Congressional SOPA hearings: no opponents of the bill allowed

As the House of Representatives opens hearings on SOPA, the worst piece of Internet legislation in American history, it has rejected all submissions and testimony from public interest groups and others who oppose the bill.

Irony Alert: The House is holding hearings on sweeping Internet censorship legislation this week -- and it's censoring the opposition! The bill is backed by Hollywood, Big Pharma, and the Chamber of Commerce, and all of them are going to get to testify at the hearing.
But the bill's opponents -- tech companies, free speech and human rights activists, and hundreds of thousands of Internet users -- won't have a voice.

Don't Censor Censorship Opponents: Let Us Testify!

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: censorship • congress • Copyfight • corporatism • corruption • human rights • law • politics • privacy • protectip • sopa • surveillance

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

jameslosey

Witness list includes representative from Google but a voice on human rights is noticeably absent for such dangerous legislation. http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/hear_11162011.html
tempo

Google is considered an opponent to SOPA.
http://twitter.com/_jolo_ JM Solé

Being from Chile, I wonder what kind of impact this law will have on other countries.
- http://scavenger-ethic.blogspot.com/ scav
  
  Immigration, probably :)
http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai

Probably because they’d pirate the congressional hearing! Hackers! Y2K! The Matrix!
Thad Boyd

“Irony Alert: The House is holding hearings on sweeping Internet censorship legislation this week — and it’s censoring the opposition!”

That’s actually the exact opposite of irony.
- libcc
  
  “That’s actually the exact opposite of irony.”
  
  is the misuse of irony now ironic? I can’t remember exactly what the guy in the skinnyjeans told me
  - Guest
    
    He said: “Can you hold this for me? My pants have girl pockets.”
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  That’s actually the exact opposite of irony.
  
  I’m experiencing cognitive consonance.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_QKGGRQRAWZTR552K6SUNB7OTYI Kodiang

Funny USA supposedly the most democratic country in the USA but almost all their lawmakers are in the pockets of big corporations.
Hell Americans, just vote those idiots out of office or better still make a law that says all corporate contributions to be treated as bribery and then start jailing all those congressmen and those billion dollar CEOs
- Eark_the_Bunny
  
  “We’re working on it!” – OW$
- Eli Haj
  
  The only way to vote an idiot out off office is to vote a different idiot into office.
Kaibaman

So Congress is willing to make this a One Sided Deal! WHAT THE FUCK!? IF THIS DOESN’T PROOF OUR POLITICIANS ARE BOUGHT I DON’T KNOW WHAT WILL!
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/ Prokofy

What, Google’s a struggling scrappy nonprofit that can’t lobby, Cory? Really?

As for “human rights,” that’s silly. There isn’t any censorship involved in protecting intellectual property, which is the basis for the fulfillment of many rights.

thank God for Andrew Keen, he’s truly done a public service here:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/14/death-internet-exaggerated/
- Baldhead
  
  You seem to have failed to notice that the language of the bill, while apparently intended to protect intellectual property, could easily be used for censorship purposes. After all, if you can get a website blocked on merely an accusation of IP violation, then all you need to do is accuse someone who disagrees with you of posting a Harry Potter Torrent on their site, and goodbye opposition site. There is nothing in the bill that would stop or even discourage that sort of behaviour.
- Star Jonestown
  
  You’re absolutely correct, Prokofy.
  
  This is just more hysteria. No one has been “censored”. Why are 90% of the articles written about this law such panic-instilling bullsh*t?
  
  I recently asked that of a different tech blog, who admitted, “Hyperbole is effective.”
  - http://codeflow.org/ Florian Bösch
    
    In case you have missed it, the EU parliament unanimously rejected SOPA as an attack on the sovereignty of the euro-zone.
http://silverfang77.tumblr.com/ Silver Fang

Isn’t it unconstitutional for them to pass this bill without opponents being able to testify against it?
http://codeflow.org/ Florian Bösch

Note that no country in the world and no coalition of countries (like the EU) will accept SOPA.

The US is claiming jurisdiction over things that are not theirs. Doing what the US does with SOPA is a direct challenge to the sovereignty of everybody else.

There are only two possible outcomes of this:
1) They do not go ahead with SOPA
2) The world will fracture the DNS system and the routing working group and the US will be cut off, left to regulate their remaining splinter of what used to be the common internet. Dismayed with the regional splinters technologists, enterpreneteurs and netizens will create a variety of ad-hoc darknets one of which will eventually be favored by most and the last traces of what used to be the old, attackable, regulated internet will be gone and will be replaced by a unregulatable termite-mound of protocols, p2p communication and networks.