A report by DSLReports.com made available to ITRealms Online
showed that the US House of Representatives has continued their breathless
support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in spite of warnings from experts
that the law will stifle free speech and break core Internet functionality.
Recent analysis by Bit Torrent transfers indicated that
there are significant number of House members, visitors and employees engaged
in piracy.
The report quoted some 800 IP-addresses assigned to the U.S.
House of Representatives as being engaged in trading copyrighted content, most
specifically books.
The same data recently showed piracy by Sony, Universal and
Fox, French President Nicholas Sarkozy and the RIAA and DHS.
“It is of course shocking that politicians, lobbyists and
the RIAA would say one thing, but do another, though perhaps the House website
should be filtered from the broader Internet?” part of the report read.
Meanwhile the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) in
collaboration with over a dozen civil society organizations worldwide recently
launched Global Chokepoints at www.globalchokepoints.org to document how
copyright enforcement is being used to censor online free expression in
countries around the world.
Internet Activist and contact lead for this project at San
Francisco-based EFF, Rainey Reitman said that Global Chokepoints, funded in
part through a grant by the Open Society Foundation, is an online resource
created to document and monitor proposals from around the world to turn
Internet intermediaries into copyright police.
These proposals, Reitman said, harm Internet users’ rights
of privacy, due process and freedom of expression, as well as endanger the
future of the free and open Internet.
Global Chokepoints, the activist continued was designed to
provide empirical information to digital activists and policymakers and to help
coordinate international opposition to attempts to cut off free expression
through misguided copyright laws and transnational agreements, like Anti
Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
Further, Reitman said, Global Chokepoints would document the
escalating global efforts to turn Internet intermediaries into chokepoints for
online free expression.
Describing Internet intermediaries all over the world to
include Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to community-driven sites like
Twitter and YouTube to online payment processors; saying they are increasingly
facing demands by IP rights holders and governments to remove, filter, or block
allegedly infringing or illegal content, as well as to collect and disclose
their users’ personal data.
Remmy Nweke
ITREALMS Online ... delivering news for ICT4D
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