I don’t see anything positive about this law, and I don’t think it will in any way eradicate piracy. It will only give false power to some bureaucratic institution to deal with things that are out of their scope by nature of computers and networks. And they, and the law itself, will fail… like every other law before. Because laws can’t stop what is happening right now. You can like it or not, but it is as it is: copyrighted material is just another obscure file on hard drive that will be seen, listened, red or whatever… and then deleted… if it sucks… it’s no ones property directly, it doesn’t even exist in physical form… but you can send it to whoever you like, if you would like. And no law can stop that, but law that you have in yourself… and that is moral you have or not built upon time to respect other people’s work and effort.
It’s time for those pesky “copyright” holders to make some changes to their model of sales, not for all others to adopt to their views and models. Internet will soon be bigger than anything they have ever dreamed of. And you can sell all sort of things there. Why don’t they?
If this law passes, we will maybe see another awaking of networks like soulseek, e-donkey, dc++ and others, because they are doing everything regarding people to people exchanging materials, just on not on visual level. Who can really stop that?
Haha, you must be kidding me. There are TONS of copyrighted material on youtube. Literally EVERY music release since 1960 and lot of the earlier ones are uploaded to youtube, and if it hasn’t been taken down it’s still there. One of the reasons SOPA was coined is because the copyright organizations found the DMCA safe harbor inconvenient and SOPA is designed to eliminate it.
Even if Youtube is struggling to manage the copyrighted material, what smaller sites should do?
In other news, Swizz Beatz (Alicia Keys’ husband) is the CEO of MEGAUPLOAD and the FBI “raids international” for racketeering and criminal copyright infringement.
Damn. Maybe there’s more going on in rap than meets the eye?
No but it will help them to bring down sites like WikiLeaks.
But i also expect morons (or people that want to frankly exploit the law to make a point it is fruitless) to attempt to shut down any site they think that have copyrighted material which isn’t legally theirs. Well Judges will be very busy with legal business, but probably no longer with murderers and other sorts of criminals.
remember ol’days ? there was a scene. closed. and much competition around.
maybe, we will get that back.
btw.: how many times was “kimble” arrested already?!
it’s like the old “mp3.com”,
do you remember the old mp3.com scene with the p4p system ?
it was a very interesting program that retributed artists for each click on their tracks
“payback for playback”
featured artists came from the real global scene, they weren’t mainstream,
this system was out of the majors control
and started to threaten their greedy asses
Guess what happened to the mp3.com site :
(1) sued by majors like Universal Music, because of some “copyright infringments” found somewhere
(2) bought by Universal Music
(3) Revamped by Universal Music so that it promoted only the Universal Music artists/bands and not the thousands of new unsigned other ones
(4) Sold to … Cnet.download.com
p4p program : fucked up & then erased
Community forums : erased.
Most active community members : fallen in oblivion.
.
.
.
now who’s featured on mp3.com’s video section ? I didn’t checked it lately I can bet there’s already the same ones, “b. spears”, & so on…
this is just the real goal : erase the new emerging culture and replace it with their “products”
edit : this is supposed to be an old story men, but if you want to understand what happens in the present just keep a look on what just happened in the past and the reasons why : they just need official reasons, but they want to keep the control on the musical culture, and they want to keep all the control on the buisness : that’s all.
edit2 : btw I remember, during the mp3.com legal issue, people on the forums became suddenly paranoïd, they were bothered all the time by unknown visitors that just faked the style/names of some usual community members to create artificial flame wars, and they finally reached their goals : they divided the community spirit. Those visitors were called “anons” (for anonymous users). Anons were faceless people, with no names, without music, or sometimes with artists pages filled with automatically generated music (produced with “band in a box” or early versions of “music maker”), and that were just faking known community names, they were caricatural trolling activists trying to manipulate debates in every thread and flames creators. at that time, even if I had no evidence about it, I believed that those anons were just people from the big ones (SONY/UMG). sad that the mp3.com community wasn’t mature enough to see through this, in the end, everybody became suspicious, friendship was gone, finally everything was fucked up in a few months.
For what it’s worth, Pinboard was raided by the FBI last year (2011): http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/06/faq_about_the_recent_fbi_raid/
I think f+d+k that you perfectly understood what is an “anonymous”. Hidden behind anonymous profiles, there are brave heroes that fight against cultural or social domination, censorship and dictatorship ; but there are also anonymous servants of the mainstream buisness, that use the same anonymizers, and that fuck up every system they don’t like. That’s why I can’t blindly trust the “Anonymous” hackers group. Activities of this group of hackers will probably fall in suspicion, because it’ll be easy to “fake” the visual style of these hackers and ruin their “reputation”.
Another common term I see being used is “shill”. On a tactical grand scale, its possible to essentially act out a scripted crime in order to enforce a law. Who knows what the fuck’s going on in that bizarre world of greed and malice, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details.
Yes, but you can trust the original hacker groups not to fuck up things this way, because the difference would be too noticable to believe the real anonymous hackergroup is behind it. The action against Scientology Church with the V for vendetta masks was fabulous though 
(Project Chanology)
Sopa is shit but we got to understand there have been other censorship laws in the past and even if we ensure this one is delete, they will make another one in a fews years.
so we stop sopa but what we do next ?
we got to make a nu model (we the artist but also we the people). because the actual model is wrong it hurts. nowadays entertainment industry is in crisis and they want the money back. that’s why the quality of mainstream culture is going down. the more cliché to sell to the more people. the more facile and dumb to please the more people. do you remember the time when the beatles could release an experimental album (like the White Album) and sell millions… we need to bring back quality culture into the mainstream.
and for that we need a nu model
Nowadays most of the musicians are so poor, doing a food job and making music late at night. music is like everything else it’s better when the guy have time to craft his art, to create nu stuff and expand his creativity. It’s mean time and in a world of greed it’s mean money.
In France some people are promoting what they called the “Licence globale”. the idea is simple. a good nu model preserve the right of the users and the artists. so the deal is you would have to take the licence globale with your connection. it will be around 10 euros a year. You’ll get an access to everything copyrighted. you can stream/download/copy/share this.
they have evaluated this will lead to around 30 % income for each artist and will probably lead to huge change in the repartition of the income as the culture will not be dominated anymore bu labels, movies studios and so on.
the culture for the people by the people.
SOPA WAS WITHDRAWN! CONGRESS SHALL NEVER FORGET THE COMBINED POWER OF A MILLION NECKBEARDS AT THEIR MASTURBATION STATIONS. JOIN ME IN MAKING SURE THE SOUNDS OF OUR CHEETOS STAINED FINGERS TYPING ANGRILY ON KEYBOARDS WILL NOT GO UNNOTICED!
That video is actually wrong:
If anyone is interested in a rational look at the law, and not hyperbolic disinformation, here are some links:
http://freeloadingthebook.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/an-elegy-for-the-piracy-wars-on-the-occasion-of-the-sopapipa-blackouts/
http://www.copyhype.com/2012/01/hey-what-happened-to-wikipedia-an-intro-to-sopa/
since 99.999% of the people who are against SOPA don’t actually know what it does, here is an excerpt from sec. 103:
[b] (a) Definitions- In this section:
(1) DEDICATED TO THEFT OF U.S. PROPERTY- An `Internet site is dedicated to theft of U.S. property’ if–
(A) it is an Internet site, or a portion thereof, that is a U.S.-directed site and is used by users within the United States; and
(B ) either–
(i) the U.S.-directed site is primarily designed or operated for the purpose of, has only limited purpose or use other than, or is marketed by its operator or another acting in concert with that operator for use in, offering goods or services in a manner that engages in, enables, or facilitates–
(I) a violation of section 501 of title 17, United States Code;
(II) a violation of section 1201 of title 17, United States Code; or
(III) the sale, distribution, or promotion of goods, services, or materials bearing a counterfeit mark, as that term is defined in section 34(d) of the Lanham Act or section 2320 of title 18, United States Code; or
(ii) the operator of the U.S.-directed site–
(I) is taking, or has taken, deliberate actions to avoid confirming a high probability of the use of the U.S.-directed site to carry out acts that constitute a violation of section 501 or 1201 of title 17, United States Code; or
(II) operates the U.S.-directed site with the object of promoting, or has promoted, its use to carry out acts that constitute a violation of section 501 or 1201 of title 17, United States Code, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement.
[/b]
So no, posting a link to copyrighted material on the renoise forums would not result in the site getting shutdown because its primary purpose is OBVIOUSLY not for the distribution of copyrighted material or the facilitation of it.
Yeah 'cos the anti-terrorism laws have only been used against terrorists haven’t they! 
we should start to worry about ACTA instead
You can make that argument against ANY piece of legislation regardless of the actual content of the bill. It’s a very simple and easy “argument” to make.
Mistakes will be made. This happens with every law. People are accused of crimes they didn’t commit and some get sent to prison. Does that mean the laws should be removed?
What is important is that the bills contain defense mechanisms. Ultimately, the protection it provides to content creators outweighs the negative effects of potential mistakes.
Nevermind the fact that it costs a substantial amount of money to obtain court orders against a website. The bill also clearly states that the posted material must exceed a retail value of $2500.
People also have been punished by death-penalty for crimes they didn’t commit. Is that just collateral damage that supposed to go with it?
Laws which exists for a very long time have proven themselves on various areas, but that doesn’t mean they don’t require changes.
If i read about cases being judged and simple avaerage people being fined for millions of dollars for downloading a few songs, i can only give my opinion that the judges who convicted these people, have lost their common sense, which is a thing that any judge also needs to separate a real case from a pickpocket thievery case.
But i do suspect some of these newsitems may be bloated here, unless several newspapers have reported it.
What is understood as “retail” value, the content in itself or the average statistical download value in overall?
A posted link represents an amount of money per download. If one download represents 2,50 and more than 1000 people download it, you have this 2500 easily.
On sites like Youtube, getting these kind of download figures also for illegal content are nothing.
Things may seem reasonable, but companies with the magnitude of multi-billion dollar industries supporting these bills are real sharks and can invent any particular argument to bring down any particular site they please.
A site hosting content of a musician that the company has under their contract is enough, even if the stuff is posted with consent of the artist.