Obama Administration Responds to We the People Petitions on SOPA and Online Piracy
Media and content is such a huge chunk of our economy that we must do some things to prevent piracy, without creating censorship, without breaking the internet, and without screwing consumers.
Industry and government both need to be careful with what they are doing as well. Consumers are sick and damned tired of buying the same content over and over and over in slightly tweaked formats. The solutions must allow for legacy media and media formats without punishing consumers to my mind. [e.g. I’ve bought every Doors, Beatles, Steely Dan, and Led Zeppelin album in multiple formats multiple times as technology has changed: vinyl, cassette, CD, DVD, and digital. As a song I’ve bought many times says “I won’t be fooled again!” ] Consumers also need protection against a rapacious media industry that wants to lock them into repurchasing the same walled garden or frozen cloud content every time they change or upgrade media appliances. Content should and must be protected for the artist’s sake, but it also should be usable across a spectrum of open devices AND CONVERTIBLE BETWEEN FORMATS IF YOU OWN A LICENSE FOR THE MEDIA!.
Right now I’m going through the throes of re ripping many of my CD’s to higher quality 256 kbps lossless digital recordings from their old 128kbps, 160 kbps lossy formats. When I signed up for the Icloud service they upgraded me on songs that I purchased from them and things that were originally ripped in Itunes, but they aren’t upgrading SONY songs because of protection, and some songs bought from Walmart, amazon.com, and converted from Windows media format via conversion utilities are not working. So I’m crawling through the library for the next month or so to fix all of my tunes to play at a quality level that I had before the digital revolution…
OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE RESPONSE TO
Stop the E-PARASITE Act. and 1 other petition
Combating Online Piracy while Protecting an Open and Innovative Internet
By Victoria Espinel, Aneesh Chopra, and Howard Schmidt
Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small. Across the globe, the openness of the Internet is increasingly central to innovation in business, government, and society and it must be protected. To minimize this risk, new legislation must be narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity. Any provision covering Internet intermediaries such as online advertising networks, payment processors, or search engines must be transparent and designed to prevent overly broad private rights of action that could encourage unjustified litigation that could discourage startup businesses and innovative firms from growing.We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security. Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk.
Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders. That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders while staying true to the principles outlined above in this response. We should never let criminals hide behind a hollow embrace of legitimate American values.
This is not just a matter for legislation. We expect and encourage all private parties, including both content creators and Internet platform providers working together, to adopt voluntary measures and best practices to reduce online piracy.
So, rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right. Already, many members of Congress are asking for public input around the issue. We are paying close attention to those opportunities, as well as to public input to the Administration. The organizer of this petition and a random sample of the signers will be invited to a conference call to discuss this issue further with Administration officials and soon after that, we will host an online event to get more input and answer your questions. Details on that will follow in the coming days.