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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

>much of it occurring overseas through rogue websites in China.

What?

I'm seeing the rhetoric here quickly shifting to "overseas", we're trying to stop "overseas" piracy.

That is so ill-defined. Does overseas mean it's hosted overseas? That it transits through overseas? That the founders are located overseas? The registrar? What if it's on a CDN? What if its a US based company that has datacenters overseas? What if it's a UK company that has US based datacenters?

What does that even mean?

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Make no mistake. The entire site blocking mechanism of this legislation was always intended to target foreign websites. The broad overreaching scope that ignores due process and the DNS provisions, the part everyone has been mad and vocal about are the products of this. But the intent has always been to stop foreign sites.

The Pirate Bay has been the slipperiest fish to tangle with. Every attempt they have made to stop or block it, including alleged manipulation and influence of Swedish courts and law have failed. Because it's a foreign website and we have no jurisdiction over it. So they crafted this law with the intent to have the ability to block Americans from viewing it within America. The way it's worded, it's able to block anything else, too.

So since the outcry and the backlash, they have shifted their narrative to explicitly spotlight those dirty evil foreign interests. But I don't believe for a second that it was never the original goal.

I don't get why they haven't gotten their DNS name seized by ICE yet considering it's a .org

Because ICE has no jurisdiction. All of the ICE take downs are only for sites that sell physical goods (bootlegs, counterfeits, etc.) to people in the States.

Other than the rap music blogs, right?

and gambling sites..... dont forget them.

It's called building up a precedent. It's like when a patent troll goes after a bunch of small fish (possibly setting favorable legal precedent along the way), then tries to use that momentum to go after a big fish, using the failure of all the small fish to adequately defend themselves as 'proof' that the big fish are should just give them a bunch of money.

If you go after the big fish first, then a large, competent legal team may just blow you out of the water. Not only that, they may set a legal precedent (that is damaging to you) in the process.

Just FYI: people usually prefix a statement with "Make no mistake" when they're about to present a disputed claim as incontrovertible fact.

I noticed that in the MPAA speech too. Copyright is a social construct, not a fundamental truth. It's not really American's place to set the social standards for other countries.

Pretty sure it means stealing movies on a boat.

On a slow boat to China, no less.

What if the data is transmitted on a cable under the ocean. Do you get an exemption for being underseas rather than overseas?

The rhetoric about SOPA and PIPA has always been centered around foreign piracy. The reasoning is very simple: domestic piracy can already be stopped through the DMCA. "Overseas piracy" is basically just defined as any piracy the DMCA can't stop, because it's not within the United States' legal jurisdiction to do so.

Unlike the DMCA, which seeks to stop domestic IP abuse, the point of SOPA and PIPA are to create barriers between foreign IP pirates and domestic consumers, by requiring domestic gateways (which are under US jurisdiction) to police and filter them out.

In practice, it just means any site under a foreign TLD. See PIPA § 2, Para 9.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c112:2:./temp/~c112BGM...:

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