ACTA is a secretly negotiated copyright treaty that obliges its signatories to take on many of the worst features of SOPA and PIPA. The EU is nearing ratification of it. ACTA was instigated by US trade reps under the Bush Administration, who devised and enforced its unique secrecy regime, but the Obama administration enthusiastically pursued it. — Read the rest

Julian Sanchez is on fire in this Ars Technica article on the funny accountancy and outright lies that underlie the harms-from-piracy stats cited in policy debates about Internet censorship and surveillance proposals like SOPA and PIPA:

As a rough analogy, since antipiracy crusaders are fond of equating filesharing with shoplifting: suppose the CEO of Wal-Mart came to Congress demanding a $50 million program to deploy FBI agents to frisk suspicious-looking teens in towns near Wal-Marts.

The former senator and now CEO of the MPAA can't catch a break: "You've got an opponent who has the capacity to reach millions of people with a click of a mouse and there's no fact-checker." Must be terribly hard to represent the largest media empires in the world, who collectively own all the major newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, billboards, record labels and studios. — Read the rest

Markos of DailyKos tears into Democrats who lack the fortitude and intellectual honesty to oppose SOPA, and continue to back it because they fear losing the campaign funding that comes from Hollywood. PNH sez, "Markos highlights a couple of paragraphs from a Politico story assessing the landscape following the SOPA/PIPA protests:"

Leo Hindery, a major Democratic donor whose New York media private equity firm owns cable channels, said Obama might have reason to worry about his entertainment industry fundraising base.

Kevin Kelly provided a nice summary of Larry Lessig's recent SALT ( Seminar About Long-Term Thinking) talk. It was about corruption in the US congress.

Lessig said the type of corruption rampant in the US Congress is not the old type of bribery, where congressional representatives had safes in their offices to hold the cash they received for voting in certain directions.

has come out against SOPA. He previously had no public position on it.

Vice's Jamie Lee Curtis Taete continues to investigate the copyright shenanigans that SOPA and PIPA's authors get up to (see the saga of how SOPA author Lamar Smith (R-TX) ripped off the photo on the front page of his website). — Read the rest

As Xeni wrote on Tuesday, the MPAA isn't pleased about sites like this one going dark to protest SOPA and PIPA. Former Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America called it "an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today." — Read the rest

Emmanuel Goldstein sez, "The websites for 2600 will go dark on Wednesday, joining many others around the world in protest against the potentially devastating effects of bills like SOPA and PIPA."

Big news: although Google won't be blacking out tomorrow in protest of SOPA and PIPA, they will have a homepage graphic and link protesting the laws: "Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet."

Morgan sez, "Hello Bar's Stop PIPA bar is a free notification bar that can be added to the top of any website. It's an easy way for websites to show their opposition to PIPA and SOPA if they can't go dark. — Read the rest

Pierre Far recommends using a 503 HTTP status code—but read on for important details. Other options include Zachstronaut's beautiful splash page; a WordPress plugin; and a simple javascript method.

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Cory Doctorow wrote in the Guardian about our copyright problems on YouTube with FedFlix, a channel of U.S. government videos.

On January 4, we protested one of the ContentID matches on a 1974 film called Pathfinder, which was paid for and produced by the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Fight for the Future has compiled a list of 61 senators who won't meet with them to discuss PIPA (the Senate version of the Stop Online Piracy Act) before Jan 24, when a critical vote will take place. These senators won't sit down with them, nor will they assign a staffer to do so. — Read the rest

pziselberger sez, "Senator Lahey, sponsor of PIPA [ed: the Senate version of SOPA], will be on Vermont Public Radio's 'Vermont Edition' January 12 at noon. This is an opportunity to share your outrage over PIPA with the author of the bill."

Public Knowledge, a public interest group fighting SOPA and PIPA, believes that its email to supporters has been plagiarized by its rivals, Creative America, an MPAA-funded astroturf group that lobbies in favor of PIPA. The copyright lobby sent a note to supporters that had a number of similarities (including word-for-word lifts) to a Public Knowledge email sent four days earlier. — Read the rest

Cory Doctorow on how the copyright wars clue us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the general-purpose computer.

Here's ChadRocco's Lamar Smith anti-election poster, in honor of the congressman's advocacy for the net-killing Stop Online Piracy Act and his blithe dismissal of the bill's critics.

Meet Lamar Smith, representative from Texas, and Chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary.

A new bill in Congress, H.R. 3699 ("To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector"), creates a regulation that make it hard-to-impossible to publish open access scholarly journals. These are journals that are paid for directly by researchers, who pay a fee that helps pay for peer review, and are then made available free of charge to all comers. — Read the rest

The Cato institute's dug deep into the MPAA's funny piracy accounting: "In IPI-land, when a movie studio makes $10 selling a DVD to a Canadian, and then gives $7 to the company that manufactured the DVD and $2 to the guy who shipped it to Canada, society has benefitted by $10+$7+$2=$19. — Read the rest