Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet Read Online Free PDF Page B

“online parasites” in March included testimony from the motion picture studios endorsing the need for legislation. The issue was soon reinforced by domain seizures through U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) “Operation In Our Sites” of websites accused of infringing copyrights. Some of these seizures, including the seizure of Dajaz1.com , appeared to violate the rights of the site owner and the free speech rights of users.
Victoria A. Espinel (U.S. copyright czar)
    Operation In Our Sites … is the first coordinated effort by the U.S. government to go after Web sites that are engaged in substantial amounts of criminally infringing activity. In the United States our legal system incorporates fundamental principles of due process and free speech, and those policy principles areextremely important to this administration. So Operation In Our Sites, and the manner in which it’s being carried out, has safeguards to protect to those policy principles. And I think that having increased law enforcement that is consistent with those values is what the United States should be doing, and I think that can and will be a good example to other countries as they are assessing how to fight online infringement.
Joshua Bauchner (writer and researcher)
    No warning was made to site operators in advance of the seizure. Beyond the IPR Center press release, the government offered very little public comment on the seizures. The application and affidavit for a seizure warrant and the seizure warrant itself, with the specific charges levied against the sites, were not released for several more weeks. Notably, the five music-related sites were the first with domains seized by ICE that were more than just link and ad dumps. This was especially true of Dajaz1, Rap Godfathers, and On Smash, all of which were prominent and vital parts of the online rap community. Serving as a sort of amalgamation of radio station, MTV, fanzine, label liaison, PR, record shop, and local bar frequented by rap fans, each site hosted video and song premieres, broke news related to both niche and popular acts, and provided open message boards and chat rooms for fans and artists.
Ernesto Falcon
    In essence, SOPA changed the debate from the original argument for PIPA (targeting foreign websites) to targeting everything Americans use and cherish today on the Internet. SOPA targeted user generated websites and open platforms in a way that would have destroyed the ecosystem of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. When I first saw the bill, I was floored that some in Congress would go so far as to engage in a scorched earth policy to fight piracy (and ultimately do very little to curb it).
Nicole Powers (managing editor of SuicideGirls)
    Richard O’Dwyer, a 24-year-old from Chesterfield, England, founded TVShack.net in December 2007 while studying for a degree in computer science at Sheffield Hallam University. The site, which O’Dwyer started as a hobby, was essentially a boutique, entertainment-oriented search engine, which provided users with links to streaming movies, TV shows, documentaries, anime, and music. TVShack.net hosted no content on its servers, it merely pointed users in the direction of third party sites that did.
    Without warning, on June 30, 2010, the TVShack.net domain was seized by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] and a boilerplate copyright notice was posted on the site. Richard continued to run TVShack. cc unimpeded, until one day when he got a rather unexpected knock at the door. The very long arm of the law, in the form of two American ICE officers, had come a-calling at his university accommodation in the north of England, accompanied by an escort of Her Majesty’s boys in blue. Richard was arrested.Richard, and his mother Julia, a National Health Service nurse, are currently in the process of appealing this autocratic extradition ruling.
Ernesto Falcon
    Essentially while I would explain to an office that DNS