Protect the Internet

Mozilla ^ | 11/16/11

[Retro Llama]

On November 16th, Congress holds hearings on the first American Internet censorship system. This bill can pass. If it does, the Internet and free speech will never be the same...

[Paperdoll]

Let’s see. Would that be the House or the Senate?

[Rudder]

How does this bill hurt the internet?

[TheOldLady]

Click the Pic               Thank you, JoeProBono

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[SorbetCon]

This website for instance could be completely blocked, Great Firewall of China style, because it posts whole copies of copyrighted works. Say someone grabs a post from a news site and pastes it in a comment here. Currently that news site can send a DMCA notice and an admin here can remove the infringing content without any penalty. (Called the Safe Harbor provision).

This bill changes the system so a company sends a copyright complaint to Free Repubilc's hosting provider and/or payment processors. Then www.freerepublic.com will be blocked. (You could still access the website via the IP Address). Credit Card donations would be blocked. The admins here would then have 5 days to file an appeal. It also removes the "Safe Harbor" provision from the DMCA which means any sites that accept user submitted content (Facebook, Twitter, Free Republic, really anything with a comments section) would then become responsible for the content users submit.

Basically the government gets cut out of the loop and Warner Brothers, Associate Press, etc would be sending legally binding notifications to service providers on their own. WB sent out fake notices under the current system a more powerful set of regualtions means internet disaster.