Ranking members of the Obama administration have published a memo condemning the approach taken in SOPA and PIPA, the punishing, pending Internet bills that establish and export a censorship regime in the name of fighting copyright infringement:

We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet.

On January 18, Boing Boing will join
Reddit and other sites around the Internet in "going dark" to
oppose SOPA and PIPA, the
pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship
regime and exports it to the rest of the world. — Read the rest

After repeatedly insisting that establishing a national censoring firewall with DNS-blocking was critical to the Stop Online Piracy Act, the bill's sponsor (and chair of the House Judicial Committee) Rep Lamar Smith has blinked. He's agreed to cut DNS-blocking from the bill, in the face of a threat from rival Rep Darrell Issa, whose House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was preparing to hear expert testimony on the harm that this provision would do to national security and the Internet's robustness against fraud and worse. — Read the rest

See the background photo on the archived, pre-SOPA version of US Congressman Lamar Smith's website?

Jamie Lee Curtis Taete of Vice says:

I managed to track that picture back to DJ Schulte, the photographer who took it.

And whaddya know? Looks like someone forgot to credit him.

Ken at Popehat examines Google's report on the number of police departments and governments that have requested removal of police brutality videos shot by citizens, and asks what will happen once the Stop Online Piracy Act makes spurious takedown even easier.

Kate sez, "Soapy is a new web browser plug-in that allows users to visit websites blocked by SOPA by automatically redirecting them to the site's IP address. The Firefox version of the plugin is downloadable now; the Google Chrome version will be finished shortly. — Read the rest

Consumer Electronics Association president Gary Shapiro, at his CES keynote: "[SOPA is championed by] politicians who are proudly unfamiliar with how the internet works, but who are well familiar with favors from well-heeled copyright extremists."

(via Reddit)

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff's recent op-ed in the Salt Lake City Tribune is full of quotes and paraphrases from promotional materials produced by the MPAA and execs from its member-companies in support of SOPA. This uncited quotation is the kind of thing that academics call cheating, and that the MPAA (incorrectly) calls "copyright theft." — Read the rest

No More SOPA is an Android app that lets you scan the barcodes of the products on the shelves at stores to determine (more or less) whether the manufacturer has backed SOPA. Unfortunately, manufacturing is so concentrated, and manufacturers' associations are so Internet-hostile, you might have to hunt quite a while for a SOPA-free alternative. — Read the rest

PIPA is the Senate version of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. It's only slightly less Internet-killingly-insane, but it hasn't gotten as much attention, mostly because the House's SOPA is just so over-the-top awful. Nevertheless, it needs your attention.

Maxwell sez, "We're gaining allies every day, but if we want Protect-IP to die in the Senate, we need to step it up. — Read the rest

A sustained campaign coordinated by redditors has evidently convinced Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the House Budget Chair, to drop his support for the Stop Online Piracy Act:

"The internet is one of the most magnificent expressions of freedom and free enterprise in history.

Rep Lamar Smith, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the principal instigator of the Internet-killing, freedom-hating, pro-censorship Stop Online Piracy Act, has dismissed the bill's enormous, widespread opposition. Smith claims that the million emails sent to Congress in one day, the phone calls received on the Hill at the rate of one per second, and the opposition from scholars, artists, lawyers, civil rights groups, big companies, little companies, librarians, and the engineers who created the Internet are all irrelevant, representing a "vocal minority" who are not "able to point to any language in the bill that would in any way harm the Internet." — Read the rest

Michael sez, "Congress is on recess and at home, which gives the public an opportunity to tell Members how bad SOPA and PIPA are in person. Members hold town halls, but they are often announced on short notice. This Meetup group keeps track of all important town halls, and adds more as they are announced. — Read the rest

A redditor called BobA841908 lays out a lucid and compelling case for how SOPA came about and what might stop it:

A full blackout is a reasonable response, because, in the language that is so popular with politicians, SOPA is going to result in excessive regulation that will cost jobs and likely cause significant increases in the cost of services, perhaps to the point where those services will no longer be able to provided on an ad supported or free to consumer basis.

Here's another SOPA supporter for you to boycott: Elsevier, publisher of many medical and scientific journals. You might also remember them from a 2009 scandal where Elsevier published fake journals as covert advertisements for pharmaceutical companies. Maybe it's time for scientists to consider not submitting papers to Elsevier journals or serving as peer reviewers for their journals. — Read the rest

EA and Nintendo and Sony's electronics divisions have renounced their support of the disastrous Stop Online Piracy Act, but their industry association, the Entertainment Software Alliance, still supports it.

However, all three companies are members of the Entertainment Software Association, a group that still remains aligned to SOPA.

David Rusenko, co-founder of website hosting service Weebly.com, describes how GoDaddy wiped his domain name records, only restoring them after a phone call. All it took was a single complaint against a single user.

"They had received a complaint about the content of a site, and that they were removing the DNS entries for weebly.com

A reader writes, "One more time, some lobbyists try to regulate the Internet with some of the stupidest laws or rules. SOPA (in US) is again one of this tentative to break down the freedom of citizen worldwide to preserve some archaic business model. — Read the rest

GoDaddy just released a statement withdrawing its support for SOPA.

Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

"Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better," Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, said.

Nick sez, "I wrote a post on my company's blog (The Positive Internet Company) explaining why SOPA is a big deal not just in the US, but for the Internet as a whole. We have rescued a number of sites from malign censorship (like Dr Ben Goldacre's 'Bad Science' blog), so we know exactly how such laws will be abused. — Read the rest