/ Cory Doctorow / 11:56 am Wed Dec 21, 2011

Adam Savage on SOPA: "We're better than that"

James sez, "MythBuster Adam Savage joins the growing chorus of opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act."

Honestly, if a friend wrote these into a piece of fiction about government oversight gone amok, I'd have to tell them that they were too one-dimensional, too obviously anticonstitutional.

The Internet is probably the most important technological advancement of my lifetime. Its strength lies in its open architecture and its ability to allow a framework where all voices can be heard. Like the printing press before it (which states also tried to regulate, for centuries), it democratizes information, and thus it democratizes power. If we allow Congress to pass these draconian laws, we'll be joining nations like China and Iran in filtering what we allow people to see, do, and say on the Web.

And we're better than that.

MythBuster Adam Savage: SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It

(Thanks, James!)

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  4. I should add that: The first intellectual pirates were the Greeks in Alexandria, who sent police aboard every ship that docked to search for books to be taken to the Great Library of Alexandria and copied.

    The Internet is the greatest library of all time, and these barbarians want to burn it to the ground.

    1. Part of me says yes to that, but I don’t think that is completely correct. Mostly because I believe most Americans will go along with ANYTHING in the name of “Defense”. Don’t be surprised if SOPA fails if they just insert it into some future Defense bill.

    2. Dude, its almost impossible to keep pace with US wacky legislations AND my own country versions of them. 

  6. Just when i thought my top-notch for abiding respect has become occupied, along comes Adam Savage.  (sorry Raymond Teller ☺)

      1. haha sure is. I love that newscorp, the teamsters and Go Daddy.com  are on there. What does Go Daddy stand to gain from censored internet?

        1. Take a look at “Operation In Our Sites”.   Who does the “pirate” domain get transferred to?  

    2. i looked at the list of companies… how do manufacturing companies like Ford Motor Company have a dog in this fight?? (i’m thinking these big companies just rubber-stamp whatever the chamber of commerce tells them is appropriate.)

      i knew theglobalipcenter.com was full of shit as soon as its intro video had a screen that said “EXCEPTIONALISM”— they used that phrase to invade Iraq!

      it’s just amazing how these PR firms take concepts you’d think should be common sense (like intellectual property) and turn them upside down.

      i’m getting depressed about the future of the internet..  first they want to throttle bandwidth.  now they want to kill parts of the internet they don’t like at will, and without due process.  this is the New Fascism.

  8. Seeing as how the people who have built, use and continue to use the internet in every waking moment are invariably smarter than the politicians, what’s the general consensus amongst all of us that if SOPA passes, “we” will just be able to build a way around their laws. Isin’t the internet bigger than any small minded politicians dreams of control?

    1. Eventually… Unintended consequences, general unenforceability and technological advance will kill SOPA.

      However, many decent persons and companies will be hurt, and cynical and dishonest ones will benefit. What I would like to have, is a leak where one of the latter admit that SOPA won’t do jack squat of what it was explicitly written to do, because probably even they realized it, they cannot be that clueless. However, the benefit will only be very short term, and prone to become harm in the long term.

      An era of freedom will have been interrupted. And opportunities lost. It’s better to have more freedom.

  9. “we’ll be joining nations like China and Iran”
    You already joined them when it comes to killing own citizens (= death penalty) and torture … why don’t you go the extra mile and join their “restricting free speech and censoring” – club too?

  10. i love adam, but i think we are actually not better than this.  our absence of betterness is becoming clearer with each passing day.  we also used to be the country that stood up for human rights and against torture back in the quaint old days.

  11. Won’t one predictable result of this be a mass rush to host formerly-American web sites in countries that have less draconian laws? Or would this ploy offer no safety for website owners?

    1. I doubt it, because the idea behind SOPA is to break the DNS system to prevent web addresses from resolving to their IP addresses, and to block listed IP addresses. So it doesn’t matter where in the world the website is located. They’re not necessarily seizing the domain; they want to prevent anyone in the U.S. from reaching the site.  

  12. Whether or not the people are better than that, their government (or rather, it’s masters) are not (and likely never will be).

    Americans are prepared to do many things, but they don’t appear to be prepared to rid themselves of their governmental corruption. That’s the real problem, stuff like SOPA is just a symptom of it.

  13. I may be the lone dissenter here, but even if this makes it to Obama’s desk and he signs it into law, we know this isn’t the end of the road. You know it will be immediately challenged in federal court, an injunction will be put into place and it’ll eventually make its way to the Supreme Court. If it is upheld as sound constitutional law, then I’ll start to worry.

    1. You have more faith than do I that the current Supreme Court, with its shocking rulings thus far on so many related issues, would have the slightest chance of overturning this law.

  14. I’m still curious to see how they think a system like SOPA can work on an inherantly international device such as the internet. Surely there will be a bazillion ways to bypass it within minutes of it being implemented…

    1. Pick DNS servers outside US jurisdiction, save settings, reboot. Ta-da. Alternatively, hosts file, same thing. ISP-level blocking? TOR!

      Several solutions accessible to everyman already exist, and tor exists for more sophisticated evasion.

      1. Except see the other article here on Boing Boing about how TOR and similar services will probably be illegal under SOPA.

        And eventually, if people can get around the restriction by using a DNS server outside the U.S., they’ll just start blocking those DNS servers too.

        1. Easy enough to deploy more DNS servers. Eventually SOPA will be reduced to blocking every IP range outside of US control, and then America will be a nice little island all to itself on the Internet. And then we’re back to the AOL model.

          I presume before this happens, SOPA will be repealed as it proceeds to gut America of any tech innovation in order to protect the MAFIAA’s profits.

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