New software called “Tribler” is the new weapon in the battle for Internet liberty and does not need a website to track users sharing torrent files. RT reports.
According to The Raw Story, it is a “peer-to-peer network protocol that enables computers to share files with thousands of others.”
For many this could be the solution movie and music pirates have been waiting for. Essentially it leaves no accountability for website owners.
While lawmakers are dreaming of a censored web, many believe Tribler will be a true nightmare for them.
According to Torrent Freak, the attempt to disconnect users from the Internet for “illegal” purposes will be foiled by the software that has been in the works for the past five years and will make it nearly “impossible” to stop file sharing.
“The only way to take it down is to take the Internet down,” stated Doctor Pouwelse of Delft University of Technology to the Daily Mail.
According to The Guardian, The Pirate Party UK will join an international day of action against controversial copyright agreement ACTA on Saturday with protests planned for London, Glasgow and Nottingham.
Pirate Party UK leader Loz Kaye said: "We saw what the combination of protest and political pressure achieved with the dropping of SOPA [the Stop Online Piracy Act].
"But the threats to digital rights and civil liberties aren't over. It's vital that we send a clear message that the people of Europe don't want ACTA."
European activists who participated in American Internet protests last month learned that there was political power to be harnessed on the Web. Now they are putting that knowledge to use in an effort to defeat new global rules for intellectual property. The New York Times reports.
In the U.S. protests , Web sites including Wikipedia went dark Jan. 18, and more than seven million people signed Google’s online petition opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act. Ultimately, even the bills’ sponsors in the U.S. Congress backed down under the onslaught of public criticism.
The European activists are hoping to use similar pressure to stop the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement , or ACTA, which is meant to clamp down on illegal commerce in copyrighted and trademarked goods. Opponents say that it will erode Internet freedom and stifle innovation. About 1.5 million people have signed a Web petition calling for the European Parliament to reject ACTA, which some say is merely SOPA and PIPA on an international level. Thousands of people have turned out for demonstrations across Europe, with more scheduled for next Saturday.
Access, an organisation that says it is a “new global movement for digital freedom”, has organised an international day against ACTA on February 11, hoping the world comes out in “an unprecedented showing of solidarity” against the treaty. TheNextWeb reports.
Access already seen 331,976 people sign its Anti-ACTA petition and has gone one step further to assist in notifying its website visitors of protest events in their local area. The organization has begun listing Facebook events for each protest around the world, motioning for individuals to create their own and request for them to be added to the list.
Sweden’s Supreme Court just announced it won’t agree to hear an appeal by The Pirate Bay’s founders, meaning the jail sentences and fines imposed by the Swedish Court of Appeals will stand.
In other words, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström, who started file-sharing site The Pirate Bay in September 2003, face jail time and have to collectively pony up a fine of 46 million Swedish kronor (US$6.7 million). TIME Techland reports.
In April 2009, The Pirate Bay’s founders were found guilty of abetting copyright infringement and sentenced to a year in prison, plus a fine of 30 million SEK (about US$4.2 million at the time). All four appealed, but the Swedish Appeals Court upheld the verdict in November 2010, decreasing the sentence’s jail times, but increasing the fine to 46 million SEK.
The group then attempted to bring the case before Sweden’s Supreme Court, but found themselves rudderless this morning after the Supreme Court effectively waved the case off.
Barack Obama was last night facing a groundswell of protest within the U.S. over attempts to extradite British student Richard O’Dwyer. The Daily Mail reports.
Incredibly, the plight of the 23-year-old – who is accused of breaking copyright laws – came top of a list of subjects the American public want to put to their president.
The student’s legal team argue the site did not store any copyright material and merely pointed users to other sites in the same way as Yahoo and Google.
... Any American with a YouTube account was invited to post a question or vote on a question. Some 227,966 submitted 133,255 questions and cast 1,630,870 votes.
The top question read: ‘Why are you personally supporting the extradition of UK citizen Richard O’Dwyer for solely linking to copyright-infringing works using an Extradition Treaty designed to combat terrorism and to bring terrorists to judgement in the USA?’
Many of the claims about ACTA that are circulating among the treaty's opponents are highly misleading or outright inaccurate. arstechnica has been covering ACTA for over four years, and sheds some light on a tricky subject.
Mainly, thanks in part to an intense public backlash, most of the controversial proposals were stripped out, or at least watered down, in the final version of ACTA.
That final version has been publicly available for months, but many ACTA opponents continue to focus on these deleted provisions in their arguments against the treaty. arstechnica will examine four of the most trenchant claims about ACTA that have been circulating on the Internet in the last week, then compare them to what ACTA actually says.
David Meyer for ZDNet in article titled "ACTA: Facts, misconceptions and questions" takes stock of the final treaty, outlining key points about the contents and process and about the next steps.
Very useful because it's an area where most media reports are confusing, Meyer lists which countries signed when - and the countries that haven't signed yet - though they were present at the negociations.
Data from MegaUpload could be erased as early as this Thursday, a report says--a disturbing prospect for those who might have used the recently shut down cyberlocker for legitimate purposes such as backing up business files. [via CNet]
... MegaUpload attorney Ira Rothken told the AP that at least 50 million Megaupload users have data that could be deleted, and that the company is working with prosecutors to try to prevent the data from being vaporized.
At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites.
22 European Union states, and the EU itself, have today signed the controversial ACTA treaty, which critics say could lead to severe restrictions on freedom and civil liberties online. TheNextWeb reports.
As Wired UK reports, at a ceremony in Tokyo, the UK, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden all agreed to adopt ACTA.
ACTA - the Anti-Counterfeiting Trademark Agreement – is a voluntary agreement between nations that covers a wide range of counterfeit goods, both physical and digital. However, it has stirred up controversy for both the secretive ‘behind-closed doors’ way in which it was drafted, and the effect it could have on our online lives.
As the Stop Acta campaign site explains, the agreement would make ISPs liable for copyright infringements carried out on their networks, leading to them to introduce surveillance technology to keep tabs on their customers’ online activity. A ‘Three strikes’ policy would also be forced upon Internet users, blacklisting them from ISPs after a series of warnings if they were found to have shared files illegally.
Critics also accuse ACTA of introducing important news laws ‘through the back door’, via a trade agreement which will become binding when ratified, instead of via individual countries introducing their own laws which would have to be debated openly in public. The remaining EU member states are expected to sign soon. Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and the US are already signed up to the agreement.
However, ACTA isn’t a done deal yet – it still needs to be ratified by the countries that have joined, something that’s not expected in the EU for several months. An opposition movement is gathering pace.
Given the international nature of this agreement, the noise made against the United States’ SOPA and PIPA bills last week could be nothing to what we see against ACTA.
SOPA and PIPA might be on hold for the time-being, but there is a greater threat looming. It's called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and it's an international agreement that aims to establish multinational standards on intellectual property rights enforcement.
ACTA may be scarier than SOPA, Internet freedom advocates say, and outrage over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement treaty is growing as it gains international prominence in the wake of the U.S. Congress shelving the Stop Online Piracy Act last week. International Business Times reports.
ACTA opponents, from the EFF to the Anonymous hacktivist collective are coalescing in opposition to the treaty.
Despite these key similarities, the ACTA vs. SOPA debate usually ends up with opponents warning that ACTA is an even graver global threat to the Internet as we know it.
Five reasons why:
1. Scope: The key reason why ACTA is scarier to many online freedom advocates is the fact that it is an international treaty.
2. Transparency: The SOPA debate took place mostly outside of the public eye at first, but because it was taking place in the halls of the U.S. Congress, Internet freedom advocates were able to monitor the proceedings and respond.
But the ACTA treaty is being negotiated almost entirely behind closed doors.
3. Ease of Approval: The SOPA bill was derailed because it required both houses of the U.S. Congress to pass it, and for President Barack Obama to sign it. Once approved, it would have been subject to legal challenge and could have been repealed or amended by future Congresses.
ACTA, on the other hand, was already signed by the United States on Oct. 11, 2011, and Obama was not required to get the approval of any outside authority to do so: not the Congress, not the Supreme Court, and not the American public.
4. Level of Support: Even before the efforts of opponents brought down the controversial legislation, SOPA had only 31 co-sponsors in Congress, meaning it was never a wildly popular bill to begin with. Despite the loud cries that SOPA was threatening the Internet as we know it and that Congress was about to pass it, it was never really that close to being made into law.
ACTA, on the other had, is an international treaty, meaning that it requires unilateral signatures, not votes based at least in part on public opinion. And the Obama administration has already signed it for America.
5. Visibility: The campaign to stop SOPA began relatively early on in its development. By the time it was even able to go to markup in the House Judiciary Committee, opponents were already loudly making their opinions known to a large slice of the Internet-using public.
ACTA, on the other hand, is largely off most people's radars, though it has been under negotiation for about five years.
Swizz Beatz, the rapper and producer who is married to singer Alicia Keys, is allegedly "bracing himself" for an FBI interview following the arrest of executives at filesharing website Megaupload, where he was listed as CEO.
The arrest of Megaupload's founders has led to other file storage sites taking action in an apparent attempt to protect themselves from legal action. And raises legitimate concern over consumers relying on 'cloud' storage for their data. The BBC reports.
Filesonic has disabled its sharing functions, allowing users to access only their own files.
Uploaded.to, which offers a service in which uploaders can receive money depending on how many people download their files, remains fully operational - but US visitors can no longer access its servers.
Other so-called "digital locker" services, such as Switzerland-based Rapidshare, have defended themselves by pointing out their anti-piracy measures.
Megaupload's closure suggested that copyright enforcers were moving away from targeting individual file-sharers as they had done in the past.
"This is all a trend of going towards the facilitators, the organisers of this," Michael Moore, a partner at law firm Marks & Clerk, told the BBC.
ACTA is a secretly negotiated copyright treaty that obliges its signatories to take on many of the worst features of SOPA and PIPA. The EU is nearing ratification of it. ACTA was instigated by US trade reps under the Bush Administration, who devised and enforced its unique secrecy regime, but the Obama administration enthusiastically pursued it. This White House petition asks the administration to withdraw its support for the treaty.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is a 'plurilateral' trade agreement, currently being negotiated between the US, Canada, Japan, the European Union, South Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand. It is somewhat similar to SOPA/PIPA, however ACTA is an executive agreement between countries besides the United States, and it can be passed without the approval from Congress and the Supreme Court. It is potentially hazardous to the Internet we know and how it works.
We need to stop ACTA before it is finally approved by all countries involved. If you value your privacy and you don't want "Big Brother" watching over you, sign this petition and spread the word. Research ACTA and see just how dangerous it is to the Internet, our privacy, and our liberties.
Kim Schmitz legally changed his surname to Dotcom at some point over the last decade, a homage to the technology that made him a millionaire and that has now landed him in a New Zealand jail. The WSJ reports.
The 38-year-old Internet entrepreneur was arrested Thursday at his birthday celebration inside a 25,000-square-foot mansion in Auckland. When police entered the property, Mr. Dotcom fled to a safe room, where he was found with a loaded shotgun, officials said.
... Despite the legal controversy brewing around his website—and a previous conviction for insider trading—Mr. Dotcom didn't lay low or hide anonymously behind his computer.
Rather, Mr. Dotcom openly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. He owned at least 18 luxury cars—including a 1959 pink Cadillac and three cars with vanity license plates that read "HACKER," "MAFIA," and "STONED," according to U.S. officials—flew helicopters, and personally funded the city of Auckland's 2010 New Year's fireworks celebration.
The Justice Department's massive copyright case against the file-sharing website Megaupload.com had the Internet world hopping this week. But it also got lawyers talking, about the scope of a criminal investigation that spanned eight countries and the hard-nosed tactics that the government deployed. npr reports.
Prosecutors and FBI agents who built the case against Megaupload call it an international crime ring — a racketeering enterprise, like the mob or a drug gang, that made $175 million from pirated movies and music since 2005 and cost copyright holders nearly half a billion dollars more.
... Megaupload has hired megalawyer Bob Bennett, who once represented President Bill Clinton, to make its case in American courts. Bennett told NPR that he intends to "vigorously dispute the charges," which carry huge financial penalties and a 20-year prison term if the executives are convicted.
Orin Kerr, an expert in computer law at George Washington University, says the legal fight is only just beginning.
"There are very complicated jurisdictional questions," Kerr says. "Did the individuals know they were violating United States law? Did that matter? Does it matter that you know you're violating the law in the U.S. even though you're outside the U.S.?
There are plenty of players in the no-questions-asked online storage game: HulkShare, MediaFire, YouSendIt. They're all staples of web sharing—and they're all still up and running today. Partly because they're smaller than Megaupload, partly because they're smarter, but mostly because they're don't operate like sloppy drug kingpins. Gizmodo reports.
The Mega Conspiracy crew—which spanned continents, and was lead by flamboyant fatboy millionaire conman Kim Dotcom—was openly, wittingly rich off of copyrighted music. They were flagrant about their intentions to squeeze cash out of Simpsons episodes and 50 Cent albums, rewarding their most piracy-pushing users, laundering money through the site, and spending the cash in the most conspicuous ways imaginable.
In the most decisive sign yet that support for controversial antipiracy legislation has collapsed, Sen. Harry Reid issues a statement announcing he has postponed the vote on the Protect IP Act. [via CNet]
In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday's vote," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), in a statement.
The numbers are pretty amazing. More than 1 million messages (and counting!) were sent to Congress Wednesday via the EFF action center. More than 4.5 million people signed Google's petition registering their opposition to the bills. And that's just the beginning.
In the aftermath of Wednesday's SOPA/PIPA blackout protests, the Internet community amassed quite a bit of goodwill, flexed its muscles in a friendly, humorous, civil-disobedience kind of way, and, remarkably, even managed to change quite a few minds. CNet reports.
Just 24 short hours later, Anonymous legions nuked that goodwill and took cyber security into thermonuclear territory. The real question now is: were they played?
... Affected sites include the White House, the FBI, the Department of Justice, multiple record label sites, the MPAA, and RIAA, and the U.S. Copyright Office.
The attacks were spawned by a large-scale indictment and the arrest of four people associated with a hosting and storage site called Megaupload, all accused of online piracy.
In a collective rage, Anonymous lashed out with the force of a cyber-nuke. The display of power is awesome--there will be a lot of high-fiving hackers tonight, that's for sure. And given the massive power of the legions, this story will get more attention in just a few hours than the SOPA/PIPA blackouts ever did.
According to the AP, Federal prosecutors in Virginia have shut down one of the world’s largest file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, and charged its founder and others with violating piracy laws.
The indictment accuses the company of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content.
The indictment says at one point, Megaupload was the 13th most popular website in the world.
Members of the Senate are rushing for the exits in the wake of the Internet's unprecedented protest of the Protect IP Act (PIPA).
At least 13 members of the upper chamber announced their opposition on Wednesday. In a particularly severe blow for Hollywood, at least five of the newly-opposed Senators were previously co-sponsors of the Protect IP Act. (Update: since we ran this story, the tally is up to 18 Senators, of which seven are former co-sponsors.)
Over the course of Wednesday, millions of people signed onto Google's petition by clicking on a thick black censorship stamp across its colorful logo. [via CNet]
"The last number we released was at 4:30pm ET," said Google spokesperson Christine Chen. "At that point we were at 4.5 million signatories and counting."
Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.," the petition reads. "Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.
TheNextWeb has put together a list of some of the Web’s major sites and figured out approximately how much they stood to lose, based on their annual revenue, if they had gone black to protest SOPA.
Google: About $100 million per day if Google had done more than cover its logo.
Facebook: If they closed shop for one day they would lose almost $11.7 million, and angered tons of Facebook users.
eBay: eBay alone would put one day’s loss at almost $28 million, without taking into account each individual seller’s losses.
Amazon: Amazon would have been looking at around $82 million lost in one day.
Yahoo: The company would have missed out on about $11.8 million, but it has far more to worry about these days.
The Stop Online Piracy Act is an American piece of legislation, and as a general rule, American legislation has only limited influence outside US borders. arstechnica reports.
SOPA is a little different from most legislation, however, in that it has an explicit focus on websites that are, in some sense, "foreign." SOPA regulates the dealings between American service providers—most notably search engines, advertising networks, and payment processors (such as PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard)—and foreign sites. Search engines will have to remove listings of offending foreign sites; advertising networks will have to stop selling ads to offending sites; payment processors will have to stop processing payments from Americans for offending sites.
Early versions of the bill also had provisions requiring disruption of DNS services, something that would have had an impact that was felt globally. Fortunately, these provisions have been dropped.
The delineation between foreign and domestic that SOPA makes is arbitrary and inaccurate. Canadians, whose IP address allocations are governed by the US-based ARIN, probably qualify as "domestic," and so may evade SOPA's regulations. So too might the Hong Kong-based MegaUpload, thanks to its dot-com domain name, and similarly the Switzerland-based RapidShare. The Pirate Bay might also escape SOPA's reach, thanks to a dot-org domain name. There's plenty of scope for interference with these sites' operations, through measures such as ICE takedowns. Just not necessarily using SOPA as the justification.
ut most foreign sites—those using domain names registered in non-US registrars, and/or IP addresses allocated by non-US regional Internet registries—are covered by SOPA. If they deal, in whole or in part, with Americans, and if this dealing involves counterfeit medicines or pirated intellectual property, they can find themselves victims of a range of unilateral actions. Search engines could purge them from their listings, and payment processors and advertisers could cut off their revenue streams.
Today, if you reside in the U.S and you access Google.com, the search giant has blacked out its logo in protest against the SOPA and PIPA, stating that it believes politicians should “end piracy, not liberty” as the bills would “cenesor the Internet and slow economic growth.”
According to MacObserver, Congress has dropped SOPA.
President Obama spoke out against SOPA and targeted key parts of the bill that would require domain hosts to block websites suspected of sharing content that’s copyright protected based on little more than a complaint.
Bill supporters responded first by dropping language that required hosting companies to block websites suspected of copyright infringement, then later shelved the entire bill. A new version could, however, find its way back to the debate floor should law makers come to a consensus on wording that’s more to the President’s liking.
While SOPA may be on the back burner for now, a similar bill called the Protect IP Act (PIPA) is still working its way through the Senate.
Late Friday, California representative Darrell Issa announced that the House is holding off on any vote on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act until a “consensus” can be reached, and that the bill’s creator, Texas representative Lamar Smith, has agreed to remove a portion of the bill that would allow sites to be deleted from the Internet’s domain name system.
Rupert Murdoch's latest tweets accuse President Obama of supporting Google—the "piracy leader"—and the rest of his "Silicon Valley paymasters." The accusations follow a White House blog that expressed doubts about the Stop Online Piracy Act.
He claims that his support to Silicon Valley "pirates" instead of SOPA will destroy US jobs.
Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them.No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.
According to ABC News, as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and complementary bills make their way through Congress, the Obama administration responded today to two online petitions regarding the measures. The petitions, each of which had been signed by more than 51,000 people as of press time, were filed through the White House’s “We the People” online initiative.
The Hollywood Reporter reports that a message posted on a White House blog on Saturday says that the Obama administration acknowledges the threat that foreign websites pose but it “will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”
The White House's message Saturday comes in response to online petitions cirticizing the proposed law.
A judge ruled on Friday that a 23-year-old student can be extradited to the United States for running a website posting links to pirated TV shows and films, despite significant doubts over whether such sites break any UK laws. The Guardian.
The ruling threw Britain's contentious extradition treaty with the US, which critics allege is greatly biased against UK nationals fighting their removal to America, under further scrutiny.
Richard O'Dwyer, a computing student at Sheffield Hallam University, faces a potential 10-year term in a US jail despite never having been to America or using web servers based in the country. When still a teenager O'Dwyer set up a website, TVShack, which posted links to pirated material. It did not directly host any files, which meant, according to the student's lawyers, that it acted as little more than a Google-type search engine and did not breach copyright.
Rep. Lamar Smith said Friday that he will remove a controversial provision from the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that would have required ISPs to block Web sites with infringing content. PCMag reports.
SOPA targets "rogue" overseas Web sites that traffic in illegal goods, from fake purses to prescription drugs. It would allow the Department of Justice to obtain court orders to go after these Web sites and, before today, would have required ISPs to block sites with infringing content. Detractors, however, were concerned that the bill was too broad and would've targeted legitimate sites.
Though DNS blocking will be removed, SOPA will still allow officials to "follow the money" and cut off payment options to foreign illegal sites, like credit-card processing or PayPal accounts. Search engines like Google and Bing would also still be required to remove infringing Web sites from their search results. Copyright holders could also still bring claims against foreign Web sites that steal their technology, products, or IP.
The latest grumblings (or lack thereof) from the lawmakers on Capitol Hill suggest that they're coming around to the idea that the latest anti-piracy efforts in the House and the Senate might've been a little hasty. The Atlantic Wire reports.
Patrick Leahy, a senator from Vermont who co-authored the PROTECT IP anti-piracy bill, posted a press release on Thursday, confessing that his legislation needed "more study" before implementation. It's a sure sign that's he's starting to cave to political pressure -- much of which is coming from the unexpectedly increasingly politically powerful Reddit -- and other lawmakers could follow suit.
Over on Techdirt, Mike Masnick has pointed out the mother of all ironies: The Pirate Bay, one of the largest outlets of copyright infringement, would be immune to the takedown tendrils of the imminently incoming Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). ExtremeTech reports.
Apparently it all comes down to the fact that The Pirate Bay has a .org domain — and according to Masnick, the current version of the SOPA bill working its way through congress excludes American domestic domains from being the target of takedown notices from copyright holders. In this case, a “domestic domain” is any domain that comes from a TLD run by an American registry — and sure enough, .org’s registry is Public Interest Registry, a US non-profit based in Virginia. In other words, thepiratebay.org isn’t eligible for a SOPA-based takedown, even if its servers are based in Sweden or another country outside the US.
Believe it or not, by the same logic, .com and .net domains — both of which are managed by American company VeriSign — would also be immune from the SOPA bill as it currently stands.
Presumably the bill distinguishes between domestic and non-domestic domains for legal or political reasons. SOPA was originally designed to target any “US-directed site” — i.e. any site that is accessible from the US — but a recent amendment narrows the target of SOPA down to “foreign internet sites.” If this is really the case, SOPA, as it stands, is toothless.
It's worth noting the same is true of both RapidShare and Megaupload -- two other sites frequently cited by the MPAA and the US Chamber of Commerce as the types of awful, evil sites that these bills are targeted to take down. In fact, remember that "53 billion visits to rogue websites" claim that the US Chamber of Commerce loves to repeat? Nearly half of that is from RapidShare and Megavideo/Megaupload. And yet, those sites are clearly excluded from SOPA based on the definitions. So why would they still be trotting them out as examples?
The Stop Online Piracy Act and its counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act, represent the greatest threat to a free internet we’ve seen from the US government yet. So far, the internet remains a frontier of innovation, the sharing of ideas, and free-wheeling communities. In many ways its the last unregulated bastion of free commerce in the world. And now it’s under attack.
Paul Tassi‘s call for an internet blackout. Noting that Reddit will go dark next week, Tassi says it’s just not enough and may be preaching to the choir:
That’s where a Google/Facebook blackout would have the power to instantly crush SOPA. If the sites went dark and instead linked to pages explaining the problems with SOPA, and then had links for people to contact Congress, I guarantee it would be the killing blow for the bill. National news agencies which have largely been avoiding covering SOPA because their parent companies support it would be forced to report on the topic, as Facebook and Google going offline would undoubtedly be the biggest tech story of the day, week, month, or possibly the year.
On the eve of the enactment of Spain's harsh new copyright law, El Pais has published a leaked letter from the US Ambassador to the outgoing Spanish president ordering him to enact the copyright law America's industry wants to see, or face trade sanctions. [The Guardian via boingboing]
Spain's new law establishes a Syrian/Chinese style censoring firewall that blocks websites on the basis of unproven copyright claims, and mirrors the matching provisions of the proposed US Stop Online Piracy Act, making censorship into one of today's leading American exports.
Controversial legislation that Sergei Brin, the co-founder of Google has warned "would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world" has received virtually no coverage from major American television news outlets during their evening newscasts and opinion programming. The parent companies of most of these networks, as well as two of the networks themselves, are listed as official "supporters" of this legislation on the U.S. House of Representatives' website.
Companies including Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Yahoo! and Wikipedia are said to be discussing a coordinated blackout of services to demonstrate the potential effect SOPA would have on the Internet, something already being called a “nuclear option” of protesting. TIME Techland reports.
According to Erickson, Markham Erickson, executive director of trade association NetCoalition, the companies are well aware of how serious an act such a blackout would be:
This type of thing doesn’t happen because companies typically don’t want to put their users in that position. The difference is that these bills so fundamentally change the way the Internet works. People need to understand the effect this special-interest legislation will have on those who use the Internet.
New software called “
According to 
European activists who participated in American Internet protests last month learned that there was political power to be harnessed on the Web. Now they are putting that knowledge to use in an effort to defeat new global rules for intellectual property. 
Sweden’s Supreme Court just announced it won’t agree to hear an appeal by The Pirate Bay’s founders, meaning the jail sentences and fines imposed by the Swedish Court of Appeals will stand.
Barack Obama was last night facing a groundswell of protest within the U.S. over attempts to extradite British student Richard O’Dwyer. 
Many of the claims about ACTA that are circulating among the treaty's opponents are highly misleading or outright inaccurate. 
22 European Union states, and the EU itself, have today signed the controversial 
The arrest of Megaupload's founders has led to other file storage sites taking action in an apparent attempt to protect themselves from legal action. And raises legitimate concern over consumers relying on 'cloud' storage for their data. The 
In the aftermath of Wednesday's 
The Stop Online Piracy Act is an American piece of legislation, and as a general rule, American legislation has only limited influence outside US borders. 
Great news, Hollywood has a potential new adversary in its effort to pass 
Over on 
Controversial legislation that Sergei Brin, the co-founder of Google has 
