Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : i2C - Internet Infrastructure Coalition : Thank you for your support on SOPA & PIPA! WE ARE WINNING!

[mrcjdawson]

Thank you for your support!
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 table. The original vote was planned for Tues 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."

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX), in a statement later said, his committee won'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 are just not coming up for a vote right now...
...But we have accomplished something remarkable!

With the deck stacked tremendously against us, we have taken something that looked sure to pass and sent legislators back to the drawing table to regroup.


Our involvement in Wednesday's events:

We wanted to give you a short update on the recent efforts of Save Hosting Coalition to try to make sure the message of the web hosting community is heard on the fights against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

This Wednesday, when thousands of websites blacked out their servers to protest SOPA & PIPA, Save Hosting Coalition collaborated with another group focused on the startup community called Engine Advocacy to put up a call tool called http://stopthewall.us/

Many of the blacked out sites used our call tool to generate calls to their Senators and House members. Due to massive response, we're still tabulating the various types of contacts generated from the tens of thousands of calls our efforts generated to Congressional offices.

Whatever the numbers, our efforts generated the desired effect.


Our video:

We also produced and will be releasing an animated video (my first time writing & producing!) that shows the problems with these bills from the hosting provider perspective. It's designed to be able to share with friends who might not get what we're so worked up about - the goal was to break things down into very layman's terms.

Here's a link to the animated video we produced:

http://vimeo.com/35353431

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zjJ-TrMvaQ&feature=youtu.be


Our press conference:

Yesterday, Thursday February 19th, NetCoalition held a press conference to recap the events of Wednesday and explain the need to continue protesting PIPA. Save Hosting Coalition co-founder Christian Dawson was asked to represent the Internet industry on their speaker panel. Here were the participants:

• Markham Erickson: Executive Director of the Open Internet Coalition
• Casey Rae Hunter: Deputy Director, Future of Music Coalition & independent artist
• Michael Petricone: VP of Government Affairs for Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)
• Christian Dawson: Co-founder, Save Hosting Coalition & COO of web hosting provider ServInt
• Mike Masnick: CEO and founder of Techdirt
• Mike McGeary: Director of Engine Advocacy

And here's a stream of the event: http://www.c-span.org/Events/Interne...n/10737427244/

Christian's prepared statement begins at 15:25. There's a good Q&A after everybody speaks.


Our lobbying efforts:

Also yesterday, a group of Coalition members went up to Capitol Hill for meetings with Senators and Congresspeople. The group was represented by Carpathia Hosting, FortressITX, Hedgehog Hosting and ServInt.

A longtime Senate staffer told us the anti-PIPA/SOPA action was the most effective thing he's seen in a decade on the Hill! Long time congressional observers called this, "the most effective single day advocacy in the modern, social media era" and pretty much killed or at least severely stalled these bills.


We ARE winning!:

Back in November Save Hosting Coalition met with Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) and the Chief of Staff from Sen. Maria Cantwell’s (D-WA) office. Sens. Cantwell, Moran and Rand Paul (R-KY) joined the fight against PIPA the next day. We were very excited to be a part of securing their support - it was the first in a long line of successes we have been able to achieve!

Today, within moments of news breaking that Sen. Harry Reid was backing off of PIPA, Save Hosting Coalition received a note from members of Sen. Jerry Moran's staff. The note said:

"Thank you for the support, and all of your help and diligence on this issue!"

It is a testament to our hard work and efforts that their staff thought to reach out to us immediately.



THANK YOU!

[WebzPro]

Wonderful, wonderful news. Thank you so much for your efforts Christian.

[JD0192]

This would have no affect on our company, Really. If the bill was to pass our services would have to be relocated to Europe, UK.

I am sure many providers would have no problem with proceeding and providing USA Hosting, But the real fear is we will be responsible for content that we do not intend to be there if it is against the law.

This bill would damage America's economy even more, Government is stupid at thinking this is going to stop Copyright Infringements or even a start to stopping it. It's just another useless way to spend money. Which could be efficiently used to A. Donations to Poor countries , B. Go back into the US Economy.

[mayank]

Great Thanks for This news

[WebCare360]

Great news... Really happy to read thank. Million thanks for posting this

[MarioR]

Yes thanks again Christian for your efforts, anything I can do to help let me know.

[caisc]

Its really nice to see that our efforts collectively are showing some positive results, but fight is not over yet we will have to keep an eye that what comes out next from draft table next time.

[nibb]

What about ACTA? Everyone forgot that one and its already passed...

[mrcjdawson]

ACTA isn't a bill that got passed by Congress, it's a treaty - which is much much harder to lobby against. It was more or less negotiated in secret by big IP. It hasn't been a transparent process. Moreover a lot is still very unclear about ACTA.

We've been monitoring it since it was signed in secret last October and trying to find actionable things to address, but yeah the truth is it's harder to fight. Sen. Ron Wyden's office is leading the charge to determine how ACTA will be enforced within the U.S.. He is pushing for our signing of it to be 'nonbinding'.

Your point is ultimately well taken, people should bone up on ACTA as well.

ACTA was signed by Ambassador Ron Kirk, USTR Office of the United States Trade Representative last October and it has now been signed by The EU and 22 of its 27 member states.

Text of ACTA is found here http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/economy/i_property/pdfs/acta1105_en.pdf

Here is an article on EFF https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/0...ous-about-acta

Here is a good video on ACTA:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=citzRjwk-sQ


The EFF has another very good article about it here:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/internet-black-out-day-fires-digital-rights-activism-around-world


And this seems like a REALLY good article that puts the situation into perspective for hosts:

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4972/125/

[nibb]

I wonder how many people actually read what Dawson posted because nobody noticed the typo "yesterday, Thursday February 19th, NetCoalition held a press conference to recap..."

This thread was posted the 20 January, so it should read Thursday January 19th.

How can ACTA be a commercial treaty and yet impose legal obligations on countries, companies and citizens?

Im not a lawyer but I don´t think its legal to make secret treaties behind the population by people that are not elected or have the right to impose such regulations. Its against the very basic foundation of a democracy, at least in the US:

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security"

Your video is very nice, but the background music is a bit to loud, I have troubles understand the speech, or the voice volume should be higher or the background music a bit lower to better understand the voice. At least in some specific parts like 0,50 to 1 minute.

[nibb]

Discussing SOPA and all this laws, the biggest problem and threat most people never see about this is not about content. Most people opposed SOPA because they where afraid of censorship and that is one of the reasons but the truth is that this laws and regulations will have no effect on piracy but will have deep impact on the US economy, in terms of money and in terms of being the biggest Internet holder.

It actually already did allot of damage. Allot of hosting companies in the US have confirmed massive leaving of their clients to offshore countries, specially Europe. Its like this laws where made for this companies as they are laughing to the bank while US hosting companies are suffering the effects of canceling customers.

Internet companies, not only hosting companies in general but companies providing content and services in the US bring allot of income to the US. This is thousands times more money than what Hollywood and the music industry claims to loose each year on piracy, they produce pennies vs the Internet, theirs claims cannot even be confirmed with real facts vs numbers from hosting companies that can proof exactly how much money foreigns companies and clients give them each year.

This is money that comes to the US, from outside, its money that gives people jobs, pays server, pays energy, pays software, pays innovation and puts food on the table of allot of people. Not only in the US but outside as well, as many companies outsource allot of their services.

This is why the US has so many datacenters, allot but ALLOT of this clients are from outside the US. Now imagine something like SOPA or PIPA passed on. The first thing that all this customers will be do, is move out. They are not pirates, they just don´t care exactly to read about this laws, and they are just afraid of a government that can shut them down without any evidence of anything. This are legal business, but they don´t want someone picking on their data and for surely get a bad vibe when they read online a website was ceased. This makes people nervous, and when people are nervous they take decisions like this.

They move out to Asia, Europe or other countries, this effect will have such a deep impact and damage that the US will loose its position as the Internet holster. Not only this, prices will raise for US customers as well, hosting companies will close, and datacenters will have to be reduced in size. All this money is going to flow offshore. And piracy? Well they are going to go offshore as well, they will not be stopped, they will just move on because this laws are so stupid that only a monkey can think they will have any effect on people that have no intention to comply with law in the first place.

This law is similar to his. "General, Terrorists are hiding in some house in XXX neighborhood. What should we do?" Answer: Bomb the whole city.

Well more or less, this is the effect on this laws. Piracy cannot be stopped with censorship, it has to be stopped with competition. I don´t think any law can stop piracy because the Internet is so huge and pirates are so tech savvy they will just create an alternate Internet or separate networks, more or less what they did with the Bitcoin, creating an alternative payments systems after Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and most banks cut financing to WikiLeads.

This groups of persons behind this or must people actually don´t see how easy it is to cut the financing and economy of someone and how just 4 or 5 companies worldwide control the Internet economy. This was brought to light with the WikiLeads case. I don´t say they are behind the BitCoin but I'm sure allot of people realized how easy it is for some governments to kill any company or group by just pressing some companies.

So what happen? They created an alternative uncontrolled currently, digital money, which is having a huge success, you can transfer money in real time, from any point in the world to another without anyone controlling it which means interfering it. Some people say its the biggest innovation in the world after the Internet. A real time digital currency uncontrolled and free.

And the proof to all this, is that Visa, Mastercard and PayPal have cut and suspend accounts of all people that are dealing with bitcoins or websites that accept payments in this form to change them to bitcoins.

Why? Because its their biggest thread. And they brought this all by themselves. They cut the financing to this companies so they went around them, by passing them and creating something that will destroy them in the end.

Same will happen with this laws, they will just create an alternative uncontrolled Internet and of course legal business will the ones that suffer and have to pay for all this extra burdens. And something like that would actually destroy the hollywood, the music industry and content creators for good, because it would be even more uncontrolled than what the Internet is today.

Try to ban them and they will create new ways to bypass this. The truth is that companies need to adapt to the new ages. Hollywood was created by pirates. They went to the West, where Edison could not prosecute them for ripping their patents. So its very ironic the same pirates that created Hollywood now want to suppress parts of the Internet and want the Internet to change around them. Its them that have to adapt and change their business model so it fits with the Internet. They cannot change the world, its to late, people are interconnected everywhere and its the future, they cannot control data flow, they have to adapt to it.

[Nigel1111]

It is old business against new business, that's all what it is, basically. While patents and copyright laws seem to be fair thing to exist, they are also holding back the progress. If Edison was able to exert his patents over the Hollywood people, there wouldn't be the movie industry the way it is now. If Hollywood realized what was about to happen in the late 1990s, there wouldn't be Google and Facebook today... Time will come and Google will be the old business, and something will be the new one, fighting for its birth rights with Google. That's dialectics...

[Nigel1111]

This is not to say that I'm not disgusted by SOPA/PIPA, which I certainly am.

[enviousity]

Fantastic news.

[EdgarSy]

I was part of the Blacked Out day...