SOPA, PIPA Backers Back Down On DNS Filtering

[admin]

The sponsors of the house's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the senate's Protect IP Act (PIPA) have both backed down from their support for DNS filtering, due to the ongoing public backlash against this, and other aspects of the controversial bills.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), followed Sen. Patrick Leahy's lead in removing a provision in their respective bills that would have allowed DNS records to be tampered with in order to redirect web users away from websites "dedicated to piracy".

"After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision. We will continue to look for ways to ensure that foreign websites cannot sell and distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers," Smith said in a statement.

Critics have attacked DNS filtering as a dangerous way to prevent piracy, as it opens up the Internet for other risks, and prevents plans to rollout a new version of the Internet's domain name system designed to stop cyber-security threats.

However, the equally controversial IP filtering provision, which forces ISPs to prevent access to IP addresses of known piracy haunts in cases where DNS filtering is inappropriate, may still be present in the bills, and the statements issued by both politicians suggest that DNS filtering could be put back on the agenda at some future date, after the bulk of SOPA/PIPA have been passed.

The MPAA was disappointed at the back downs by Smith and Leahy, and continue to believe that DNS filtering is "an important tool, already used in numerous countries internationally" (including countries like China, Iran and North Korea), and that "it will not break the internet".

But the Electronic Frontier Foundation's intellectual property director, Corynne McSherry, says simply removing DNS filtering is insufficient to make SOPA and PIPA acceptable. "These bills need to be killed altogether," McSherry said. "Our view all along has been they are not fixable."

[Abuilder]

Of all sites, it looks like Craigslist has had enough of SOPA & PIPA.
craigslist | about > SOPA

[rago88]

This is a great logical response to Internet tampering

There’s a war brewing against the Internet, and it’s not just SOPA (the bill in Congress that threatens to break the Internet in the name of fighting overseas content piracy). It is, in the words of Cory Doctorow, a “war on general-purpose computing.” (read his post on BoingBoing, if you haven’t already). What he means is that in trying to clamp down on a very specific problem on the Internet (the wide availability of pirated movies, music, and other content on foreign servers beyond the reach of U.S. laws such as the DMCA), laws like SOPA start messing around with the inner workings of the Internet such as blocking DNS servers. Applying special-purpose rules to a general purpose technology messes it up for everyone. Doctorow explains the difference between general-purpose and special-purpose technologies with a parable of the wheel:

The important tests of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose are first whether it will work, and second whether or not it will, in the course of doing its work, have effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress, Parliament, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it’s unlikely I’d succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles, and asked, “Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would be “No”. This is because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications, but useless to bad guys. We can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we’d be foolish to risk changing them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies—even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies—no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

The same is true of the Internet and computers. The Internet is designed to transmit information to anyone who connects to it. If regulators try to prevent certain types of information from reaching its destination by disabling part of the Internet, all sorts of unintended consequences will arise. First, legitimate parts of the Internet may also be disabled as a result. And second, the information they are trying to block or suppress will find its way to the people who want to find it one way or another because the Internet routes around roadblocks. That is what it was designed to do—find alternate paths for information to get to its destination.
Attacking the general underpinnings of the Internet to prevent a specific problem on the Internet is a recipe for disaster. It is like taking the spokes out of all wheels to stop bank robbers from making getaways.