Entertainment

Following the massive world-wide protests over the Internet in January, the infamous SOPA and PIPA are mostly dead with the author Lamar Smith saying he won’t take the bill up in committee until a wider agreement on a solution is reached.

While people have been celebrating the victory over SOPA and PIPA, here’s what has managed to slip by relatively unobserved, until now.

A bill, titled HR 1981, Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, is being sponsored by Lamar Smith and is considered to be a wide-ranging Internet surveillance bill with many other domineering attempts by the government to invade privacy and control the Internet.

According to David Seaman, a prominent new media advocate, the bill has been named thus so that politicians in the House and Senate are strong-armed into voting for it, even though it contains utterly insane 1984-style Big Brother surveillance provisions — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Support for ACTA in Europe is waning as both Bulgaria and the Netherlands refuse to ratify the international anti-piracy agreement.

Bulgaria will not ratify the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement over fears it will curb freedom to download movies and music for free and encourage internet surveillance, economy minister Traicho Traikov said on Tuesday.

More than 4,000 people marched in the capital Sofia last Saturday calling on parliament not to ratify the act. Similar rallies drew thousands of protesters across eastern Europe, as well as in Germany, France and Ireland — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Now that the SOPA and PIPA fights have died down, and Hollywood prepares their next salvo against internet freedom with ACTA and PCIP, it’s worth pausing to consider how the war on piracy could actually be won.

It can’t, is the short answer, and one these companies do not want to hear as they put their fingers in their ears and start yelling. As technology continues to evolve, the battle between pirates and copyright holders is going to escalate, and pirates are always, always going to be one step ahead.

But what’s clear is that legislation is not the answer. Piracy is already illegal in the US, and most places around the world, yet it persists underground, but more often in plain sight. Short of passing a law that allows the actual blacklisting of websites like China and Iran, there is no legislative solution. That’s what SOPA and PIPA were attempting to do, but it so obviously trampled on the First Amendment, it was laughed out of existence as the entire internet protested it. The only other thing you could get the internet to agree on was if they tried to institute a ban on cat pictures — via redwolf.newsvine.com