In short SOPA is bad for the Internet and its users, and good for copyright holders.

Companies who support SOPA are already facing a backlash from Internet communities who have started to boycott the companies and their services (see for instance Goddady Tries To Recover After SOPA PR Nightmare).

No SOPA is a Chrome extension that aids Internet users in boycotting SOPA supporting companies and websites. The extension acts as a detector that informs Chrome users if the website they are currently on is supported SOPA.

A notification is displayed on top of the page if that is the case.

The website is still functional and the next step of action is entirely up to the individual user. Some users might close the website right away, others may want to contact the company expressing their disapproval while others may still do business with a company that’s supporting SOPA.

No SOPA uses a database of known SOPA supporters that is updated by the developers regularly. This is necessary as companies may decided to withdraw their support or start supporting SOPA.

Popular companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Pfizer or the NBA are supporting the bill, while an equally elusive list including Google, Mozilla, Yahoo or AOL are opposing the bill.

Google Chrome users can download and install No SOPA from the official Google Chrome web store.

In addition; Chrome users can install SOPA Lens, an extension to visualize the effect that SOPA can have on today’s Internet. The extension lets you flag websites that you think are infringing copyright, and displays information if a website has been flagged by a user of the extension, and how many users in total have flagged it.

Flag any sites that could threaten “your” corporation with a single click. Under SOPA, it may be this easy to file a complaint with the Attorney General that requires the government to send takedown notices to ISPs, search engines, and any other sites affiliated with the offender.

SOPA Lens is also available at the Chrome Web Store.

Update: Companies like Apple or Microsoft may not be supporting SOPA after all. Check the comments for more information.

The truth is that in casually posting your intellectual property to the web, you may be throwing away the rights you once held over that property. While you may have taken a picture, if you agree to terms that surrender those rights, others may be free to manipulate and profit from that image in whatever way they see fit. You likeness could wind up on a website, a flyer, or even a billboard in New York City, all because you failed to understand the importance of intellectual property rights and the internet.

Protecting yourself requires different measures for different property and purposes. For example, most people have little interest in profiting off of the things they post on Facebook further down the road. As such, simply reading user agreements when signing up for web services and uploading content to them can ensure that your property is safe. There was a great deal of suspicion around Facebook’s user agreements a few years ago that caused many people to fear their intellectual property rights to things posted to the could disappear. Users responded, and the agreement was changed. This kind of consciousness is absolutely necessary to protect yourself from theft.

When you have something of value, however, things are more complicated. You have to decide how close you are going to hold your rights, file for protection, and prepare to fight for your intellectual property should an attempt be made to steal it. For most people this can seem like a pretty difficult set of tasks to tackle, but it doesn’t need to be.

First, decide how you want to protect your property, or if you even want to at all. You may choose to deliberately open something up to the public domain, providing it to those on the internet to use at their discretion. However, most people require at least some level of protection. For such people, “copylefting” or creative commons licenses may be best. These grant permission for your property to be used under certain circumstances, and with restrictions you set.

Finally, copyrighting may be necessary if your intellectual property has significant value and you want to upload it to the internet. Copyrighting requires you to submit documentation about your property to the government, which will validate that you have sole rights to the property and will then offer it protection. Most people have no idea how to submit this information. A quick visit to the U.S. government’s site here can provide most of the information you need to know. Of course, if you really feel you need help, paid programs like are available that can help you out. For most people, however, software is not necessary to understand the filing process.

Protecting yourself is no simple task. Yet with a little knowledge, a lot of thought, and maybe even a little help from software, you can protect your intellectual property from theft.

Martin’s Addendum:

Webmasters may want to look specifically at the document Copyright Registration for Online Works. While it is not possible to copyright a domain name, it is possible to copyright contents on a website. Then again, you will have to pay a fee and, from what I can gather, copy all contents of your website that you want to copyright on CD, DVD or in paper form, which is not really practicable for large sites.

To many open questions for my taking: Can foreign nationals register copyrights in the US? How much are the fees, and how much is the deposit the document is referring to? Lastly, is there a way to copyright a website’s contents without making it available on CD or DVD?

Torrentvalley is different from other BitTorrent services in that it’s not a file tracker like Pirate Bay. Instead, it’s a torrent indexer. That means Torrentvalley does not host any torrents itself. Rather, it acts like a search engine and attempts to locate the torrent across different trackers.

Another interesting fact is that Torrentvalley’s servers are located in Bulgaria, a country not particularly noted for targeting file-sharers. Unfortunately, that hasn’t lasted very long. Acting on the advice of the Bulgarian Association of Music Producers (BAMP), the Cyber Crime Unit raided Torrentvalley’s premises and shut down its servers.

The charge laid against Torrentvalley was copyright infringement. To quote Ina Kileva, the executive director of BAMP: “Torrentvalley was a major international source of copyright infringing material. This site was a gate towards more than 5 000 torrent-trackers from all over the world. The decisive action by the authorities shows that Bulgaria is no haven for copyright abuse in Internet and makes efforts to protect the rights of those involved in the creative industries.”

Torrentvalley certainly wasn’t the largest BitTorrent network out there. They had about 150,000 registered users but a fair number of people probably used the indexing service without registering. This does reinforce the fact that the authorities are always on the lookout for those that share copyrighted content.

Have you ever used Torrentvalley.com? What do you think about the site being shut down? Who do you think the next target will be? Let me know in the comments.

The website lists a screenshot and the name of the video, the category that it appeared in at Youtube and the views that it received. The interesting information is probably the company or individual that asked for the takedown of the video. Lastly the date of the takedown and the time the video was available at Youtube is also mentioned.

The statistics page lists all the reasons why a video was taken down. Exactly 4413 videos have been taken down due to alleged copyright violations while the remaining 13424 videos have been taken down for other reasons including adult content and TOS violations.

The site makes it possible to take a look at all videos taken down by a specific company and it would probably make a nice research project to identify the reasons behind the takedowns.

The so called Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007 would for instance:

• Criminalize “attempting” to infringe copyright.
• Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software
• Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations
• Allow computers to be seized more readily
• Increase penalties for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anticircumvention regulations
• Add penalties for “intended” copyright crimes
• Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Association of America

You do find a in depth report by following the link mentioned above or read the summary of the act here. What’s next, Death Penalty for someone who copies the newest Britney Spears album ?

Thanks Jan for sending me the information per email.

CopyRightLeft is a Open-Source application that has two processing modes. The first is an image by image mode that manipulates one image at a time. You can use the tool to open an image in many known formats including jpg, gif, bmp, tiff and png and save the image in the same formats except gif. You can then enter a text, define the font size, color and many other options. It is for instance possible to add the copyright notice at the bottom of the image, in the center or rotate it to place it diagonal.

Instead of opening and manipulating every image by itself you could use batch processing to process a number of images at once. It is possible to select a number of files, a directory or a file list from a text document and process them one after the other. CopyRightLeft can be run in most Windows versions. I was able to run it in Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows XP without problems.

Many normal users who visit your website will probably dislike that all images on your website have a copyright notice thus preventing the full view of the image. It is up to you to decide whether to use it to fight content theft.

GEMA’s Chief Executive Officer Dr. Harald Heker commented: “The Court’s decision confirms that it cannot be the task of the rights owners to control at their own cost the continued operation of services, which generate commercial profit from unlawful use of their works. This decision will also send out a major signal to all services enlisting the help of the individual users to create a comprehensive illegal offer and then in the end to use this offer for generating revenue for themselves”.

Rapidshare announced the same day that they would appeal the ruling. The current ruling would have a drastic impact on every company that would operate from Germany (Europe) offering free disk space to their users. It is also important to note that it would be technically impossible to check every uploaded file if it would violate a copyright. It is for instance perfectly legal to upload a private copy of album to make it available to close friends. How would Rapidshare be able to verify if the uploaded file would violate copyright ?

It is in my opinion ridiculous to demand that Rapidshare, or any other company or individual who are providing webspace, is responsible for the copyright infringements of users who upload copyrighted files to the service. This would essentially mean that every webspace provider could be held responsible of a user would upload copyrighted files to rented webspace.

Buying Sealand looks more like a publicity stunt to me than a real en devour that would result in the creation of a country that would have no laws against piracy whatsoever. Everyone who would donate money to “the cause” will receive citizenship which leads to the question where they want to accommodate all their citizens if the purchase would indeed take place.

The initiators even think one step ahead. If they can’t collect enough money to buy Sealand they intend to buy a small island somewhere in this world. Here is a quote from the official piratebay blog.

“The price for Sealand is probably about $2.000.000.000. We don’t really care. We’re going for it anyhow! We really want to see what the community can do – with it’s own island. Since we are all for sharing the country would be shared amongst us all.”

What is your take on the matter ? Great idea or bogus one ?

ISPs should be charged for their role in the distribution process which could come in the form of a collective license just like the one for radio or tv in many countries. They could as well demand a copyright shift for the post as well, because lots of burned cds are traded this way. And they could demand it for the railway, the interstates, airlines, streets, schools, university and every other place as well. Sounds like a good bargain to me.

I think they become more and more desperate and try everything in their power to influence politics with all they lobbying power. Is this the way to treat the own customers ? Make them pay many times for the same service ? Let them pay for radio, for blank CDs and DVDs, for printers, for burners, for internet access. Whats next, for their own memory ? It´s definatly time to take a stance and write or call your local representative and demand a change in politics to a consumer friendly one.

“When enough people feel that it’s OK to do a thing, that thing ceases to be wrong in their own cultural context. You can complain about moral relativism all you like, but the facts are inescapable”

That’s pretty self-explanatory, if enough people are doing something it will become common use and therefor legal. You can´t put millions of people into jail because of something like this. Therefor the law has to change to reflect this.

He uses this premise to analyse the current situation of file trading and comes to the conclusion that the lawsuits, the spyware and the DMCA are the death struggles of an outdated business model.

The last part of his essay looks at the possible future, at different models that could be used if there would be no copyright. If you are interested head over to Gamasutra and take a look for yourself.

Update: Five years later and the situation has not changed at all. The content industry is still struggling to keep up with the ever changing Internet, and still insisting on blocking, prosecuting and suing users left and right. It is not really clear if and how this will end. Their latest efforts in the United States, SOPA and PIPA, have been pulled for now, but there is some certainty that these proposals will come back in the near future in a slightly different form.