from www.thehill.com – The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a scathing analysis on Tuesday of a bill designed to combat online piracy unveiled earlier this week, caling it “a censorship bill that runs roughshod over freedom of speech on the Internet.”

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act introduced on Monday by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.- pictured) and other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee would make it easier for the Department of Justice to shut down a website or domain name repeatedly trafficking in pirated movies, videos or music.

The government would be able to apply for a court order forcing Internet service providers, payment processors and other services to block users from the domain.

EFF Activist Richard Esguerra called the bill “flawed” and said it “would allow the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to break the Internet one domain at a time” by censoring certain websites.

“COICA is a fairly short bill, but it could have a longstanding and dangerous impact on freedom of speech, current Internet architecture, copyright doctrine, foreign policy, and beyond,” writes Esguerra. “In 2010, if there’s anything we’ve learned about efforts to re-write copyright law to target ‘piracy’ online, it’s that they are likely to have unintended consequences.”

Esguerra took particular exception to a provision in the bill that allows the government to block not just the offending website but an entire domain, which he said is a violation of the First Amendment. He also said passage of the bill would send a message to totalitarian regimes across the world that the U.S. endorses unilateral censorship of the Web.

Esguerra was also unimpressed with the bill’s provisions for squashing piracy, calling the approach futile.

“The bill gives the government power to play an endless game of whack-a-mole, blocking one domain after another, but even a relatively unsophisticated technologist can begin to imagine the workarounds” such as peer-to-peer file sharing and other tools.

“To us, COICA looks like another misguided gift to a shortsighted industry whose first instinct with respect to the Internet is to try to break it,” Esguerra said in closing.

“There are still many questions to be answered, but one thing is for sure — this bill allows the government to suppress truthful speech and could block access to a wealth of non-infringing speech, and the end result will do little to protect artists or mollify the industries that profit from them.”

from www.techeye.not – Online rights groups are sharpening their battle weapons after proposals by a US lawmaker for a take down legislation that could globally effect the web.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy proposed a cross-party supported Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which he says will provide the Justice Department with tools to crack down on online infringement.

According to the EFF, the new bill would break the internet one domain at a time by requiring domain registrars/registries, ISPs, DNS providers, and others to block internet users from reaching certain websites that are hosted in the US. The bill would also create two internet blacklists. The first is a list of all the websites hit with a censorship court order from the Attorney General. The second is a blacklist of domain names that the Department of Justice determines — without judicial review — are “dedicated to infringing activities.”

The bill only requires blocking for domains in the first list, but strongly suggests that domains on the second list should be blocked as well by providing legal immunity for Internet intermediaries and DNS operators who decide to block domains on the second blacklist as well.

Visitors to blocked sites will see a 404 error message.

If the site is hosted outside the US, the Justice Department would approach the registries controlling the top level dot.com, dot.net and dot.org domains, which are all US based.

“Where the registry or registrar is not located in the United States, the Act would provide the Attorney General the authority to serve the order on other specified third parties at its discretion, including ISPs, payment processors, and online ad network providers,” Leahy said.
“These third parties… are critical to the financial viability of the infringing website’s business.”

EFF said in its story: “COICA is a fairly short bill, but it could have a longstanding and dangerous impact on freedom of speech, current internet architecture, copyright doctrine, foreign policy, and beyond,” EFF said in it’s story.

“In 2010, if there’s anything we’ve learned about efforts to re-write copyright law to target “piracy” online, it’s that they are likely to have unintended consequences.”

It said the bill probably couldn’t give the Attorney General the power to block YouTube, but it could stop the next YouTube.

It also pointed out that the bill included poorly drafted definitions that threatened fair use online, endanger innovative backup services, and d questions about how these new obligations on internet intermediaries were intended to fit with existing US secondary liability rules and the DMCA copyright safe harbor regime.

Richard Esguerra, wrote on his EFF blog: “Moreover, it seems easy to get on the blacklist — the bill sets up a seemingly streamlined procedure for adding domains (including a McCarthy-like procedure of public snitching) — but in contrast, it seems difficult to get off the list, with a cumbersome process to have a blacklisted domain removed.

“And what do we get in exchange? Not much, if the goal is to actually limit unauthorised copying online. The bill gives the government power to play an endless game of whack-a-mole, blocking one domain after another, but even a relatively unsophisticated technologist can begin to imagine the workarounds: a return to encrypted peer-to-peer, modified /etc/hosts files (that don’t rely on the domain name system for finding things on the Internet), and other tools, which will emerge and ensure that committed pirates have a way to route around the bill’s damage to the DNS system.”