Decado

Slightly different format this week. No "coming soon" or "What's going on" Just the news then comments from the entire Dev Team on SOPA - something we all feel quite strongly about.

DBTech News

The biggest news is the release of vBSecurity Lite and the slight price increase of vBSecurity pro now it is out of Beta. You can see the Lite feature list here, and check it out on vBulletin.org - vB3. vB4.

There have also been a number of small updates to vBSlider this week, you can read about those here and an update ot vBNavTabs which you can read about here.

Lastly we have a special discount coupon running for a week - ANTISOPA It will give you 15% off any transaction over $150.

SOPA

Iain (@Decado ): SOPA is something i've had my eye on since it was first introduced mid October. The basic premise of it is actually something that could be helpful for DragonByte Technologies. Our products get pirated, mostly by american users, and if we could block access to the sites that distribute our products illegally it would be great for us. It might even make us some more money.

Despite that, I'm firmly against it. For those of you who are unaware SOPA is a bill intended to prevent copyright infringement (Stop Online Piracy Act). The idea behind it is that sites distributing copyrighted material could be blacklisted by US ISP's and DNS providers so they would essentially be inaccessible. Now right away i'm iffy about the idea of censoring the internet, but there are worse aspects to the bill.

Firstly, it would be very easy to accuse a site of copyright infringement and have it closed. The law would also allow you to have payment processors no longer handle transactions for that site. As you can imagine this could have a huge effect on a website that was blocked - even one blocked accidentally or maliciously. The problem is the law does not allow the closed site to sue for damages unless it can prove the action was "wilfully malicious". This is almost impossible at the best of times, and if it meant hiring a lawyer in the US to handle the case... Lets just say it would become very easy for corporations to shut down international competitors - or even just people to shut down sites they dislike.

Secondly the language is so broad that a single infringement could be enough to close down a site. I imagine most of you reading this run a forum. That means if one of your users posts a copyrighted file your site could be wiped from the US internet without you even having a request to remove the infringing copyright. After this ISP's have no incentive to RE-instate your site - you don't have a "right" to that. Once you're off the grid there's no "minimum response time" for an ISP to put you back up - unlike the 5 day limit they have to take you off.

Lastly it gives other countries carte blanche to set up their own internet blacklists for social policies - the US would lose all right to complaint about china's great firewall, or about countries such as Libya blocking access to any sites that do not support the government message. If the US is allowed to block citizens from viewing webpages that aren't in the best interests of its corporations (and thus politicians) why shouldn't these other countries be allowed to do the same thing?

Here at DragonByte Techologies Ltd. we recently moved all of our domains (over 30) from the SOPA supporting GoDaddy to the SOPA opposed Namecheap. We would ask, and recommend, that if you have domains with GoDaddy you consider switching them to a more ethical domain name company.

You can read more about SOPA at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organisation dedicated to protecting net neutrality, which even goes so far as to offer legal assistance to bloggers and websites targeted by frivolous copyright lawsuits. A good starting piece is here.



Fillip (@Belazor ): I don't often involve myself in politics, much less American politics. Even when it's domestic, I'm usually apathetic because I often find it very difficult to find an objective point of view (or at least as objective as possible) so I often dismiss it with "this is probably just another sensationalist article designed to generate hits".

It was similar when I first heard of the SOPA. Sure, there are examples of corporation abusing legislation in order to walk all over the common folk, but surely it couldn't be as bad as the headlines made it out to be.

It was only after my favourite YouTube game channel host TotalBiscuit decided to break his vow of silence regarding politics on his channel and make a video depicting in great detail why the SOPA is exactly as bad as it sounded, was I convinced.
For those interested, the video can be watched here. He explains the bill better than I ever could.

While I'm by no means now a political activist, and while I don't currently live in the USA, I still try to avoid companies that publicly support the SOPA when I choose with whom I do business.

To that end, when I discovered that our old domain registrar GoDaddy had not only publicly supported the SOPA, but also attempted to deceive its users by publicly, yet not formally withdrawing its support, I approached @Decado about moving DragonByte Tech's domains to another registrar, NameCheap.

In closing, a plea to our American customers: No matter how apathetic you are towards politics as a whole, please do not remain apathetic regarding the SOPA. It affects the whole world, not just your country.



Dylan (@Dylan ): As a software developer I believe in protecting the rights of copyrighted material. On the other side, I believe in an internet free from censorship. Once again, "representatives" are catering to their special interest groups and designing legislation about things they seem to know little about, which results in the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to hunt a fly. The language is so vague it can do serious harm to completely innocent people while skipping our entire legal system and bypassing an individual’s right to defend themselves in a court of law before they are deemed guilty.

The ability to shut down entire domains for a single user’s possible copyright infringement without giving the domain a chance to remove the content in good faith flies in the face of everything most of us hold dear. If this had been put in place in the early 90's there would be no youtube, sites like Facebook would only survive by being wholly owned subsidiaries of big business and engines like google would be severely limited with all the regulating they would have to do. If it passes you can look forward to a Chinese style internet experience.


John (@Darkwaltz4 ): I've created plenty of scripts, so I can certainly see where the frustration is coming from in the battle against piracy. However, giving the government power to block websites for the entire country not only won't actually retard piracy, but will let them censor the innocent with any flimsy excuse. The music industry is not going bankrupt; even if every pirate ever was forced to pay back everything stolen, it would not be worth losing our freedom.


Chris (@Ozzy47 ): The bill seems way to broad for my liking, it creates a ton of liability for small to mid size e-commerce based businesses. If you think "Net Neutrality" is a good thing, please share your knowledge with me If you know how the Internet works at a network level, please explain how the government can create neutrality. You're a sucker if you think congress should have any control over the Internet.

Decado's Corner

Thanks to everyone who read through this weeks special blog. As you can tell we are all extremely concerned about SOPA - even those of us not in the US. I would again encourage anyone with domain names registered with Go Daddy to change to a more ethical provider. Even after a huge storm of protest and hundreds of thousands of URLs being switched from Go Daddy over this they still refused to unilaterally withdraw support for SOPA, instead releasing a vague "We do not support SOPA in it's current form and will work towards improving it" type statement. For those of you who missed it we have a special coupon running for the next week called ANTISOPA which will give you 15% off any purchase over $150. Please let us know in the comments what you think about SOPA, and if you've moved your URLs because of it.

Thanks again for reading and as always I look forward to your replies.

Iain & The DBTech Team