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Tech

How To Beat SOPA

Although we can't guarantee that they'll be 100 percent legal, here's some ways to circumvent the most destructive piece of legislation the internet has ever faced.
Janus Rose
New York, US

As I’m writing this, the Senate is getting ready to vote on the single most destructive piece of legislation that the internet has ever faced. SOPA, penned by a team of corporate shills who now have swell lobbyist jobs to show for it, is a bill aimed at combating online piracy in the worst conceivable way possible: By giving copyright holders and the government overreaching, due process-circumventing powers to shut down entire websites based on the mere suspicion that they might contain infringing material.

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Worst of all, it’s already happening. Even before the bill has come to vote, censorship shenanigans have already been demonstrated by Universal, who fraudulently removed a music video by Will.i.am that voiced opposition to SOPA. Now, imagine what will happen when SOPA is in full-swing and all of YouTube is held liable for bogus copyright claims … or Etsy, or Flickr.

Of course that says nothing of the countless technologists who have warned SOPA’s China-style DNS blocking will seriously fuck up the internet in general, so it’s really not hyperbolic to say that this is the worst nightmare of a democratic and stable internet. So the question on everyone’s mind right now is what kind of free speech fail-safes exist if and when SOPA (and its twin in the House, PROTECT-IP) passes? Although we can’t guarantee that they will be 100 percent legal, here are a couple of them.

Read the rest at Motherboard.