(Source: joshsternberg)

reuters:

Gautham Nagesh for The Hill - Eight of the largest Web companies have endorsed an online piracy bill offered by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) as an alternative to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart PROTECT IP.

The OPEN Act would direct online patent infringement claims against foreign websites to the International Trade Commission, which would be authorized to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties with the rogue foreign sites.

“The OPEN Act has attracted strong support from Silicon Valley, but criticism from the entertainment industry, which claims it wouldn’t effectively prevent piracy.” 

This type of thing doesn’t happen because companies typically don’t want to put their users in that position. The difference is that these bills so fundamentally change the way the Internet works. People need to understand the effect this special-interest legislation will have on those who use the Internet.

Markham Erickson of NetCoalition commenting on the fact that a so-called “nuclear option”— essentially a complete blackout of services— is being considered by Internet giants Google, Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook in an effort to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). (via ZDNET, @lheron)

Document-sharing site Scribd makes a powerful case for opposing SOPA, the Stop Online Privacy Act that’s currenly delayed in Congress. If it passes, Scribd is saying, the web could just… disappear. 

[via TechCrunch]

It would effectively give every copyright and trademark owner a big club with which to threaten any new technology or feature that it thinks doesn’t do enough to police possible infringing uses.

That’s the Center for Democracy and Technology’s David Sohn writing on the implications of SOPA, that anti-piracy bill that Tumblr (thankfully) threw in our faces last week with their censorship dashboard takeover.