ReadWriteWeb

In the aftermath of the Megaupload shutdown that unfolded nearly two weeks ago, the story has splintered into a few interesting directions. One of the more controversial issues is the fate of the personal data stored on the now-defunct service's servers.

Yesterday, news broke that the data could be at risk of deletion as early as this week, if Megaupload's former hosting service providers decide to do so. Well, not if the Electronic Frontier Foundation has anything to do with it.

So, we've shot down SOPA and PIPA. Congratulations Internets for a job well done. Mission accomplished, right? Not so much. While that's two bad pieces of legislation pushed back, there's much more where that came from. Leaving aside existing nastiness like the DMCA, we also have the even nastier Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) (PDF). How bad is it? Bad enough that the European Parliament's rapporteur for ACTA (Kader Arif) resigned over it today (January 27, 2012). Unfortunately for those of us in the United States, President Obama has already ratified ACTA on behalf of the United States.

Just ask the man who signs my paychecks... or at least, go back to October 2007 and ask Richard MacManus, the founder and EIC of this publication. He would tell you directly and succinctly that ReadWriteWeb is not a blog. That is, by the definition of that time, it's not a one-man show. "ReadWriteWeb has evolved," Richard wrote at the time, "into something different than a blog, which is traditionally thought of as the voice of a single person."

Over the years, the complaints I've received from readers (we all receive some) center around the notion of bias - a tendency to interpret a story with the appearance of a certain slant or, perhaps more accurately, from an angle somewhat askew from the angle most others use in their interpretations. If a blog were truly by and about one person, then the appearance of bias would be impossible to avoid. Typically with publications, it is plurality that enables the reader to see the complete picture of subject matter. Plurality, for any organization, requires organization. And at a time when the Web publishing industry's definition of what we do evolves faster than our ability to do it, organization has been difficult to achieve.

The opposition to this year's round of anti-piracy bills in Congress - the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, and the PROTECT-IP Act in the Senate - centers around the idea that the intention of such a law would be to facilitate government censorship. Such opposition reached its peak last week, during online rallies organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others, on what was called "American Censorship Day."

At the request of this reporter, Hillel I. Parness, a practicing attorney and partner with the New York-based firm of Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, and also adjunct member of the IP faculty at Columbia University School of Law, conducted a study of the current state of both bills this week. As Parness told ReadWriteWeb today, his analysis of the bills as they are currently written indicates that federal authorities would not be given the authority or the tools they would require to request a court order to take down any Web site (the bills concentrate on sites based abroad) based on content evaluation alone.

Crisis averted, so far. Last week's hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was stacked in favor of the Internet blacklist bill but we seem to have come out unscathed.

Public outcry against the bill rallied enough opposition to keep it from sailing through. Google testified against the bill, MasterCard voiced some objections, and tens of thousands of users lit up their representatives' phone lines thanks to Tumblr. But it's not over.

It's no exaggeration to say that, sometimes, anonymity is a matter of life and death. Which is why it's important to know just how trivial it is to track down an "anonymous" blogger using their Google Analytics code.

Andy Baio, who runs the popular linkblog Waxy.org posted Wednesday about using simple tools like eWhois and Statsie to unmask several bloggers.

The Internet is rising up to oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is just a noble name wrapped around a dangerous package. It's an overreaching bill being pushed in the name of Homeland Security, even going so far as to target Mozilla specifically for refusing to comply with past requests.

Today is American Censorship Day, and it happens to coincide with a hearing in the U.S. House about this censorship bill. To raise awareness of the importance of stopping SOPA, Tumblr has artfully censored everyone's blog dashboards and linked to a petition form at the top of the page under the heading, "Stop The Law That Will Censor The Internet!"

If you've been living under an Internet-free rock the past couple of weeks, you might have managed to miss the steady drumbeat of opposition to HR 3261, the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Then again, if you've been living under an Internet-free rock, you've already had a preview of what we're facing if SOPA goes into effect.

I'm exaggerating a little, but not by much. We've covered SOPA earlier this week and the EFF's efforts to rally opposition to the bill. But today is American Censorship Day and a hearing for the bill in the U.S. House that's stacked in favor of the bill.

Another dangerous bill is winding its way through Congress, this time it's the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by Texas representative Lamar Smith. Smith's bill would establish a system for taking down Web sites that the Justice Department "determines to be dedicated to copyright infringement."

The bill is, by nearly any sane measure, overreaching and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says that the bill targets Mozilla specifically for refusing to comply with Homeland Security's ICE unit.

We do this dance at least twice a year now, and we're starting to get the steps so well memorized that once we hear the familiar tune, we start stepping to the beat without a moment's thought. It's the Anti-piracy Shuffle, and one defining element of its choreography is that we always end up right where we started.

Here's how it goes: You can't run an Internet server that trafficks in illicit content to American clients, from American soil, without violating American law. Makes sense. The magic of the Internet lets someone in America run a server in another country, whose domain may be registered in yet another country, that sends illicit content to American downloaders. It's impossible to prosecute one downloader without prosecuting all of them, otherwise you run into the selective prosecution defense.