Their Only Crime Was Guilt by Association ~ SOPA

One Domain - One Main Forum - Many Satellite Sites - All Guilty .. By Association ...

What is a ~ Satellite Websites ...Are satellite sites too risky?

The RIAA/MPAA (The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trade organization that represents the recording industry distributors in the United States) is pressing the government to legislated SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. But the effect will be globally devastating for the Internet.

SOPA operates under the "guilt by association" philosophy where anyone can be held responsible for other people's copyright infringing content.

The RIAA/MPAA want to make any form of linking to copyright infringing content a felony. In effect, resources such as search engines could be held responsible for the search results if they contain links to sites with copyright infringing content. The same would apply to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Yes, SOPA is that overly broad and stupid. SOPA attempts to expand the scope of legal liability to ridiculous proportions.

Continues ...read more ..

It gets worse...The RIAA/MPAA want to shift the responsibility of enforcing copyright law to the Internet service providers. In essence, the RIAA/MPAA want to make ISPs the "copyright police" and employ privacy invasive monitoring such as deep packet inspection to enforce SOPA.

This "Copyright Firewall" the RIAA/MPAA wants established is essentially government sanctioned DNS spoofing.

Such tactics are used by China and Iran to censor the Internet within their borders.

DNS spoofing is a form of malicious attack where DNS servers are tricked into caching incorrect information so users can be redirected to specific sites. Sites blocked under SOPA would have their visitors redirected via DNS spoofing.

Anyone who believes that, if SOPA is passed, that it will remain a largely American problem and that it will only affect the "bad guys", is being incredibly naïve. If SOPA is passed, the effect will be global and it will affect everyone, guilty and innocent alike.
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Guilt By Association

The interconnected nature of the Internet fostered the growth of online communities such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. These sites host our humdrum daily interactions and serve as a public soapbox for our political voice.

Both the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA would create a national firewall by censoring the domain names of websites accused of hosting infringing copyrighted materials.

This legislation would enable law enforcement to take down the entire tumblr.com domain due to something posted on a single blog. Yes, an entire, largely innocent online community could be punished for the actions of a tiny minority.
If you think this scenario is unlikely, consider what happened to Mooo.com earlier this year.

Back in February, the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security seized 10 domains during a child-porn crackdown called “Operation Protect Our Children.”

Along with this group of offenders, 84,000 more entirely innocent sites were tagged with the following accusatory splash page: “Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution."

Their only crime was guilt by association: They were all using the same domain name .. Mooo.com domain.

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