SOPA may be a distant memory for the Internet community, but Canada now finds itself in its own SOPA moment. Telecom giant Bell leads a coalition of companies and associations in seeking support for a wide-ranging website blocking plan that could have similarly harmful effects on the Internet, representing a set-back for privacy, freedom of expression, and net neutrality. While that need not be the choice - Canada’s Copyright Act already features some of the world’s toughest anti-piracy laws - the government and the CRTC, Canada's telecom regulator, are faced with deciding on the merits of a website blocking plan that is best described as a disproportionate, unconstitutional proposal sorely lacking in due process.
Chris Dodd (previously) was once a Democratic senator who decried politicians who became lobbyists; then he became one of the highest-paid and least competent lobbyists in DC, taking the helm of the Motion Picture Association on America and leading the organization to failure, catastrophe and irrelevance.
Five years ago, we won an unprecedented victory: spurred on by blackouts of more than 50,000 sites, more than 8 million Americans called Congress to object to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a brutal internet censorship bill that would have been a stake through the heart of the open net. — Read the rest
"Hollywood" Howard Berman, former-Congressman-turned-MPAA-lobbyist is one of the 15-member panel selected by the Democratic Party establishment to draft the party's platform for this summer's convention.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a powerful, corrupt Democratic Party official, the chair of the DNC who has tilted the rules to give the advantage to Hillary Clinton (Wasserman Schultz co-chaired the Clinton 2008 campaign), publicly threatened staffers who questioned her Clinton partisanship, voted against medical marijuana, co-sponsored SOPA, demanded the extradition and prosecution of Edward Snowden, takes massive corporate donations, and stands unopposed for the Democratic Party nomination in South Florida in every election — except this one.
The Trans Pacific Partnership is the largest "trade deal" in history, negotiated in secret and encompassing many issues unrelated to trade, including rules that make the Internet less secure, easier to censor and spy on, and more subject to corporate dominance.
The Republican Texas Congressjerk maintains a flying squad of political officers who descend upon the NSF to pore through its grant records looking for evidence of ideologically impure science.
A murder of Congresscritters and Senators have told Internet ad-brokers that they expect them to behave as though SOPA passed into law (instead of suffering hideous, total defeat); they want the companies to establish a secret, unaccountable blacklist of "pirate" sites. — Read the rest
Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA Debate is a scholarly paper by Yochai Benkler (et al) that analyzes the links, traffic and spread of the anti-SOPA campaign to see how the story went from an obscure area of wonkish concern to a massive Internet-scale shitstorm that put millions of phone-calls through to Congress and ultimately killed a bill that was tipped to be a sure thing. — Read the rest
The facts are clear: the NSA has turned the Internet into a massive surveillance system. They're using the websites we love to track our every move. On July 4th, people are protesting in more than 100 cities across the U.S. The Internet Defense League and more than 30,000 websites will join the protest. — Read the rest
Hacking Politics is a new book recounting the history of the fight against SOPA, when geeks, hackers and activists turned Washington politics upside-down and changed how Congress thinks about the Internet. It collects essays by many people (including me): Aaron Swartz, Larry Lessig, Zoe Lofgren, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Nicole Powers, Tiffiny Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, and many others. — Read the rest
Alan sez, "Demand Progress, part of Aaron Swartz's legacy, has been working for a while on a collection of essays and thoughts by people including Aaron, Lawrence Lessig, Techdirt's Mike Masnick, and Kim Dotcom. The collection is now available in ebook and paperback form. — Read the rest
Lamar Smith (R-TX) is the goon who brought SOPA to the nation. Now he's in charge of science funding in the House, and he's got some spectacularly stupid ideas for science as a whole.
Stuart sez, "The new chair of the House of Representatives science committee has drafted a bill that, in effect, would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress. — Read the rest
Derek Khanna was a Professional Staffer for the Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives. Khanna, 24, previously worked on Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign and in the office of Senator Scott Brown (R-MA).
CISPA is a sweeping, privacy-annihilating Internet law that we killed last year. The Congressmen who introduced it haven't learned their lesson and they've reintroduced it. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, right? We killed CISPA once before. We will kill CISPA again. — Read the rest
Simon sez, "
This is a short motion graphic video concisely documenting the fall of SOPA with great attention to detail, and recognising future bills that may be a threat to online democracy.
It is notable for the way in which it highlights SOPA as a great moment in history; a bill that threatened democracy was felled by one the greatest democratic sources in the world — the internet." — Read the rest
Dierdre from the I-School at Berkeley sez, "Did you take part in history? Want to contribute your story? We want to know it. Contribute to a knowledge base designed to shed light on the public's role in the debates. Many folks have written the people out of the narrative. — Read the rest
SOPA may be a distant memory for the Internet community, but Canada now finds itself in its own SOPA moment. Telecom giant Bell leads a coalition of companies and associations in seeking support for a wide-ranging website blocking plan that could have similarly harmful effects on the Internet, representing a set-back for privacy, freedom of expression, and net neutrality. While that need not be the choice - Canada’s Copyright Act already features some of the world’s toughest anti-piracy laws - the government and the CRTC, Canada's telecom regulator, are faced with deciding on the merits of a website blocking plan that is best described as a disproportionate, unconstitutional proposal sorely lacking in due process. 
