[SOPA] Lamar Smith announces DNS blocking has been removed from SOPA

[SOPA] Lamar Smith announces DNS blocking has been removed from SOPA

If SOPA passes, that is going to suck. But now, it'll suck just a little bit less with the removal of the originally planned DNS blocking. This doesn't fix everything that is wrong with the bill, as it is still possible (and easy) enough under the bill for anyone to request the cutoff of revenue sources for a site but it is no longer possible to obtain a court order to block all access to that website from within the US.

Yeah, like I said... it still sucks, but that minor victory for the continuation of our freedom to visit a website that might be struck in such a way is worth celebrating when a bill like this threatens so much.

A statement on Lamar Smith's website reads as follows, "After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision. We will continue to look for ways to ensure that foreign websites cannot sell and distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers."

It is unlikely that this change as occured as a result of the public outcry that has been taking place recently, but that doesn't mean you should give up. Keep on writing / talking to / contacting your congresspeople and hopefully more changes will follow.

Written by: Kyran Morrison

RE: [SOPA] Lamar Smith announces DNS blocking has been removed from SOPA
The best part of SOPA is that the one of the biggest sites it sets out to stop (Pirate Bay) is actually exempt from it due to it being under a ".org" domain name.

The web should be free. It's impossible to censor it and any attempt to do so is pointless and expensive.

Companies should be putting this money towards improving their services so that people don't want to pirate. If there was a DRM-free, High Quality, video download service which costed _at most_ the same price as the equivalent physical media (By rights it should be much cheaper considering that it costs next to nothing to deliver a digital copy) and was available globally instead of restricted to regions, piracy would drop significantly. This was demonstrated recently when the american comedian Louis C. K. wanted to sell a video of one of his live shows, instead of going down the normal channels, he put the avi up on his site for sale at $5. No DRM, No Regions, High Quality, Reasonable Price. Hell, I'd have probably paid more if he'd asked for it. But his experiment was a success, within a week he'd sold over $1m.

Music piracy dropped when DRM was dropped.
PC Game piracy dropped when Steam got DRM right.

Why is it taking the video industry so long to catch on? Why are the 1-play film rentals on my phone half the price of the actual DVD?

tl;dr - SOPA is a 'solution' concocted by a bunch of people who know nothing about the problem and will do more harm than good.

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R-Type being removed from Virtual Console on Sept. 30

by Alexander Sliwinski on Sep 28th 2011 4:58PM

Sega recently announced that the Sega Master System versions of R-Type will be removed from the Wii's Virtual Console on September 30. No reason was given for the game's removal, but these things usually involve business mumbo-jumbo surrounding licensing issues. If you have any interest in this milestone of the shmup genre, grab it while you can.

Coincidentally, Irem, which developed R-Type, removed several titles from the Japanese PSN back in August, including several R-Type games. No reason was given for those edits either.

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NES Ghosts 'N Goblins removed from Virtual Console

by Griffin McElroy on Jan 11th 2011 2:10PMArthur has bested demons, specters and all manner of otherworldly monsters, but now he's finally found an unbeatable foe: Erasure. No, we're not speaking about the greatest band of all time -- we're speaking about actual, literal erasure. The NES version of Ghosts 'N Goblins has mysteriously vanished off of the Wii Virtual Console platform, leaving only the slightly more expensive, 800 Nintendo Point arcade version in its wake.
Capcom hasn't formally explained why the NES version of the game disappeared, but it certainly isn't the first title to vanish off of Nintendo's downloadable games services without warning or cause. Ironically enough, our best guess for the reason behind these disappearances involve both ghosts and goblins. We'll see if we can get something a little more official than that.

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