Obama And ISP’s To Launch Largest Digital Spying Scheme In History (Must Read)

If you download potentially copyrighted software, videos or music, your Internet service provider (ISP) has been watching, and they’re coming for you.

Specifically, they’re coming for you on Thursday, July 1.

That’s the date when the nation’s largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users’ bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials.

Word of the start date has been largely kept secret since ISPs announced their plans last June. The deal was brokered by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and coordinated by the Obama Administration. The same groups have weighed in heavily on controversial Internet policies around the world, with similar facilitation by the Obama’s Administration’s State Department.

The July 1 date was revealed by the RIAA’s CEO and top lobbyist, Cary Sherman, during a publishers’ conference on Wednesday in New York, according to technology publication CNet.

The content industries calls this scheme a “graduated response” plan, which will see

-Time Warner Cable

-Cablevision

-Comcast

-Verizon

-AT&T

and others spying on users’ Internet activities and watching for potential copyright infringement. Users who are “caught” infringing on a creator’s protected work can then be interrupted with a notice that piracy is forbidden by law and carries penalties of up to $150,000 per infringement, requiring the user to click through saying they understand the consequences before bandwidth is restored, and they could still be subject to copyright infringement lawsuits.

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Response: This is much worse than SOPA/PIPA and ACTA. It doesn’t necessarily censor the internet but it spys on everything you do. Your ENTIRE web history will be watched and recorded and might even assist the government. This was coordinated by Obama and his administration with the help of the MPAA and RIAA.

What is so dangerous about this is that this is not a law it is a policy adopted by several companies. That means this will not be debated in Congress and you will agree to be spied on by signing a contract with the company.

Internet censorship is becoming a reality and now the corporate elite will legally be able to spy on you. If we spread this and cause an uproar like what we did with SOPA, maybe they will back down. Either way people NEED to know about this.

Lamar Smith, the lead sponsor of SOPA, is at it again!

A U.S. House committee has approved a bill sponsored by Lamar Smith that would force Internet Service Providers to to keep track of and retain their customers’ information — including your name, address, phone number, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses.

ISPs would collect and retain your data whether or not you’re accused of a crime.

The bill was shamelessly dubbed ‘Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act’ despite having nothing to do with child pornography.  

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill said, “It represents a data bank of every digital act by every American [that would] let us find out where every single American visited Web sites.”

Sign the petition to tell Congress not to pass the bill. Texas, repeal this man already!

Chris Dodd, CEO of MPAA and Former Congressman, Publicly and Directly Threatens Politicians Who No Longer Support SOPA

Reinforcing the fact that Chris Dodd really does not get what’s happening, and showing just how disgustingly corrupt the MPAA relationship is with politicians, Chris Dodd went on Fox News toexplicitly threaten politicians who accept MPAA campaign donations that they’d better pass Hollywood’s favorite legislation… or else:

“Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,”

Public Knowledge issued a fantastic statement that not only highlights the ridiculousness of Dodd’s threats, but also the hypocrisy of the Hollywood studios on this issue:

Public Knowledge welcomes constructive dialog with people from all affected sectors about issues surrounding copyright, the state of the movie industry and related concerns. Cybersecurity experts, Internet engineers, venture capitalists, artists, entrepreneurs, human rights advocates, law professors, consumers and public-interest organizations, among others should be included. They were shut out of the process for these bills. 

We suggest that in the meantime, if the MPAA is truly concerned about the jobs of truck drivers and others in the industry, then it can bring its overseas filming back to the U.S. and create more jobs. It could stop holding states hostage for millions of dollars in subsidies that strained state budgets can’t afford while pushing special-interest bills through state legislatures. While that happens, discussions could take place.

Source

A petition on WhiteHouse.gov has raised more than 26,000 signatures to demand Chris Dodd and MPAA be investigated for bribery.

Sign the petition here.

While SOPA may be dead (for now) in the U.S., lobby groups are likely to intensify their efforts to export SOPA-like rules to other countries. Parliament of Canada is planning on passing a very similar bill called Bill C-11.

Groups such as the Canadian Independent Music Association and the Entertainment Software Association of Canada have been advocating for Ottawa to expand the provision to allow them to go after not just sites containing copyright-infringing content, but also those ‘enabling’ acts of infringement as well.

The music industry is demanding new provisions that would “permit a court to make an order blocking a pirate site such as The Pirate Bay to protect the Canadian marketplace from foreign pirate sites.”

The music industry also wants Internet providers to be required to adopt a termination policy for subscribers that are alleged to be repeat infringers. According to the industry.

To incent service providers to cooperate in stemming piracy by requiring them to adopt and reasonably implement a policy to prevent the use of their services by repeat infringers and by conditioning the availability of service provider exceptions on this being done.

This means users in Canada may be banned from accessing the internet! There is no indication in the music industry document of due process or even proof of infringement.

According to the music industry document, Bill C-11’s “enabler provision” should be expanded to include “services that are primarily operated to enable infringement or which induce infringement.”

Those demands are echoed by the Entertainment Software Association of Canada, which called on the government to “amend the enabling provision to ensure that it applies to services that are ‘designed or operated’ primarily to enable acts of infringement.” Both groups also want statutory damages added to the enabler provision so that liability can run into the millions of dollars for a target website. 

The expansion of the enabler provision to include sites that operate to enable or induce infringement could extend far beyond so-called “pirate sites”, since many user generated content sites (such as YouTube) and cloud-based service sites can be said to enable or induce infringement, particularly in a country like Canada that does not have a fair use provision.

Bill C-11 would make it illegal to save a DVD on your personal computer, even for fair dealing purposes. Ripping a CD/DVD or recording a show/movie via DVR will also become illegal under C-11!

Websites will be mandated to “retain records that will allow the identity of the person to whom the electronic location belongs to be determined, and do so for six months”

If the website refuses to submit identifying information about the infringer, they will be fined “not less than $5,000 and not more than $10,000.”

That raises another question, what if the website cannot identify the user? We they still be charged, will the website then be shut down, or will hiding your ip via proxy/Tor become illegal?

Credit

You can read the Bill on the Parliament of Canada website.

A protest against Bill C-11 will be held on Feb. 10, at Norman Bethune Square at 2pm local time. [1]

If you are a Canadian, contact your representative and send him/her a letter or email. Script

#WhistleblowingWednesday: Is This The Real Reason Why MegaUpload Was Censored?

In the weeks before the crackdown, Megaupload was planning on launching a new music sharing website called Megabox that looked like it had the potential to completely transform music distribution, and even find a way to pay musicians in the process.

From TorrentFreak, via Digital Music News:

“UMG [Universal Music Group] knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations directly to consumers while allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings,” said MegaUpload founder Kim dotcom.

“We have a solution called the Megakey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free,” Dotcom said. “Yes that’s right, we will pay artists even for free downloads.  The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works.”

Seems like MegaUpload was taken down for reasons other than piracy.

Who said the Anti-SOPA internet protests didn’t work?

The FBI has shutdown of the world’s largest Internet file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, and charged its founder and others with violating piracy laws.

The site has claimed it is diligent in responding to complaints about pirated material. MegaUpload is one of the websites on the MPAA’s ’rogue list’. 

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is arguably the biggest supporter of SOPA/PIPA and has spent millions in lobbying for the bills. 

MegaUpload is fighting back  in court and have filed a countersuit against Universal Music Group.

The following code will display a simple but effective message that allows visitors to contact their representative and could be circumvented by clicking anywhere on the page:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”//js.sopablackout.org/sopablackout.js”></script>

Take a look.

An online petition is urging Electronic Arts to oppose SOPA and internet censorship.

Just three days ago the petition only had 1,500 signatures. Now over 121,000 have signed the petition!

Sign the petition and help end SOPA.