SOPA: EFF launches Chokepoints, •As House of Reps linked with 800 IP

As the agitation over the support and against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being championed by the United States, her House of Representatives have been discovered to be a very big fan of piracy with some 800 Internet Protocol (IP) traces.

A report by DSLReports.com made available to ITRealms Online showed that the US House of Representatives has continued their breathless support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in spite of warnings from experts that the law will stifle free speech and break core Internet functionality.

Recent analysis by Bit Torrent transfers indicated that there are significant number of House members, visitors and employees engaged in piracy.

The report quoted some 800 IP-addresses assigned to the U.S. House of Representatives as being engaged in trading copyrighted content, most specifically books.

The same data recently showed piracy by Sony, Universal and Fox, French President Nicholas Sarkozy and the RIAA and DHS.

“It is of course shocking that politicians, lobbyists and the RIAA would say one thing, but do another, though perhaps the House website should be filtered from the broader Internet?” part of the report read.

Meanwhile the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) in collaboration with over a dozen civil society organizations worldwide recently launched Global Chokepoints at www.globalchokepoints.org to document how copyright enforcement is being used to censor online free expression in countries around the world.

Internet Activist and contact lead for this project at San Francisco-based EFF, Rainey Reitman said that Global Chokepoints, funded in part through a grant by the Open Society Foundation, is an online resource created to document and monitor proposals from around the world to turn Internet intermediaries into copyright police.

These proposals, Reitman said, harm Internet users’ rights of privacy, due process and freedom of expression, as well as endanger the future of the free and open Internet.

Global Chokepoints, the activist continued was designed to provide empirical information to digital activists and policymakers and to help coordinate international opposition to attempts to cut off free expression through misguided copyright laws and transnational agreements, like Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

Further, Reitman said, Global Chokepoints would document the escalating global efforts to turn Internet intermediaries into chokepoints for online free expression.

Describing Internet intermediaries all over the world to include Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to community-driven sites like Twitter and YouTube to online payment processors; saying they are increasingly facing demands by IP rights holders and governments to remove, filter, or block allegedly infringing or illegal content, as well as to collect and disclose their users’ personal data.

Remmy Nweke
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