It’s time to shelve SOPA, PIPA
CYBEREYE
It’s time to shelve SOPA, PIPA
It is getting hard to find anyone outside of Hollywood who thinks that the two anti-piracy bills now pending in the House and the Senate are good ideas. Service providers who would be held responsible for blocking offending sites, the Internet community that is trying to secure the Domain Name System and even the Obama administration have weighed in against these ill-considered bills — and with good reason.
Both the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate’s Protect IP Act take the wrong tack in addressing the problem of sites outside U.S. jurisdiction engaged in online piracy or counterfeiting.
Because of the difficulty in attacking the sites themselves, the bills would place responsibility for effectively taking them offline for American users on third-party service providers. The bills would ban not only direct services supporting the sites but also serving up links or advertisements for the sites.
Related coverage:
SOPA undercuts Internet security, experts say; lawmakers float alternative
This is offensive for two reasons. The first, according to people who understand the technology, is that it would interfere with DNS Security Extensions, a technology that the administration has mandated be implemented in .gov domains and that is being rolled out in many other domains as well.
“Both of these remedies involve modifying DNS responses, and that is exactly what DNSSEC is designed to prevent, no matter who is doing it,” said Cricket Liu, general manager of the Infoblox IPv6 Center of Excellence. “The bill seeks to codify something that we in the DNS community have been working to prevent for 15 years.”
The second reason is that it should not be left to search engine operators or other service providers to filter content on the Internet based on what the courts or other governmental bodies find unacceptable. It is one thing to forbid financial services for overtly illegal transactions. It is another to censor sites and block traffic in an effort to make it appear in this country as if a site does not exist.
In response to an extensive public relations campaign against the bills, the administration in January issued a statement on anti-piracy legislation.
Article source: http://gcn.com/articles/2012/02/06/cybereye-says-time-to-kill-sopa-piracy-bill.aspx. Creative Commons (CC)