Last week I was talking to a friend, and we got to talking; we’ve realized it’s just the early 2010s all over again; Now hear me out on this.
Back in May TorrentFreak is reporting “Kim Dotcom Expects New Raid & Bail Revocation After ‘Secret Orders’ Issued in U.S.”.
For my readers who might not remember or been around the last time old Kimble was in the news, back in 2012 Kimble’s home was raided by the New Zealand at the request of US authorities for what? I can hear you asking; well, namely criminal copyright infringement for his website Megaupload (2005–2012). The DoJ alleged that MegaUpload was a site dedicated to copyright infringement, when in reality it was a file sharing site used by many people including Indie creators to share high-quality uploads of their works.
Many people think that was directly tied to the SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act] bill that that was introduced in the United States on October 26, 2011 by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) sadly while the law was shot down many people were left dead and countless lives ruined on the way.
The one major technical issue with SOPA was the idea they could just delist a site and block it, well no that wouldn’t fix the problem at all, if anything it would break the backbone of the internet.
A great way to explain how DNS works is to visualize a giant list that says what IP address is tied to a domain name so while yes in theory you could just remove GOOGLE.COM from the DNS, but you can still get to that site via 142.251.211.228
Try it yourself, and you’d see; So imagine my utter shock and disgust back in June when sites like Deadline, TheVerge among others started reporting that MPAA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin has started fearmongering Theater Owners at CinemaCon a conference for movie theater owners.
Now how his idea of Site Blocking would work if not just repeating the DNS idea from SOPA… I have no idea.
If you want a good documentary I’d recommend The Internet’s Own Boy [2014] while not directly about SOPA, it does tell the story of an Activist who was fighting against SOPA but sadly passed on at the tragic age of 26.
Can we just get our heads out of our asses already? I hope so.