There was a big discussion and of course also protest within the last weeks about the US SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bill as a new act to protect IP. This was actually the idea behind it, but it finally turned out to be a much more powerful option for goverment and the big industrie to control/shutdown websites which „might“ violate rights of IP. Besides that it would not require any kind of court decision upfront and technically this initiative would pretty much f*ck up how the Internet works and would also make DNSsec absolete. The technical part how SOPA would work is just spoof DNS to redirect users for an website or even send users to the „null device“ or nowhere to block access to the target web server with the content.
Anyway, after SOPA was stopped for the moment our folks in the European Union just signed on an ACTA paper, which in my opinion has even more impact not only at the Internet and content industry. This contract was negotiated for year in the background without asking people and without publising anything about this at all. Now the EU signed this paper in a first step together with other industrial nations and as next step it must pass the EU parliament. After this happens (which i hope will not take place!) the european countries have to adopts this into national law (another pass is required in the parliament of each EU country.
So biggest thing is here: this was „cooking“ all in the background and was negotiated in the background and now „bang“ its there. So it looks like we need another „STOP SOPA“ now in an even bigger scale to stop this ACTA thing. I’m pretty sure we will see a lot of protest and ANONYMOUS will also take care that this topic will get much attention.
Here some more info links (german language) http://www.golem.de/specials/acta/
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