Tuesday, December 13, 2011
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
"The bill would allow the US Department of Justice (DOJ), as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who requests the court orders, the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the infringing website; barring search engines from linking to such sites and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a felony."
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Dec 14, 01:10:00 PM:
You'd think that Hollywood would have learned its lesson by now.
You can't stop a new content delivery system -- cassete tapes, VHS, DVD, napster MP3, streaming -- by passing a law and then hanging a few relative innocents to make an example of them.
Figure out how to profit from it. Steve Jobs did, which was the key to Apple's comeback.
Some companies will get hurt, but that's life. I'm looking at cable companies. They're literally selling the rope with which they'll get hung. Netflix at times has an amazing share of the bits that are getting carried on cable companies' pipes.
By 
Willuz, at
Thu Dec 15, 08:36:00 AM:
As with most of these types of laws it will have little to no effect on piracy, but a devastating effect on legitimate and falsely accused sites. The most effective way to resolve piracy is for the media companies to support a single distribution method like Netflix so that consumers have a solution which is better than piracy. Instead, the media companies are withdrawing their content or jacking up the prices in order to drive Netflix out of business.
Example:
I got tired of paying for my cable DVR which is slow, misses the end of shows, has horrible menus, too small of a hard drive and costs to much. My chosen solution was a networked cable card DVR which streams to PC's. In an attempt to thwart piracy, the following requirements are placed on the consumer:
- Cablecard must be obtained from the provider
- Cablecard must be activated by the provider (extremely difficult)
- Premium channels set to "Copy Never" cannot be recorded so forget about HBO, Showtime, etc...
- Most cable companies set all of their channels to "copy once" so the DVR recording can only be viewed on the PC on which it was recorded
- Only Windows 7 PC's can be used
- Only Microsoft Media Center can view "copy once" channels (i.e. all the channels)
- The computer must have a hardware encoding video card
- The video card and monitor/tv must be HDCP capable over HDMI
- The moon and stars must be in proper alignment for all of the above to work at the same time
So as a paying consumer I deal with all of the above. What do pirates have to do?
- Download a cablecard hack from the internet
- Plug in an HDCP stripper
- Record anything, anytime with no DRM
Internet laws have the exact same effect, they hurt the consumers and completely fail to solve piracy.
By , at
Thu Dec 15, 08:52:00 AM:
My son will be home from college soon. Can't wait for him to show me his "black art".
I'm a netflix fan, but frustrated because of their title limitations for streaming. Would be happy to pay for a reasonable solution.
