On 01/18/2012 08:23 PM, upscope wrote:
I remembered last night that there was a computer program that helped some people find who was offering their books illegally. I read it in an e-newsletter a few years ago. It was a program that used a search engine, like Google, and processed the results of the search for the links to their product. The program was like a spider or bot that searched the web from the search engine's links to determine if the web sites were links to information about the product or links to the product itself. It was "smart" enough to know the difference.On Wednesday, January 18, 2012 04:06:28 PM webmaster for Kracked Press Productions wrote:On 01/18/2012 02:26 PM, upscope wrote:On Tuesday, January 17, 2012 11:58:24 PM drew wrote:Howdy, Well, someone decided that the English website should go dark today..I guess if you are reading this you know why. I would like encourage you to follow your own feelings on this. IMO it's a good time, if you haven't done it before, to send your congressman and or senators an email. (My personal experience is that it's much better do it yourself, don't use one of the canned services..) The vote in the congress isn't happening till the 24th, so you have time.. Best wishes, //drewDrew I have to dis-agree with people not wanting to pass these bills. My wife is aself publiched ebook author and at least 5 illegill sites have stolen her books and are giving them away or charging less. This reduces her income significantly. Maybe the bill news to be tuned to not step on peoples free thoughts, but definately should protect writer, author, etc. But noing our so called representatives I wonder what they are really after, probably more loss of our freedoms. Just my biased thoughts.Use Whois to find out who carries these sites and they are required by law in most countries to shut these sites down or remove the illegal content from their sites. No site carrier wants to be held liable for $100K in damage claims you can get them for. If the sites are hosted my a home-based server system, the broadband access company is required to stop their access/services. There are working laws to help protect you wife's e-books and shutting down these sites. We need to make the net safer and better, without creating privacy issues and reduce the freedom of speech. If it come down to a local, regional, federal government shutting down or filtering content just because they do not like it, then that violates the Freedom of Speech laws that many countries have. China and other contries like that do not want their people to have access to the truth as seen by the out-of-country media and on the net. If we start losing our freedoms and privacy, then our countries slowly will treat us like China and North Korea treats their people. Sure, remove pirated e-books and such using the law, but do not remove the good to get rid of the bad. There has to be better ways.I wasn't suggesting removing the good. I'd just like to have them blocked, if possible. Several of the sites sre in Nigeria who is all ready known for the spamming and skims. I think one of them is in Russia. As for your last paragraph I think were headed that way anyhow, ths would just be another step closer. It will take alot of man power to impliment the proposed laws, etc and I feel the people breaking the law would just find another way.
Once it ran for a day or three, it gave the operator a list of sited of where the product could be downloaded. It also could list the Whois information for the domain's owner and the company who hosts the site. At that point, a lawyer contacts the hosting company and tells the people there that the must shut down that site, according to the laws of the country that the site is being hosted from. If they do not have good laws for that, then that company gets a threat of international law suits of some very high monetary number.
The article stated that the company's results without having to go to court was over 90%. As far as I remember, if things like this goes to court, the hosting company that does not take down the site almost always loses. If it is not a loss for them, it still costs them enough that the next time they are told to take down a site that is doing something illegal to their local laws and international laws, they will take the site down.
The anti-piracy laws in place are good, if used. To make the hosting company responsible to police their clients would make web hosting 400% the current cost, just to pay for the extra copyright legal team/police. They would have to analyze all their 100's or 1000's of clients 24/7/365 and determine if the posted info is illegal. That is not as easy as it seems.
For software like LibreOffice, the hosting company would have to find out if the client has a legal right to have a download link on the page they host. Then they have to determine if the software was legally obtained for the source and it was legal to either post the link for downloading or hosting the file on their site. There are some things, as far as I remember over the years, that is legal to have a link to another host so you can download, but not legal to place the software on your server and have it downloaded from there.
I have a list of free, FOSS or other types of, software in a list. I provide links to the software's home page, and not host the software itself. That is legal. If I downloaded and then hosted the software on my hosting account, then 90% of that would be illegal. There are only a few non FOSS packages that will allow you to do that. So it can be very difficult for your hosting company to determine which ones is which and do this for all their 1000's of clients and their 100,000's of web pages and their millions of links. Then do this every time a web page file changes. The manpower costs for the legal teams and the people who do the researching would make hosting a domain and web pages too expensive for the average person. I can have 100 or even 1000 domains on my hosting account for one monthly fee of less than $7 a month. This new law would force the hosting company to charge per domain. But the real result would be that EVERY hosting company in the USA would close its doors do to the costs of doing business in the USA. People viewing a web page mostly do not care where the web page is hosted. It does not matter that they are getting their information from a European based server instead of one physically in New York. It does not cost the reader any more money to do "business" with a web site in a different country.
SO the real result will be that there will be less companies in the USA that are willing to host web pages and can afford to do what the proposed law will require them to do to stay in business in the USA. SOPA will shut down a large percentage of hosting companies whos clients are all doing legal "business". They would not be able to afford to do business in the USA. We now have companies who move from one state to another after the original state changes their tax laws. The USA will make it so the companies will have to leave the country to stay in business legally. On a local note, my city has just passed a law that requires a swap-shop, or used-item store, to prove that the items were legally allowed to be sold to them. They have to prove that the item was not stolen or was not owned by more than the one person who was selling it. That goes for garage sales and yard sales. You have to prove that you own the child's toy that you have had for 10 years and not want to sell it for a $1. This law went into effect on Jan. 1st and every used item store, except the used book store [books seem exempt], are closing their doors after being open for 10 to 30 years. So locally we have a type of SOPA law and it is closing good businesses. SOPA will do the same across the USA.
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