ThePirateBay.Org Is Immune from SOPA | Hacker News Reader

ThePirateBay.Org Is Immune from SOPA

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123 pointsnextparadigms27 comments

I think the solution to the following is for us in the rest of the world to just block all US based IP's until you guys get your political act together... ;)

From the Wikipedia article on SOPA:

Art Bordsky of advocacy group Public Knowledge similarly stated that "The definitions written in the bill are so broad that any US consumer who uses a website overseas immediately gives the US jurisdiction the power to potentially take action against it."[44]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

The mere fact that SOPA uses DNS to identify particular web sites and their "origin" shows how little these lawmakers know about internet and its technologies.

Only, they don't have to know shit.

If what they do re: blocking doesn't fit their purposes, they can adjust it so it does.

If you have the power to pass laws to a specific objective, the technical details are irrelevant.

But not from ICE.

Honestly, I'm surprised they haven't taken it yet. I never go there, so I didn't realize that TPB still had any US-based domains left.

ICE is illegally taking down those websites. They have no authority to take them down. This is why they are only doing it to random no-name websites that people haven't heard of, thinking the vast majority of them will not even respond. If what they are doing was legal, they would've taken down TPB by now.

It's just one more case of doing something illegally, and then using the excuse that "we were doing it before anyway" to convince politicians and pass it into law later on. I just hope that if SOPA and PIPA are rejected, someone will try to go after ICE for their abuses.

None of that has stopped them in the past. Apparently, they know a judge who doesn't mind sealing the docket in such a way as to deny the defendant even the opportunity to see them in court.

An example Internet Domain Freedom bill (opposite of SOPA) should counter this in making it illegal to take down the domain without judgement, so it would be excepted from seizures until after due process.

At the moment, they can initially seize pseudo-legally. Then it's a question of being illegal since they can't hold it without cause.

I'm for Internet Freedom laws, too, but I just worry that once we give the Government the power to control the Internet, we're only 2 or 3 Congress cycles away before someone starts tweaking that law in their favor, and start ripping the "Internet liberties" away from the law.

I would be much more confident if it was a Constitution amendment, but not done right away, because I don't trust the current generation of politicians with it, but maybe sometime by the end of the decade.

The government has seen SOPA, DMCA, PROTECT-IP, COICA, CEST, OPENA, ACTA and more. The anti-Internet groups are already giving government and corporations the power to control the Internet since 00s. I guess you could say that they are beyond tweaking the law in their favour, they're introducing laws in their favour.

If they won't stop demanding control of Internet, then we have to demand Internet Freedom bills. Those Internet Freedom bills are to replace SOPA in outlawing the opposite; outlawing attempts to seize domain names without judgement being passed.

Edit: The general aim of the bill is to make initial seizures illegal. It can be argued that it's hard to run off with the domain name during court case for example.

The anti-Internet groups

Which groups are you referring to?

In context: Whoever lobbied for this list of laws.

That's about as fair as calling those who oppose them "pro-piracy" or "pro-counterfeiting".

I just worry that once we give the Government the power to control the Internet...

This puts me in mind of the debates over the US Bill of Rights. Some people thought that the BoR was a mistake, as making an enumerated list would create the impression that it was an exhaustive list. Of course, that is just what happened, and despite protections built in by the 9th and 10th Amendments, those who continue to point out this fact are derided as "Tenthers". The result is absurd claims that censoring speech gives us freedom by respecting other peoples' religions, etc. (doublethink though that obviously is).

So in the long term, it may be a better move strategically not to have any legislation, for or against Internet freedoms. It should be entirely outside the purview of the government either way.

> So in the long term, it may be a better move strategically not to have any legislation, for or against Internet freedoms. It should be entirely outside the purview of the government either way.

Really? My takeaway from that was that non-enumerated freedoms get completely ignored...

Reminds me of what is going on in The Netherlands (such a liberal country too, so kind of weird).

2 ISP's (Ziggo & XS4ALL) have to block TPB within 9 days, or face charges of 10000 euros a day. Kind of unfair, since their competition haven't been affected by this, yet. Can't find any English news articles so will blog about it later. Brein, the dutch anti-piracy police will also be able to provide these 2 providers with other domains that they'll have to block.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3451152

In Belgium, a court order forced the ISP's to block TPB. They complied immediately.

The same day TPB registered a new domain name in Belgium, to prove the uselessness of such action.

What a waste of public money.

.com/.org/.net is in a sort of limbo about whether it's an international or US based domain. A lot of the control is in the USA, and laws like SOPA seem to view it as an American possession.

However in many non-USA countries, .com is quite commonly used in the internet.

I wonder what would happen if courts in the USA ordered a .com removed and the original .com went to local courts who then ordered ISPs to resolve it? Could there be a split in the .com namespace then?

I've just realised I know less than I thought on this... So SOPA wouldn't be able to block .ie or .co or .tk names?

Block it where? SOPA, being a law from the United States is only valid in the USA. Different countries have different laws.

As an example, if China bans a site, is it banned in the USA? So if the USA blocks a site, is it blocked in the EU?

However it gets interesting with domain names. No-one really knows what would happen if the USA courts tried to delete a .ie domain. They wouldn't have the authority to do it. USA courts may have to result in ordering all ISPs to block that site, but people in other countries would still be able to do it. After all, the USA doesn't own the internet.

But, like I said, who owns .com? What could happen then?

In response to hessenwolf and rmc:

SOPA does not 'delete' any domains. SOPA says that it can tell ISPs and Domain servers to not resolve certain domain names (within the US, the rest of the world doesn't, or shouldn't use US ISPs or domain servers). And it only affects domain names registered outside of the US. As others have stated here, the US already has existing measures to address US domains via ICE.

One of the reasons behind the claim: "SOPA will break the internet", is that many people in the US may start using non US domain servers to circumvent SOPA, and this would make our current routing and caching mechanisms inefficient.

SOPA does not 'delete' any domains

Gotcha. I don't follow the minutiæ that closely.

I totally understand, but I encourage those that feel strongly about this subject to learn those kinds of details. There's a lot of Pro- and Anti-SOPA FUD out there.

I think this answers some of those questions:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/08225217010/breaki...

This is going to just force US citizens to start taking their domain and hosting business outside of the US, until they pass another law stating you cannot do that.

I am beginning to believe that the only thing that will convince the politicians is to go ahead and pass SOPA, then everyone just have every large commercial site shut down constantly with SOPA complaints, after all there are no repercussion for ruining someones livelihood with SOPA.

No, it's not. It might be immune from the DNS blocking but that is only part of the bill. The other part provides a process for content owners to issue "takedown" orders to ad and payment processors who do business with companies like TPB.

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