Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Adam Savage busts another myth
This one being the myth that the SOPA/PIPA acts slowly working their way through Congress are somehow of value.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sister bill in the Senate, the PROTECT IP Act, are not very popular right now, thanks in large part to a growing outcry from some of the strongest voices on the Internet, from the founders of Google, Reddit, eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia and others. Now another, even more familiar voice is being raised to oppose the bills, which would mandate fundamental changes in the way the Internet operates.Every voice counts against these bills and the large amounts of money supporting them.
Adam Savage, co-host of The Discovery Channel’s “Mythbusters,” explained in an essay published this week by Popular Mechanics that the provisions in the anti-piracy bills would “destroy the Internet as we know it,” by giving content creators a club to whack entire websites based upon sometimes arbitrary claims.
“Make no mistake: These bills aren’t simply unconstitutional, they are anticonstitutional,” he wrote. “They would allow for the wholesale elimination of entire websites, domain names, and chunks of the DNS (the underlying structure of the whole Internet), based on nothing more than the ‘good faith’ assertion by a single party that the website is infringing on a copyright of the complainant. The accused doesn’t even have to be aware that the complaint has been made.
“I’m not kidding,” he emphasized.
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