Monday afternoon, the House Judiciary Committee released its planned manager’s amendment to SOPA, claiming that it eliminated significant concerns with the bill. While it does fix some of the current version’s outrageous proposals, it leaves some of the most dangerous provisions largely intact. Here’s a brief rundown of our concerns with the manager’s amendment.

DNS Filtering

UPDATE: Added mention of the $35 appeal fee in the "Appeals" section below.

Today, major ISPs joined the RIAA and MPAA in announcing a joint program to deal with file-sharing. The document governing this agreement, a "Copyright Alert System," is hosted here. Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology issued a joint statement on the CAS, available here.

Beyond that, what does this agreement represent? It extends some of the characteristics of some ISPs' existing voluntary notice-forwarding agreements, while stopping short of a three-strikes-and-you're-out procedure.

Earlier today, word spread that Google, presumably bowing to pressure from Hollywood and the recording industry, had begun blocking certain "piracy-related terms" from its autocomplete search feature. As it turns out, the terms in question are "BitTorrent," "Rapidshare" and "Megaupload". There are plenty of reasons why this is a terrible idea but for brevity's sake, I will limit myself to three:

In a couple of weeks, the new Republican majority in the House will probably start hearings on the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Net Neutrality policy.  The House majority already officially opened its campaign against a free and open Internet, with the two leading lights, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Mary Bono Mack (Cal.) out in front with speeches and petitions.

But before we get to them, let’s share a little secret. Don’t tell Blackburn or Bono Mack, but two Republicans have already voted for Net Neutrality.  They can fudge it all they want, but the two Republicans on the FCC, Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Atwell Baker, cast their votes for the Comcast takeover of NBC.  And in that takeover order was a merger condition, enforceable by the FCC, for Comcast to run a non-discriminatory, neutral network. 

In this week's podcast, we talk about the Library of Congress report on how copyright law is hindering the preservation of sound recordings, automatic filters announced by Canon and Apple, PK's own IP3 awards, and have an interview with Eric Graham of Cellular South discussing the most important story that nobody knows.

You can download and listen to the audio by clicking here (MP3) or stream it using the player below:

Want to subscribe to our podcast? Click here for the MP3 feed and here for the mixed audio/video feed.

A decision from a federal district court in New York today affirmed that online hosts shouldn't have to pay if their users are infringing. The opinion, issued by Judge Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York, found on summary judgment that Google and YouTube qualified for the safe harbors of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. By acting to take down infringing postings when it was notified of them, YouTube was able to meet the standards of the law, despite the fact that Viacom complained that YouTube generally knew that infringing works were on the site.

Video bloggers VLOG Brothers posted this entry about SpikeTV, a subsidiary of Viacom, violating musician Jonathan Coulton's Creative Commons License for one of his songs (I've included the video blog below). Briefly, Coulton has released a video of his song Flickr under a Creative Commons license allowing noncommercial use and requiring attribution. SpikeTV grabbed the video and played commercials before it and associated with while playing.

Today, a federal district court in New York found LimeWire liable for inducing copyright infringement and vicarious copyright infringement. The court’s decision, at least on those aspects of the case, may not be terribly surprising, given the precedent set in earlier cases like Grokster, Aimster, and Napster. But a few details of the court’s ruling deserve further mention.

BitStalker is a good way to get around some of the obfuscatory methods employed by some BitTorrent trackers that are primarily used for infringing content, like the Pirate Bay. It uses some clever data-gathering techniques to avoid falling for some kinds of spoofing (like listing phony IP addresses as peers). I'm glad that some of the people at my old school, the University of Colorado, are seriously addressing the fact that current anti-piracy technology used on the Internet is inadequate.

One thing needs to be clear, though: when the paper claims that "false positives are rare with our active approach," it's referring to false positives as to whether a particular IP address is part of a BitTorrent swarm. That is, if a particular file is known to be infringing, this method is better at identifying the IP addresses that are downloading it.

The leaked ACTA Internet chapter has a footnote that says an ISP can only hang on to its "safe harbor" by implementing certain policies designed to discourage the use of their networks for copyright infringement, and that "An example of such a policy is providing for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscriptions and accounts in the service provider's system or network of repeat infringers." Three strikes and you're out.

USTR's claim that ACTA wouldn't "change" US law is plausible (if not comforting). Similar language is already part of US law (17 U.S.C. 512 §(i)(1)(A))--as is the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, of course, which assures that no person can be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." One would hope that, like the existing statute, the ACTA language will be read in the context of the Constitution, which assures that mere accusations of copyright infringement are not enough to kick someone off the Internet. One would also hope that other countries, if they end up agreeing to a version of ACTA with this language, also understand that a "repeat infringer" must have been afforded due process.