SOPA/PIPA Update: We are Winning!

Today PIPA was dealt a crushing blow when Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) pulled his planned cloture vote on the bill, agreeing to go back to the drawing board. The original vote was planned for Tuesday, Jan 24, but today he announced “In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT I.P. Act.” In a later statement, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) said his committee wouldn’t take up SOPA until “there is wider agreement on a solution.” “I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy.” “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”

This shows huge positive progress on both PIPA & SOPA!

The fight isn’t over. These bills are not dead, they’re just not coming up for a vote right now.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate our remarkable accomplishment! Read more

What I Learned at CES: PIPA is the New SOPA

SOPA seems to be breathing its last!  Although Rep. Smith has indicated that he’ll remove the controversial DNS blocking provisions of the bill, we’ve heard that the bill is so poisoned, hearings won’t resume, essentially killing the bill.  That’s a huge victory for the Internet industry. This bill had big money interests behind it, and we in the Internet community were outspent to a ridiculous degree — but at the end of the day our voices were heard. Victory, right?

 

Not so fast! Read more

ServInt, GoDaddy, SOPA and the Fight to Save the Internet

In the wake of a well-publicized boycott campaign against GoDaddy, hosting providers are racing to try to come up with their stances against SOPA. I am proud that we don’t need to do that. Our stance on SOPA, its sister bill PIPA, and the bill from whence they both came COICA, is well known. We have spent much of the last year not just railing against these bills but trying to do something about them.

The well-intentioned goal of SOPA is to go after piracy, which is noble and very important. But piracy is something that needs to be handled smartly, with a laser-focus. SOPA isn’t a laser, it’s a wrecking ball that if enacted is likely to destroy hard-working legitimate businesses more frequently than it does pirates. SOPA allows people merely accused of ‘contributing to infringement’ to have their business taken from them. Pirates will maintain back-up plans in case they get their resources pulled – it’s legitimate businesses that will suffer most. SOPA will be used for censorship and as an anti-competitive tool. It will stifle innovation, and is one of the most dangerous bills I have seen in my two decades in this industry. Read more

What is SOPA and PIPA?

I just finished listening to 12+ hours of day one of the House Judiciary Committee Markup of H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and I have the scars to prove it. It was a brutal day of legislating. Four Congressmen, Reps. Issa, Lofgren, Polis and Chaffetz, stood out as having a firm grasp on the Internet and its complexities, and spoke eloquently about the dangers of SOPA. They weren’t being listened to by the Chairman, who is intent on bringing this dangerous, job-killing, security-killing, and frankly terrible bill to the House floor.

At the same time, I got to announce that the Save Hosting Coalition sent a letter to the Senate—signed by 275 Internet executives—opposing PIPA, with a similar letter on its way opposing SOPA. Both of these letters were huge accomplishments for a normally fragmented industry.

In the wake of all that, I wanted to get back to basics and try to give you an easy-to-understand overview of what SOPA is, where it is, why you should care and what you should do to stop it from becoming law. I tried to make it “non-technical” so if you are reading this and you are technical, pass it along to your friends who aren’t, but want to better understand the threats at hand.

Our story begins… Read more

ServInt Answers: What Does “Network Compliance” Mean?

Hi, I’m Mike Witty, ServInt’s new Director of Network Compliance.

To those outside of our industry, the words “Network Compliance” probably sound a bit cryptic – even bureaucratic.  But network compliance actually affects every single customer we have.  I’d like to take this opportunity to explain how, and why.

First, a little about me. I’ve been at ServInt for more than ten years now — roughly 100 years in Internet time. I first cut my teeth as a member of ServInt’s Managed Services Team and worked my way up to management from there. Over the years, I’ve seen our service offerings evolve dramatically, and it’s been an exciting ride.

When I started here in 2000, the vast majority of the content on the Internet was static – basically little strings of HTML.  These sites rarely broke on their own, if ever. Since then, there have been seismic shifts in web technology and there is a constant race to remain up-to-date and competitive.

But, as always, there’s a tradeoff.  For every internet app that changes our lives for the better, there’s a new security concern, and a new way for the bad guys to reach out and cause trouble.  As head of ServInt’s Network Compliance Team, my job is to protect and defend our customers, content creators, and ServInt as a whole, to the best of our ability. Here are just a few of the challenges my team and I face daily and some tips on how to avoid becoming a victim.
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Why America isn’t the bad guy on the Internet

If you use the internet for leisure, do business on the internet for profit, or count on the internet to spread your message, you are at a disadvantage if you are not doing so in America.

There, I said it.

That wasn’t meant as a slight to our friends and colleagues abroad. I don’t mean this as an attack on any one country or continent. Rather, I’m simply challenging the assertion that the United States is somehow the bad guy when it comes to freedom of speech on the web. I read countless stories that argue that sites that are critical of the government, large corporations, industries, political figures, etc., should host offshore in Canada or Europe because their sites are simply unsafe in the U.S.

This is little more than classic FUD.

Among bloggers, particularly in the tech world, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is loathed for its supposed coziness with the recording industry and the MPAA, among other content organizations. As a consumer, and as a geek, I personally share a lot of the same concerns and frustrations other users do when it comes to the principles of fair use. Believe me when I say I find DRM as annoying and intrusive as everybody else does. I also can see plainly that the “anti-circumvention” aspects of the DMCA are genuinely bad for consumers.

But the bigger picture here is that significant portions of this law, particularly Article II as it pertains to our industry, are actually well written. The DMCA isn’t perfect, it does a lot of annoying things but it also does a lot to protect the rights of ISP’s, online services, publishers, and users alike.

More after the jump.

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BoingBoing, Web Hosting and the First Amendment

I want to share with all of you a letter that I sent to The Rachel Maddow Show this weekend. She had Xeni Jardin on, who writes for BoingBoing.net, which I love. My big problem with the segment is that it left viewers with an overall impression that the DMCA was anti-free speech and that people should host offshore. I don’t agree, and to be fair I don’t know if Xeni does either, as it wasn’t even the primary focus of her appearance and they only discussed it briefly and in too little detail.

But our industry doesn’t land in the news all that often, and to appear in this context is what some would refer to as an ‘epic fail’. I understand that given the short time available on a news segment like that to explain our industry, the laws that govern it and the different types of players within it, a lot was left unexplained. But that’s exactly why I needed to take the opportunity to set the record straight.

Video and more after the jump.

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