Thursday 19 January 2012

SOPA: a reader asks for information

Heat ... and light
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States has generated a good deal of discussion -- but from the point of view of the dedicated copyright student the words expended on it might be said to have produced more heat than light.

A reader has written to ask me if I can recommend "any serious, legal and dispassionate reflexion about SOPA, whatever be the position of the author".

Offhand I couldn't think of much writing that complied with these criteria. Accordingly I invite readers of this blog to crowd-source a response to her request, preferably by posting recommended reading via the Comment link below. Many thanks in anticipation!

6 comments:

FrenchKat said...

I thought this link may be of interest to your reader:

http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html

Paul Edward Geller said...

To begin to understand the problem, take a look at http://msl1.mit.edu/ESD10/docs/darknet5.pdf

FrenchKat said...

And this from Professor Tribe:

http://www.net-coalition.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/tribe-legis-memo-on-SOPA-12-6-11-1.pdf

Andy J said...

@Paul Edward Gellar. With the greatest respect, I think a paper dated 2002 is hardly relevant to the situation today. Yes it covers some of the technical background on file sharing and so forth, but my understanding of Jeremy's post is that his correspondent wanted an analysis of SOPA from a legal perspective (albeit not necessarily from a strictly neutral viewpoint).
Frankly if the correpondent wants any technical background on the problem SOPA claims to address, (but which I would argue is totally irrelevant to how SOPA is intended to operate), then you will find much of this discussed on Torrentfreak. At least there you hear it from the 'enemy' so to speak.

Emil A. Georgiev said...

I found the article Don't Break the Internet by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, & David G. Post very useful.

BR,
Emil

Dan Glover said...

For a view on why SOPA and PROTECT IP will NOT "break the Internet", particularly in their current form, see this link to an article by Terry Hart at Copyhype:
http://www.copyhype.com/2012/01/hey-what-happened-to-wikipedia-an-intro-to-sopa