Tulare County Supervisors Brown Act Suit Appealed

As the Visalia Times Delta is reporting this morning, the suit against the Tulare County Board of Supervisors has been appealed to the Supreme Court.

The article is not clear on several important points, so I will clarify those.

First, what has occurred is that the newspapers in question have filed a petition for review.  They are just asking the California Supreme Court to review the issue at this point.  The Court will have to decide whether they actually want to hear the case.  Statistically, they will decline to do so.

Second, the case was already heard at the Fifth District Court of Appeal where the newspapers lost, making their odds of success slim, even if the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

Commentary - Stop Online Piracy Act (SPOA)

This is the kind of legislation that results when Hollywood gets to write laws, puts them in the hands of a group of knowledgeable politicians, then lobbies those politicians to pass the law.

SOPA is a terribly written law, worse than the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and any reader should know my feelings on the DMCA.

First, any law that has to start out with "Nothing in this Act shall be construed to impose a prior restraint on free speech or the press protected under the 1st Amendment to the Constitution" - does exactly that.

Second, the entertainment industry wants the federal government and other companies like Google to be their copyright police all over the world.  With all the issues facing the country, taxpayer money is effectively spent elsewhere, especially when media companies consistently cry about piracy, but continue to receive record profits. I have nothing against media recording profits - just do not cry about a problem that does not exist when there are real problems to be solved.  SOPA basically says the government, who just botched a domain seizure that I previously wrote about here and here, can seize a domain upon application to the court if piracy is suspected.  Pages 10-13 at the link below to the bill text describe the enforcement provisions.

Finally, this Act will stop nothing. Just visit godaddy.com and see how long it will take a pirate to get a new domain if the old one is blocked. [spoiler alert - you can get a ".info" domain for $1.99]

The Technical Aspect

The government can make a site disappear by requiring search engines and internet service providers to eliminate the site from DNS records.  DNS records are what computers use to point to each other - when you type in www.google.com, the DNS record at your ISP (such as Comcast), takes that name, looks in a table for that name and its associated IP address, and then requests the web page from that IP address.  If the search engines and ISP's remove the name of the site they do not want you to see from the DNS record, the site effectively cannot be located since all DNS records are supposed to be the same around world.

It's not just teenage kids and nerds in their basements opposing SOPA.  Companies against it include eBay, Go Daddy, Facebook, Google, and Wikipedia. I hope someday we will have politicians who will understand these technical issues. I do not get my hopes up though.

The bill text of SOPA can be found here.

Article from techdirt on how they believe (I agree) how SOPA will be abused.

UPDATE:  Since the President has come out against the laws in their current form, opposition has grown.  Also, Wikipedia and others are shutting down tomorrow to protest the two laws.  Mke sure your kids get their homework done early.