Stop Censorships

China's WeChat cracks down on accounts, amid nation's growing censorship

On Thursday WeChat closed the public accounts of several publications known for their political writings

One of China's most popular messaging apps, WeChat, has started shutting down certain accounts known for their political writings, the latest sign that the nation is stepping up its censorship of the Internet. Chinese users began noticing the closures on Thursday, as several public accounts on WeChat went silent. Users trying to access them were instead met with a message that said the accounts had violated WeChat policies. Tencent, the Chinese Internet giant behind the social networking platform, said the account closures were made to ensure a quality user experience. "We continually review and take measures on suspicious cases of spam, violent, pornographic and illegal content. We also welcome users to report to us online or through our 24-hour hotline," the company said in an email. But many of those closed accounts come from publications and local scholars that write about the nation's politics. Some have published articles critical of China, and examined government corruption and the nation's one-party rule. Read More!

How Chinese Internet Censorship Works, Sometimes

Earlier this week, Chinese Internet services blocked searches for the phrase mìshū bāng (秘书帮). Roughly translated as “secretaries gang,” the term relates to the speculation surrounding government probes into public officials linked to former security czar and Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang, who is reportedly under investigation for corruption. Services such as microblog Sina Weibo and search engine Baidu also blocked keywords related to former Politburo member He Guoqiang after the overseas Chinese muckraking and rumormongering website Boxun published an unverified story alleging corruption. In news media outside China, discussions of Chinese Internet censorship often center around how Chinese Internet users creatively circumvent filters and blocks, especially when the censorship hides Chinese politicians’ graft. While the power of netizens should never be discounted, the cases of Zhou and He illustrate the multiple ways in which Chinese censorship still often manages to succeed by either pushing the agenda of authorities or silencing critical stories. According to the latest statistics from China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), an administrative body under the Ministry of Information Industry, China currently has 618 million Internet users and 281 million use popular microblogging sites known collectively as Weibo. Read More!

Twitter says 'no plans' to enter Chinese market

Twitter has reportedly dismissed plans to enter the Chinese market, where the government strictly censors the Internet and the microblogging site is already blocked. Twitter's spokesman said that the company has no plans to change anything about their service in order to enter the market. The spokesman said that CEO Dick Costolo frequents the country to know more about the Chinese culture and the country's thriving technology sector, PC World reports. According to the report, China has blocked Twitter and other foreign social networking sites as a way to silence anti-government views, which in turn have allowed domestic services like Sina Weibo, which is called as 'China's Twitter,' to gain popularity. Read More!

SOPA's Heart Beats On In New 'Notice and Staydown' Effort

Most of you should clearly recall the train wreck that was the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a proposed law that was broadly and overwhelmingly criticized for its attempt to force ISPs and search engines to filter user access to "infringing" websites (among many, many other bad ideas). The House Judiciary Committee this week started the engine on what's to be a rebranding of the disastrous SOPA anti-piracy effort, which will this time be pushed under the moniker "notice and staydown." These new push is yet another expansion of already dubious copyright law, with a focus once again on stripping ISPs of their safe harbor protections in order to make them content nannies. The entertainment industry's supporters are busy arguing in editorials that the current DMCA notice and takedown process is a game of "whac-a-mole," so we need even broader copyright laws holding ISPs and search engines more liable than ever for content that's often arbitrarily deemed "infringing." As Mike Masnick at Techdirt explores, the MPAA/RIAA really just want to place massive liability on ISPs and search engines, forcing them to spend money on new anti-piracy systems (with the costs passed on to you, of course) that will take the game of whac a mole to an entirely new and useless level. But as Masnick notes, these proposed systems will again be over-broad and have a number of repercussions for Internet users: quote:The idea is, more or less, that if a site receives a takedown notice concerning a particular copy of a work, it should then automatically delete all copies of that work and, more importantly, block that work from ever being uploaded again. This may sound good if you're not very knowledgeable about (a) technology and (b) copyright law. But if you understand either, or both, you quickly realize this is a really, really stupid solution that won't work and will have all sorts of dangerous unintended consequences that harm both creativity and the wider internet itself.Read More!

SOPA: Dead in Congress, Alive in Trans-Pacific Partnership

Lobbyists who once unsuccessfully pushed for federal control over the Internet are now finding new hope in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). President Obama recently named Robert Holleyman deputy U.S. trade representative. Although he has worked until recently as a “chief executive of BSA/the Software Alliance, a trade organization for software companies that counts Apple, IBM, Microsoft and other top computer firms among its members,” a couple of years ago, Holleyman worked as a professional promoter of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill introduced in 2011 by Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas). The official purpose of SOPA was to “expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to combat online copyright infringement and online trafficking in counterfeit goods.” In reality, though, the measure would have surrendered control of the Internet to federal agencies.Read More!

Popcorn Time is Back to Streaming Movies for Free, Can Anything Stop Online Piracy?

It was a busy weekend for Internet piracy. Popcorn Time, basically a Netflix for streaming video of incredibly dubious legality, went down on Friday after skyrocketing to popularity in just four days. The actual legality seemed like a moot point with it down, but this being the Internet, nothing is every truly dead. Torrent website YTS has resurrected Popcon Time from its purgatory on GitHub and brought it back to the people clamoring for free movies. Although they’ve officially distanced themselves from the project according to TorrentFreak, it is convenient for YTS to play a part in Popcorn Time’s return since the open source project actually runs off of their API. The developers told TorrentFreak that “The YTS team will now be picking up the Popcorn Time project and continuing on like previously. We are in a better position copyright wise as for us, because it’s build on our API, it’s as if we have built another interface to our website. We are no worse off managing the project than we would be just supplying the movies.” Whether or not their standing can hold up longer against the forces of Hollywood remains to be seen. The fact of the matter is that Internet media piracy of all sorts has been an unmovable thorn in the side of copyright owners since broadband made downloading and sharing files online so easy and fast. All attempts to squelch it have failed often in embarrassing ways for the companies involved like when they end up suing little children or dead people. Read More!

Elliot Alpern: Music's piracy problem

Remember back in 2012, that one day when Wikipedia, Reddit and a few of your other favorite procrastination sites went dark? For some, it was just an annoyance — but many others realized that something big was going down, and that websites don’t suddenly go dark for some trifling reason. In a matter of days, the bill known as SOPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act — was dead on arrival from the public pressure. Cue the pride of victory, that warm fuzzy feeling that democracy could actually work when we the people realized we needed to band together. Because, really, the stakes were high enough to warrant losing a full day’s revenue for most websites. Under SOPA, copyright holders could shut down any infringing site with a quick court order. And anyone who streamed anything illegally — be it a song, an album, a TV show — was liable for up to 5 years in prison. But we don’t have to worry about that any more, right? After all, we slayed the two-headed SOPA hydra and the lesser-discussed PIPA. Surely those media execs ran home with their tails between their legs, never to try the will of the American people again. Read More!

USPTO to examine DMCA take-down process

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is looking for ideas on how to improve the controversial notice-and-take-down provisions of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, amid complaints that the current process is cumbersome for small musicians and filmmakers. The USPTO and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Commerce, will host a forum on Thursday at USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, focused on ideas on how to improve the take-down process. The DMCA process allows copyright holders to notify websites and Web services of infringing materials posted by users and request that the infringing material be taken down. Some copyright holders have complained that the process doesn’t stop the repeat posting of infringing files, while some digital rights advocates have pointed to examples of some purported copyright holders filing illegitimate take-down requests. The USPTO is looking for a broad range of perspectives, a spokesman said. Thursday’s meeting builds on a Department of Commerce paper, released last July, that examines problems with the current take-down process. The purpose of that paper was to “queue up discussions on just the sort of questions” people have raised, said Patrick Ross, a USPTO spokesman.Read More!