. Where this knowledge is not available or indeed attainable, the situation is one of uncertainty. All the components of the decision space — the entertainment industry, the Internet and the Internet industry, rights holders and content users, local and global economic conditions — are man—made and theoretically knowable.

Customs and Border Protection [ 4 ]. For the resistance, these implied certainties are inaccurate at best, malicious at worst. The statistics are contested with good evidence, the cited report by the U. General Accountability Office having found no record of the data or methodology used to obtain them , as is the efficacy of the proposed legal remedy.

The resistance succeeded in mobilizing against SOPA because they were able to introduce specific uncertainties into the public conversation about the bill. Callon, et al. The resistance to SOPA created controversy by challenging the technical claims of the bill and highlighting the democratic shortcomings of its passage as much as by re—introducing the social dimension. Taken together, these re—framings achieved the development of a hybrid forum around digital IP issues, and the resurrection of uncertainty in the face of attempts to sanitize a highly self—interested piece of legislation.

In the exploration group, work is done to explore the problem space and potential solutions, and to identify concerned actors. The learning group includes the development of tactics as well as the construction of adoption of a collective, oppositional identity. All these activities are evident on Reddit in the lead—up to the 18 January blackout, and together provide a useful framework for analysis.

Attorney General:. The possible economic consequences of the legislation were judged more plausible than its unintended potential for political suppression. They have no reason to believe you have any special authority on the moral and legal aspects of the bill. Sites like YouTube, which publishes millions of user-uploaded videos each week, are worried that they would be forced to more closely police that content to avoid running afoul of the new rules.

The bill requires every payment or advertising network operator to set up a process through which outside parties can notify the company that one of its customers is an "Internet site is dedicated to theft of U.

Filing false notifications is a crime, but the process would put the burden of proof -- and the legal cost of fighting a false allegation -- on the accused. As the anti-SOPA trade group NetCoalition put it in their analysis of the bill: "The legislation systematically favors a copyright owner's intellectual property rights and strips the owners of accused websites of their rights. Who supports SOPA, and who's against it? In general, media companies have united in favor of them, while tech's big names are throwing their might into opposing them.

The bill's supporters dismiss accusations of censorship, saying that the legislation is meant to revamp a broken system that doesn't adequately prevent criminal behavior. But SOPA's critics say the bill's backers don't understand the Internet's architecture, and therefore don't appreciate the implications of the legislation they're considering.

In November, tech behemoths including Google GOOG , Fortune and Facebook lodged a formal complaint letter to lawmakers, saying: "We support the bills' stated goals. Unfortunately, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities [and] mandates that would require monitoring of web sites.

Where does the bill stand now? SOPA was once expected to sail quickly through committee approval in the House. But tech companies, who largely oppose the bills, mobilized their users to speak out. Google GOOG , Fortune drew more than 7 million signatures for a petition that it linked on its highly trafficked homepage. The bills lost some of their Congressional backers as a result of the backlash. One major tenet of the original SOPA legislation has already been removed.

As originally written, SOPA would have required Internet service providers ISPs to block access to sites that law enforcement officials deemed pirate sites. But the White House said its analysis of the original legislation's technical provisions "suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity," and that it wouldn't support legislation that mandates manipulating the Internet's technical architecture. What are the alternatives?

One option, of course, is that Congress does nothing and leaves the current laws in place. Who's opposed to SOPA? Much of the Internet industry and a large percentage of Internet users. Here's the most current list PDF of opponents. Senate and House of Representatives, saying SOPA poses "a serious risk to our industry's continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation's cybersecurity.

The European Parliament adopted a resolution last week stressing "the need to protect the integrity of the global Internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names. A letter signed by Reps. Ron Paul, the Republican presidential candidate from Texas, predicts that SOPA will invite "an explosion of innovation-killing lawsuits and litigation.

And yes, there is a protest song. How would SOPA work? It allows the U. It's kind of an Internet death penalty. Protect IP targeted only domain name system providers, financial companies, and ad networks--not companies that provide Internet connectivity.

Because SOPA is broader, even some companies who liked, or at least weren't vocally opposed to, the Senate bill aren't exactly delighted with the House version.

What are the security-related implications of SOPA? The idea of DNSSEC is to promote end-to-end encryption of domain names, meaning there's no break in the chain between, say, Wellsfargo. The Sandia National Laboratories, part of the U.

Department of Energy, has also raised concerns about SOPA, saying it is "unlikely to be effective" and will "negatively impact U. Among them: it's "incompatible" with DNSSEC, innocent Web sites will be swept in as "collateral damage," and the blacklist can be bypassed by using the numeric Internet address of a Web site.

The address for CNET. A little-noticed portion of the proposed law, which CNET highlighted in an article , goes further than Protect IP and could require Internet providers to monitor customers' traffic and block Web sites suspected of copyright infringement. The exact requirements will depend on what the removal order says. Deep packet inspection, meaning forcing an Internet provider to intercept and analyze customers' Web traffic, is the only way to block access to specific URLs.

Its "safe harbor" language indicates that not resolving "the domain name of the foreign infringing site" may be sufficient, but some ambiguity remains. Are there free speech implications to SOPA? Section says that, to be blacklisted, a Web site must be "directed" at the U. Some critics have charged that such language could blacklist the next YouTube, Wikipedia, or WikiLeaks.