COICA: US/World Internet Blacklist

[coolzeldad]

Progress:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-3804

Comments:

This morning, COICA unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) sets up a system through which the US government can blacklist a pirate website from the Domain Name System, ban credit card companies from processing US payments to the site, and forbid online ad networks from working with the site.
(Source:ARS Technica - http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/pirate-slaying-censorship-bill-gets-unanimous-support.ars)

Not only does the bill effect people of the United States, other countries will see the effects as the United States Government takes other actions to completely remove a website from the internet.

Any website is a potential target including youtube, google, etc.

There is tons of information online and I hope everyone will educate themselves and others about the truth and reality of this bill, in order to fight the bill's progress.

Description:
The COICA Internet Censorship and Copyright Bill

The "Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act" (COICA) is an Internet censorship bill which is rapidly making its way through the Senate. Although it is ostensibly focused on copyright infringement, an enormous amount of noninfringing content, including political and other speech, could disappear off the Web if it passes.

The main mechanism of the bill is to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS), which translates names like "www.eff.org" or "www.nytimes.com" into the IP addresses that computers use to communicate. The bill creates a blacklist of censored domains; the Attorney General can ask a court to place any website on the blacklist if infringement is "central" to the purpose of the site.

If this bill passes, the list of targets could conceivably include hosting websites such as Dropbox, MediaFire and Rapidshare; MP3 blogs and mashup/remix music sites like SoundCloud, MashupTown and Hype Machine ; and sites that discuss and make the controversial political and intellectual case for piracy, like pirate-party.us, p2pnet, InfoAnarchy, Slyck and ZeroPaid . Indeed, had this bill been passed five or ten years ago, YouTube might not exist today. In other words, the collateral damage from this legislation would be enormous. (Why would all these sites be targets?)

There are already laws and procedures in place for taking down sites that violate the law. This act would allow the Attorney General to censor sites even when no court has found they have infringed copyright or any other law.
(Source:Electronic Frontier Foundation - https://www.eff.org/coica)

Fight It:
http://demandprogress.org/blacklist/

Sign the petition.

Call your state senator and leave a message of the bill's disapproval.

Distribute Flyers
http://demandprogress.org/campaigns

More Reading:
http://demandprogress.org/blacklist/coica
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/pirate-slaying-censorship-bill-gets-unanimous-support.ars
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-segal/stop-the-internet-blackli_b_739836.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combating_Online_Infringement_and_Counterfeits_Act

I will potentially update this with more info.

[» Magic «]

I'm in the UK and I voted against this a long time ago

Over 3 mil votes against it

[Xrain]

News Update: Hot from my inbox

...big news! Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to send the Internet blacklist bill to the full Senate, but it was quickly stopped by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) who denounced it as "a bunker-buster cluster bomb" aimed at the Internet and pledged to "do everything I can to take the necessary steps to stop it from passing the U.S. Senate."

Wyden's opposition practically guarantees the bill is dead this year -- and next year the new Congress will have to reintroduce the bill and start all over again. But even that might not happen: Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Hollywood's own senator, told the committee that even she was uncomfortable with the Internet censorship portion of the bill and hoped it could be removed when they took it up again next year!

This is incredible -- and all thanks to you. Just a month ago, the Senate was planning to pass this bill unanimously; now even the senator from Hollywood is backing away from it. But this fight is far from over -- next year, there's going to be hearings, negotiations, and even more crucial votes. We need to be there, continuing to fight.

So it looks like we can still retain some faith in our government... for this year at least...   

[coolzeldad]

Wow nice, I'm impressed

[Tomcat]

A WOMAN

OMG THEY NEED TO GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN MOAR OFTEN