Tech News Today 418

Tech News Today Episode 418

"The Facts About SOPA And PIPA"Hosts: Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Iyaz Akhtar, Jason Howell, Ryan Block, Declan McCullagh Recorded: January 18, 2012 Published: January 18, 2012 Duration: 54:31 Transcript Previous episode – Next episode

Contents 1 Tech News Today 418: The Facts About SOPA And PIPA 1.1 Video 1.2 Hosts 1.3 Top Stories 1.4 Discussion Stories 1.5 News Fuse 1.6 Randomizer 1.7 Calendar 2 INCOMING 2.1 Email 3 Sponsors 3.1 GoToMeeting 4 Production Information

Tech News Today 418: The Facts About SOPA And PIPA

What SOPA and PIPA really mean, whether they solve any problems, why Jerry Yang really left Yahoo, and more.

Submit and vote on story coverage at technewstoday.reddit.com

Video

• The Day The LOLcats Died

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Sarah Lane (@SarahLane)
  • SarahLane.com
• Iyaz Akhtar (@Iyaz)
  • ThisOldNerd.FiniteComedy.com
• Jason Howell (@RayGun01)
  • JasonHowell.net
• Ryan Block
  • gdgt.com
• Declan McCullagh
  • news.cnet.com

Top Stories

• What is SOPA and how does it work? The Stop Online Piracy Act explained
• Even without DNS provisions, SOPA and PIPA remain fatally flawed
• How SOPA Works
• A SOPA/PIPA Blackout Explainer
• Protest on Web Uses Shutdown to Take On Two Piracy Bills
• SOPA Infographic
• A technical examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP
• What does SOPA mean for us foreigners?
  • The attorney general must seek a court order against ISPs, search engines, payment network services and advertising services. Once served with this court order, these companies will have no more than five days to comply
  • SOPA would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content deemed worth more than $1000 or ""for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain"" a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
  • the power to seek injunctions not only to the attorney general but also to private copyright holders.
  • website owners can intervene and argue for their site to be restored, only after they have been posted
  • Neither SOPA nor PIPA have any penalties for copyright holders who abuse their new powers.

• Who's Going Dark to Protest SOPA, PIPA?
• SOPA blackout spreads across the Internet
• Flickr Joins SOPA Protest, Lets Users Black Out Photos
• Why one game developer is skipping E3 to start an anti-SOPA crusade
• Mark Zuckerberg posts against SOPA
• SOPA protest sees large offline turnout in New York
• In Face Of Protests, Congressmen Begin To Abandon SOPA Ship
• SOPA Bill Faces New Hurdles
• An open letter to Washington from Artists and Creators
• More Arts Groups Sign On to Oppose SOPA/PIPA
• Boxee Brings The SOPA Protests To Living Rooms
  • Rep. Ben Quayle no longer a co-sponsor, and Rep. Lee Terry planning to remove name from co-sponsor list, according to Politico.
  • Rep. Justin Amash joined protest movement. He changed his Facebook profile picture and added the added a note to his Facebook page.
  • Sen. Orrin Hatch "simply not ready for prime time."
  • Sen. Marco Rubio (formerly co-sponsor) called for "new legislation that addresses Internet piracy while protecting free and open access to the Internet."
  • Rep. Anna G. Eshoo from Palo Alto turned her House website black.
  • Senator Roy Blunt (co-sponsor) withdrew support on Facebook
  • House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) told reporters that the piracy legislation wasn't set to come up for a vote anytime soon because "it's pretty clear to many of us that there's a lack of consensus at this point."

• MPAA CEO Chris Dodd: Blackouts Turn Users Into “Corporate Pawns”
• RIAA Reminds Us Why We Hate Them With Obnoxious Smartass Tweet (Updated)
• WSJ comes out for SOPA, more lawmakers pull support
  • Lamar Smith (co-sponsor) "It's easy to engage in fear-mongering and it's easy to raise straw men and red herrings but if they read the bill they will be reassured."
  • "Obviously there's no censorship in the bill and no one can indicate any censorship whatsoever. It's not censorship to want to stop illegal activity That's all we do. We're trying to impede illegal activity by foreign websites."

Discussion Stories

• SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy
• Tim O’Reilly: Why I’m fighting SOPA
• Least restrictive means? One way that SOPA could die in court
  • in Elrod v. Burns (1973): "If the State has open to it a less drastic way of satisfying its legitimate interests, it may not choose a legislative scheme that broadly stifles the exercise of fundamental personal liberties."
  • Julian Sanchez: "suppose the CEO of Wal-Mart came to Congress demanding a $50 million program to deploy FBI agents to frisk suspicious-looking teens in towns near Wal-Marts. A lawmaker might, without for one instant doubting that shoplifiting is a bad thing, question whether this is really the optimal use of federal law enforcement resources."
  • Matthew Lasar from Ars suggests SOPA would die in court from same thing that killed COPA. --- May also be considered prior restraint. speakers are entitled to tell their own side of the story to the judge before their content is taken down
  • a recent survey study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School concluded that ""data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers"" from producing more works, at least in the US market.
  • Does it kill jobs? If pirates bought more digital copies it would not have the linear effect that pirates buying more CDs would have.
  • O'Reilly's 5 points in GigaOm interview

• What you can do about SOPA
• Where your representatives stand on SOPA
• Protesting SOPA: how to make your voice heard
• Protect IP, SOPA protests knock Senate Web sites offline
• When a petition isn't enough

• 5 Tips for Surviving Today’s Wikipedia Blackout
• How to Access Wikipedia on SOPA Protest Day
• The One Wikipedia Page You Can Actually Read Today
• SOPA protests won't damage Google search rankings

News Fuse

• Speaking of the reports that Samsung may acquire RIM, Samsung spokesperson said, "We haven't considered acquiring the firm and are not interested in (buying RIM)." That doesn't necessarily foreclose the possibility that Samsung may license some RIM technologies, but you've got to give it to Samsung for being such straight shooters.

• AllThingsD reports that Jerry Yang's departure from Yahoo was indeed his own decision - he was not pushed out. According to Kara Swisher's sources, Yang "had had enough" and realized the company "had enough of him." Apparently, Yahoo's executives were given a "few minutes" notice on Yang's decision to leave the company he co-founded.

• In a 6-2 ruling, the Supreme Court of the U.S. ruled that Congress may take public domain works and give them copyright protection once again. In this particular case, the works were still copyrighted overseas. The legislation being examined was enacted in 1994 to make the U.S. comply with the Berne Convention, an international copyright treaty. The court's opinion penned by Justice Ginsburg made it clear that the case should not be used by Congress to create perpetual copyrights and tried to limit its application to the terms of the treaty.

• Comments by Dish president and CEO Joe Clayton to Bloomberg West are fueling speculation that AT&T could acquire the satellite company. The comments include "We could be acquired, or be the acquirer" and the company is "open to all options." Bloomberg then reported that AT&T is under enough pressure to obtain spectrum that it may "pay the highest premium in more than a decade to secure Dish."

• Nielsen looked at which smartphones were purchased in the U.S. over the last three months of 2011 and found that the amount of people choosing iPhones over Android increased. In October, only 25.1% said they'd pick an iPhone, but by December 44.5% said they did. Back in October, 61.6% went with Android, but that dipped to 46.9% by October. Overall for the 4th Quarter, Android still makes up 46.3% of the market with iOS at #2 with 30%.

• T-Mobile's teaming with Walmart on a new Family Mobile Plan with unlimited talk, text & web without a contract. The pricing plans start at $45 per month for the first line and $185 for a family of five. If you sign up before March 16th, you're subject to 5GB shared data cap - after that you're throttled. If you sign up after March 16th, the data cap is 250MB. Speeds are limited to 3G.

• LightSquared issued a strongly worded statement today calling test results of its proposed network "rigged by manufacturers of GPS receivers and government end users to produce bogus results…" LightSquared asks the FCC and NTIA to start another set of tests to "ensure objectivity and transparency" because the previous tests were "shrouded in secrecy" and the testing standards did not reflect reality.

• Reuters reports the European Union will decide whether to file a formal complaint against Google by the end of March. At issue is whether Google abused its position in the search engine market. The investigation began in November 2010 after several companies, including Microsoft, complained to regulators.

• Dell's Alienware just introduced a gaming machine - that's not news - but the form factor is. From the pictures, the Alienware X51 doesn't look that much larger than the Xbox 360. The PC is positioned as an entry-level gaming rig with a base price of $700 which comes with a dual core i3 at 3.3GHz, GeForce GT545 and 4GB of RAM.

Randomizer

• Young, in Love and Sharing Everything, Including a Password

Calendar

• Star Trek Online is now offering a ‘Free-to-Play’ model known as the silver level. All sectors and missions, PVP access, weekly episodes, classes, joining guilds, playable species and Klingon play, all free! If silver players can put up with advertisements.
• Apple's Education event is tomorrow at 10AM Eastern at the Guggenheim. We'll have a wrap-up here on TNT
• Intel and Microsoft both report 4th Q earnings tomorrow. Wall Street is cautious considering the sluggish PC market. We'll see if enthusiasm for ultrabooks and Windows 8 translate to numbers.
• LG Spectrum, an LTE phone, is coming to Verizon on January 19th for $200. No ICS, but it does have a nice 4.5 inch display, Qualcomm 1.5GHz dual-core CPU, 8MP rear cam, 1.3 MP front cam, and the first device that features ESPN ScoreCenter content in HD.

INCOMING

Email

"Hi TNT crew, Marlon "theGuyFromTrinidad" here, happy blackout day. I just wanted to give you a quick feedback on how the blackout is being perceived outside of the US. In a word ""annoyed"", at least at my workplace. In our lunch room today I was asked to explain by some staff members what the hell is this SOPA thing and why is it preventing them from getting the info they want from wikipedia (note that even though the link to learn more information is there they said they couldn't be bothered to click it). After giving them a brief explanation and telling them how it could affect them in the future if the bill is passed (thanks TNT for the info over the past few weeks so that I could actually give an explanation) they were just interested to know when would wikipedia be back up and running, after I told them tomorrow they were happy and resolved to visit it then when this "foolishness" was over. Granted, Trinidad and Tobago is not the direct target for these protest but neither was general staff interested or cared about SOPA. As a side note also they only mention I saw on SOPA on my social networks were from my tech friends from the US and two in Kuwait. Thought you would like to know. Love the Show.

Marlon "TheGuyFromTrinidad"

"We need to show the other harm that this legislation could do to civil rights. In my first letter to my Senators and Representative I cited what happened to TNT under the DMCA, when someone did not like your coverage of an issue. The responses I got back from their offices, proved to me that this argument made an impact. We need them to see how corporations and government have abused the DMCA take down notice system to silence opposition.

Is it possible to document these abuses, so we can use them the information in our letters to our Senators and Representatives. I seem to remember you all reporting on media companies that trolled for even mentions of their properties and sent out abusive take downs.

- Kimberly"

Sponsors

GoToMeeting

• ad times: :36-:44 and 20:39-21:47

Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

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