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US Crackdown On Web Piracy 'Shelved' 9:28pm UK, Monday January 16, 2012 US plans to legislate against internet piracy appear to have been effectively shelved after Barack Obama came out against it and Congressional leaders reportedly said a vote would not be held "unless there is consensus". The bill, popularly known as the 'Stop Online Privacy Act' or Sopa, had been hotly opposed by tech giants such as Google and Facebook. User-generated website Reddit had vowed to carry out a blackout on January 18 in protest against the bill, with Wikipedia possibly following suit. Today, California congressman Darrell Issa, who...

It’s like a political blindside to the American voter. Somehow, with virtually no coverage in the press, the White House has managed to close in on the unthinkable… bending online piracy laws to give the Department of Justice abusive power over the Internet. Sound farfetched? Constitutionalist attorney Gary Kreep, President of the United States Justice Foundation (USJF), not only has a firm grasp on the legislation that would grant this authority, but he also has inside sources informing him that the Senate is scheduled to make this potential nightmare a reality when they pass S. 968 into law on January...

In a move the technology sector will surely see as a victory, a controversial antipiracy bill being debated in Congress will no longer include a provision that would require ISPs to block access to overseas Web sites accused of piracy. Rep. Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), one of the biggest backers of the Stop Online Piracy Act, today said he plans to remove the Domain Name System or DNS-blocking provision. "After consultation with industry groups across the country," Smith said in a statement released by his office, "I feel we should remove DNS-blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that...

It is no secret that the MPAA and other pro-copyright groups lobby politicians and law enforcers, but when a column by a prominent Attorney General appears to be written directly by the entertainment industries something is horribly wrong. A few days ago Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff wrote an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune. In the column the Attorney General stresses how important it is for Congress to pass the SOPA and PIPA bills. The MPAA is delighted with the support and praised it in a blog post yesterday. “Shurtleff effectively hammers the point that Google, Yahoo and...

In the midst of all this talk of jobs and wars and families, one of the issues the Republican presidential candidates have not addressed that much is the internet. Specifically, their positions on regulating the internet. Over the weekend, Rick Santorum was asked by a New Hampshire resident during a campaign stop if he supported or opposed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which would give the government more authority to regulate the internet and crack down harder on piracy. Considering how much the Republican party of late has been concerned with government overreach, Santorum has been a surprisingly strong...

I already wrote a big post about yesterday's SOPA markup day one. While we're moving forward on day two, I wanted to call out one key point that was really made clear by an amendment offered by Rep. Jared Polis late in the day yesterday, which hasn't received nearly enough attention. As you may recall, with the "manager's amendment" version of SOPA (i.e., SOPA 2.0), the "notice-and-shut off funding" section of the private right of action in Section 103 was removed. This was good, because we've seen how the notice-and-takedown provision of the DMCA has been widely abused. However, what...

Prominent Rightwing Blogger Promises To Work Hard To Defeat Any Rightwing SOPA Supporters In Congress from the good-for-him,-how-about-the-left? dept One of the more interesting things about the whole SOPA/PIPA debate (and, as I've pointed out for many years, about any of the intellectual property policy fights) is how non-partisan they are. In fact, I think it's important that they're non-partisan, because when things become partisan, they become... well... silly (on both sides). SOPA/PIPA supporters keep touting how their bills have "bi-partisan" support, but I'd argue what's much more powerful is how the growing movement protesting these bills is almost entirely...

The PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) is a threatening sequel to last year's COICA Internet censorship bill that would—like its predecessor—invite Internet security risks, threaten online speech, and hamper Internet innovation. Urge your members of Congress to reject this dangerous bill! Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the PROTECT IP Act as a new way to prevent online infringement. But innovation and free speech advocates know that PIPA is nothing more than a dangerous wish list that will compromise Internet security while doing little or nothing to encourage creative expression.

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jul 5 (OneWorld) - A vast majority of Americans disagree with President George W. Bush's stance on global warming, a new poll said Tuesday amid reports of a widening rift over climate change between the United States and its partners in the Group of Eight (G8) dominant countries. ''Going into the G8 Summit, nearly all Americans feel that the U.S. should not be a laggard, but should be ready to do as much as most other developed countries to reduce emissions that cause climate change,'' said Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy...

We report, you get it wrong By Jim Lobe WASHINGTON - The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War and its aftermath, according to a major new study released in Washington on Thursday. And the more you watch the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, in particular, the more likely it is that your perceptions about the war are wrong, adds the report by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). Based on several nationwide surveys it conducted with California-based Knowledge Networks since June,...

Heavy viewers of the Fox News Channel are nearly four times as likely to hold demonstrably untrue positions about the war in Iraq as media consumers who rely on National Public Radio or the Public Broadcasting System, according to a study released this week by a research center affiliated with the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs. "When evidence surfaces that a significant portion of the public has just got a hole in the picture ... this is a potential problem in the way democracy functions," says Clay Ramsay, research director for the Washington-based Program on International Policy Attitudes,...

Fox News fans misinformed, study finds BY BRIAN LAMBERT Pioneer Press One of Jay Leno's best shticks is "Jaywalking," when he manages to find more or less average Americans who know, or at least appear to know, almost nothing about the world beyond Entertainment Weekly. Show them a picture of Abe Lincoln, and they're stumped. "Is he the guy from Smashmouth?" Ask them to name two countries that border the United States, and you get, "Covina? Azuza? I don't know." It's scary - these people could be called for jury duty or placed in middle management. But it gets scarier...

One of Jay Leno's best shticks is "Jaywalking," when he manages to find more or less average Americans who know, or at least appear to know, almost nothing about the world beyond Entertainment Weekly. Show them a picture of Abe Lincoln, and they're stumped. "Is he the guy from Smashmouth?" Ask them to name two countries that border the United States, and you get, "Covina? Azuza? I don't know." It's scary — these people could be called for jury duty or placed in middle management. But it gets scarier yet, apparently, when you start asking 3,334 randomly selected adult Americans...

Fact-Free News ".. researchers discovered that large minorities of Americans entertained some highly fanciful beliefs about the facts of the Iraqi war. Fully 48 percent of Americans believed that the United States had uncovered evidence demonstrating a close working relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Another 22 percent thought that we had found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq... The fair and balanced folks at Fox, the survey concludes, were 'the news source whose viewers had the most misperceptions.' Eighty percent of Fox viewers believed at least one of these un-facts; 45 percent believed all three." Added 4:45...

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/next/2001803151_nextmisinformed30.html Pacific Misinformed America: What we don't know could hurt us allNEXT guest We take pride in being a democracy. But a democracy is only as good as the choices of its voters. A recent study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) revealed some disturbing facts about how misinformed many Americans are, and how that affects our country. The PIPA group looked at how accurately Americans responded on key questions about Iraq involving terrorist links, weapons of mass destruction and global support for invasion. It then compared where the respondents got their news, and their level of support...