Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
So far, the revisions have been fairly minor.
Many of those experts are techno-libertarians who said pretty much the same thing about the DMCA, or have commercial interests in providing users with whatever information they want, regardless of copyright laws.
For example, the idea that it would "break" the Internet is hyperbolic. At the worst, it might require ISP's to blacklist certain sites, or introduce some discrepancies between US and foreign DNS servers.
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The amendments proposed have in fact been quite significant; including amendments that would require the law to be reviewed after a certain period of time, to only put in force DNS/IP blocking after it has been studied and to limit the scope of SOPA to the U.S. Whether any of these will pass is unknown, but it is not correct to suggest the revisions have been minor.
And Whether or not the experts that testified are "techno libertarians" is irrelevant (and probably fallacious reasoning), as is our arguing about whether or not it will or will not break the internet. The point is that there has been no study done on the effect that SOPA will have, and it is obvious from the streaming broadcast of the hearing that the politicians involved haven't a clue about how the internet works. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the people proposing sweeping legislation to regulate the internet be required to have actually considered the issue carefully.
If you're interested at all, there's a letter
here from 83 engineers explaining what's wrong with SOPA and Protect IP from a technical perspective. Notable "techno libertarians" who signed the letter include:
-Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP (recognized as one of the "fathers of the internet" according to Wikipedia)
-Paul Vixie, author of BIND, the most widely-used DNS server software, and President of the Internet Systems Consortium
-Esther Dyson, EDventure; founding chairman, ICANN
-Christian Huitema, worked on building the Internet in France and Europe in the 80’s, and authored many Internet standards related to IPv6, RTP, and SIP; a former member of the Internet Architecture Board