[Japo]

I agree with Lulu, and this kind of thing is showing its face ever more often lately. And they say that if you start smoking weed you may end up smoking crack cocaine, but if they start restricting Internet access for these reasons, I wonder where they might end up.

Originally Posted by hunvagy

Not to sound rude, but the internet is not the US. This site is certainly not hosted in the US. And unless they can get the ones they want to sue to US soil, the US laws don't apply. So they can take their draconian rules and show it up their collective asses, as soon as they cross the ocean.

They can't get it, in principle, as things are right now--don't forget there are international conventions about copyrights.

But what little I read about this, I understood it's not about shutting down sites--what they can already do, and another recent US law widened the government's discretionary and executive powers to do so, and disposed of any bothersome judicial procedures. I think it's about denying US citizens access to infringing content, even if it's hosted abroad and continues to be online elsewhere.

They don't seem to have gone as far as the Great Firewall of China (for all the anti-American talk, probably the USA will be the last country to implement country-wide WAN firewalling, I think several "democracies" were considering it--or had any already made it... Australia? But depending on what is decided, it could mean just that. They plan to require all services within their jurisdiction (hosted in the US?) to remove any access to the infringing content (even if their servers remain online), and these services may include search sites (Google...) and even DNS servers (good luck with that, as if pirates would mind typing a numeric IP address instead of an alpha-numeric domain name, LOL).

Again the legal framework will be different in your country, freer or harsher, but this is about affecting the content US citizens are allowed to see. And we're allowed to care about them. And once these laws are acceptable in one "democratic" country, they're automatically up for consideration in every other one.

Originally Posted by Red Fortress

The reason behind my concern is the power that Corporations and their Trade Associations hold over parts of the US Government through techniques such us Lobbying Groups and the Revolving Door.

I'm afraid that this law will turn into a “We Aim, You Shoot” kind of deal, with Companies using the Government to take down loads of Sites that they dislike.

I totally agree, however it's your point of view that the government is on the collar side of the business's leash, and not the other way around. The only objective truth is that their relationship is clearly symbiotic.

Under the new law they don't have to show that the site is "defiant", only that its main purpose is "infringing activities".

That is pretty vague, and can be stretched to cover all sorts of stuff...

Read this on the ESA's Site: Link

Plus this article From gamepolitics.com:
ESA Altered Wikipedia Entries on Mod Chips, Abandonware

That sound like they think abandonware should not exsist at all ...

If they were to get a "kill switch", whats to stop them using it on us?

What I meant is that they could have acted against us, with the weapons already existing at their disposal, if they cared. We're still alive, or at least we haven't received any scare since Tom's ESA deal, because they don't care about us. In short, nobody has prevented them to act against us so far, but they haven't.