Gunsling Birds

from www.thenation.com http://www.thenation.com/article/164209/occupy-college

And good on Google for refusing to do it.

TechCrunch still finds room to criticize the company, and I agree with most of that criticism. (It would be nice if they named the police agency.) Still, Google’s transparency report is in itself a pretty remarkable thing. Even as the company is facing pressure and investigations from governments all over the world, it continues to put out a report every six months documenting how many times various government asked for user information or that a video be censored, and how the company responded. Which means Google is not only risking the wrath of governments, it’s also giving civil liberties groups information they can use to criticize Google for the way it responds to these requests.

All of which I think deserves some praise.

from The Agitator http://www.theagitator.com/2011/10/27/google-police-agency-asked-that-police-misconduct-video-be-taken-down/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+radleybalko+%28The+Agitator%29

PROTECT-IP is a US Senate bill that establishes a draconian censorship and surveillance regime in America in the name of protecting copyright. Its House version, SOPA, has just been introduced, and it’s even worse than PROTECT-IP. Much, much worse:

As with its Senate-side evil sister, PROTECT-IP, SOPA would require service providers to “disappear” certain websites, endangering Internet security and sending a troubling message to the world: it’s okay to interfere with the Internet, even effectively blacklisting entire domains, as long as you do it in the name of IP enforcement. Of course blacklisting entire domains can mean turning off thousands of underlying websites that may have done nothing wrong. And in what has to be an ironic touch, the very first clause of SOPA states that it shall not be “construed to impose a prior restraint on free speech.” As if that little recitation could prevent the obvious constitutional problem in what the statute actually does.

But it gets worse. Under this bill, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities. Websites that simply don’t do enough to police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would qualify as “enough”) are now under threat, even though the DMCA expressly does not require affirmative policing. It creates new enforcement tools against folks who dare to help users access sites that may have been “blacklisted,” even without any kind of court hearing. The bill also requires that search engines, payment providers (such as credit card companies and PayPal), and advertising services join in the fun in shutting down entire websites. In fact, the bill seems mainly aimed at creating an end-run around the DMCA safe harbors. Instead of complying with the DMCA, a copyright owner may now be able to use these new provisions to effectively shut down a site by cutting off access to its domain name, its search engine hits, its ads, and its other financing even if the safe harbors would apply.

Disastrous IP Legislation Is Back – And It’s Worse than Ever

from Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2011/10/27/sopa-us-house-of-reps-copyright-bill-proposes-national-censorship-attacks-on-hosting-services-twitter-youtube.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

Ingrid Bergman

from bebe le strange http://bebelestrange.tumblr.com/post/11985255516