Editorials

This morning as a powered up the systems I use to get on the internet and research the day’s articles I found that I was not able to get anywhere although everything appeared to be working the way it should. My Cable modem was working, my edge firewall had an valid IP address, and DNS all looked ok. Still no traffic was being routed out. I flushed the IP address and DNS resolvers internally and externally to no avail. Finally I power cycled the modem, after an unusually long period of time the modem came back up, but with an IP address that was nothing like the ones I have be receiving from RoadRunner for the past several years. It was not even close to the same subnet.

In mid-January the battle over SOPA and PIPA hit a peak with an unprecedented show of opposition. We saw Wikipedia go dark for the day while other large site put black censored bars over their logos. At the end of this the SOPA and PIPA backers in the Senate and the House of Representatives decided they needed to change their direction. Lamar Smith, the sponsor for SOPA made the official announcement that SOPA was being shelved. Many hailed this announcement as a victory, but it seems they did not see the finger crossed behind Smith’s back.

A couple of days ago, while researching information for another article, I stumbled across an article on patents and how they have evolved since their beginning. I will not go into a full blown history lesson, but I do want to cover something that was very interesting. The first true patent laws were enacted in the US back in the 1790s. This simple law established the patent system to “promote the Progress of Useful Arts” under the original laws a patent could only be granted for up to 14 years and then only if the device was “sufficiently useful and important” and in many cases a working model of the device had to be submitted.

If you ever needed evidence of how badly laws like PIPA and SOPA (and of course ACTA) could and would be abused you have to look no further than some of the laws that are already in place. We have shown you how the lawyers for the entertainment industry have (and continue to do so) violated due process and circumvented even court orders to get what they want. Now we have Spain’s Sinde Law as a direct show of how eager the content “owners” are to pull down sites or simply make complaints.