I know it's HN and we're all very serious business here.

And I'm not trying to be age-ist – my condemnation is strictly confined to mental state.

But what. the fuck. do we do with these dinosaurs who know nothing of technology policy but have decided to go and make it anyway? What do we do? The strategy of waiting for them to retire or whatever doesn't seem to be paying off.

But having such cases is useful because it gives the system something on which to chew, and then publish opinions (not all cases get published opinions) which set case law. So the good news might be that it gets to the circuit court which then has a chance to publish an opinion that our courts can't make these kinds of claims, and that gets upheld in the Supreme court and life is better because all the judges have to follow along.

The system is cranky, and obtuse at times, but its remarkably resilient in the face of unexpected challenges.

That being said, for the folks who are complaining about the institutions in the US being subverted, I point out that nearly all the elections in this country are won or lost by at most a 10% difference in votes. Further, in general more than 20% of the registered voters don't even bother to vote. So one could argue that if 20% of the 99% really cared about stuff they could actully vote in whomever they chose to vote in and no amount of money, croniesim, or stupidity on the part of the voters who are being lead around by their noses could stop them. The math says it is impossible (short of fraud) but fraud on that scale is really really hard to cover up.

[1] http://servingnotice.com/sdv/038%20-%20Order%20Granting%20Se...

[2] Federal courts have 89 districts, feeding into 13 circut courts, feeding into the supreme court. http://www.uscourts.gov/Common/FAQS.aspx

http://servingnotice.com/sdv/038%20-%20Order%20Granting%20Se...

This is a temporary restraining order. Chanel is posting a bond for any damages to the defendants, should the trial prove them innocent.

Regarding de-indexing, there is only one paragraph (10) which says the domains "shall immediately be de-indexed and/or removed", without specifying who will do this action. This is vague, but I don't think it can be interpreted as an order to Google / FB because:

- the list of search engines / social sites is open ended

- the previous paragraphs require actions by the plaintiff or by the defendants (e.g. preserve computer files). Among others, paragraph (8) states that the plaintiff can use Google Webmaster Tools on these domains.

- the (temporary) transfer of DNS records is specified in small technical details (including multiple technical solutions for the redirection involved) in multiple paragraphs, while this arguably much more complex requirement receives minimum treatment.

While the language is indeed a bit vague in paragraph (10), I think consideration of all these factors seems to indicate it is the plaintiff and the defendants who are to take action to see the sites de-indexed (using, e.g., Google Webmaster Tools) and not the indexing companies.

I agree with the attorney. Why get upset about SOPA? They can screw you over just the same way today without all the extra laws.

This will eventually reach the point, if left unchecked, where large corporations will completely own all of their internet distribution channels -- resale, wholesale, damaged goods, you name it. If it's got "Brand X" as part of the offering, folks over at Brand X are going to want to control it.

I really hate the fact that so many of these stories remind me of people running around waving their arms with their heads on fire. It's always the end of western civilization as we know it. But damn it, the problem is that there are many separate issues where there are real threats to common sense and to liberty. It's like living in a town where several large buildings are on fire. Being alarmed seems appropriate, but why bother? The whole place is hosed.

Other points begin with "Plaintiffs shall...", "Defendants shall...", but in this point there's no party stated that must do the action:

"The Group II Subject Domain Names shall immediately be de-indexed and/or removed from any search results pages of all Internet search engines including, but not limited to, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and all social media websites including, but not limited to, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter until otherwise instructed by this Court or Plaintiff that any such domain name is authorized to be reinstated, at which time it shall be reinstated to its former status within each search engine index from which it was removed."

Assuming that Charnel's claims are accurate(that counterfeit goods were being sold), then the standard procedure 20 years ago would have been to work with law enforcement and the courts. If the defendants were found guilty, the counterfeit goods would be seized and profits off of them would be awarded to Charnel. With the invention of the Internet, the exact same thing should have happened. Charnel should have worked with law enforcement and the courts, and if the defendants were found guilty, the goods should have been seized, and the story should have ended. In either case, it would take a while(especially if the shops were in countries that had very lax copyright laws), but there should not have been really any difference between now and 20 years ago.

Only in this case, the judge, in his infinite wisdom, went the "OMG INTERNET IS NEW AND SCARY" route, and decided to just remove the sites from indexes. Aside from the fact that this doesn't actually fix the problem(hello, eBay), this is a pretty new(and dumb) "solution" to a pretty settled problem.

If we find out these counterfeit goods are also coming over from China, should we tell UPS and FedEx they can no longer fly planes out of there?

Right now the core of the internet is broken from a security perspective. DNS[1], BGP[2], and SSL[3], despite being key to daily internet function, are all completely inadequate for the important role the internet now plays in the world and society. The thing is: right now they all work, almost all of the time. Any change will be really painful. Even incremental changes like DNSSEC see scant adoption[4] and obviously needed changes like IPv6 are put off until the last possible second[5].

We need things to break before we'll see real change. And by break I mean really break. When enough money is lost because of meddlesome, malicious, or ignorant government and other intervention, we'll finally see real change. But not one second before. After all, if it works, don't fix it[6].

If you really want to see change, exploit these laws to take down legitimate and government websites. Post infringing links, ideas, etc, in the most visible places you can. Try to get major news and other sites that allow user generated content taken down. In the process you'll hopefully break things for enough people that we see change, or you'll at least demonstrate how blatantly inequitable most of these laws are. Both are good steps toward real change.

[1] http://www.dnssec.net/dns-threats

[2] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4272.txt

[3] http://www.darkreading.com/taxonomy/index/printarticle/id/23...

[4] http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110330006919/en/IID-...

[5] http://ripe59.ripe.net/presentations/botterman-v6-survey.pdf

[6] Yes, I know it doesn't technically work in all cases right now, but did you notice when any of these sites went offline? I didn't. I see an increasing frequency of these types of reports, but have yet to be personally affected.

And it raises the point of how tricky it will be to even suggest enforcing SOPA with out providing massive centralized services listing blocked sites etc.

This is what you get when you support a modern liberal state. It's always going to over-extend and over-regulate, because that's just the way the bureaucracy works - it's preserving itself by always finding new areas of society and the economy that "just have to be regulated for the common good".

It's a matter of basic principles, really. It's just never going to end unless you stand up for individual freedoms and very limited powers of the state.

But seriously, the Judge may be just as tired of it as we are, and just made a quick ruling to please Chanel, at least for another month or so...

Put aside all the technical limitations - they can (have been or will be) solved. The real question is adoption. What's a darknet without Facebook, Google, etc. worth? Who will use it? There are already countless projects implementing parts of suggested darknets, some of them very cleverly. They've been around for literally decades. None of them are perfect, but they're not so fatally flawed either.

The fact of the matter is, the internet is one big, huge de facto standard. No one will use your pet project. No one will look at it. People would far rather shoehorn or build on top of existing infrastructure (thereby being bound to the limitations of the underlying architecture and design requirements).

Just look at IPv6. It's a new technology with the full force of all the giants in the industry.... and it hasn't gone anywhere.

Actually, IPv6 would have been a good place to add the support for decentralized everything, as it is pretty much the only "authoritive" replacement for the current generation of technology. But it doesn't and it's not.

You can build it, they won't come. History proves it.

Oh wait, that would never happen. (Incidentally in about 98, before capri's got fashionable again, my friend took to folding and stitching her jeans, in a few weeks all the girls were doing it throughout the summer; about 4 years later she was pissed when Levi and Wrangler jeans started selling them, manufactured from regular jeans and stitched almost identically)

I dislike the whole anti-counterfeit programs because companies want you to spend $2000 for a leather bag with their name on it, but the bag is only really worth $20. They're not even complaining that you're not willing to pay for it (like pirating a movie), they're complaining because you're unwilling to spend a massively unreasonable amount on it.

There's no reason to target the counterfeitters as they're not hurting your business model. They're selling to people who know they're getting ripped off, but Gucci and what not are selling it to rich idiots who don't know they're getting ripped off.

The thing of most concern isn't the seizures themselves. It is the lack of due process. The litigant finds 3 websites from 228 are selling counterfeit goods. The litigant says the other 225 are also selling counterfeit goods.. the judge takes their word. Websites disappear!?

I don't have a problem with counterfeit websites being taken offline. They can ship goods which are dangerous to the public. What I have a problem with is the lack of due process and the ordering of international websites which everyone depends on to press the delete button also.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is the lack of influence Silicon Valley apparently has on US law. The western world's internet is dominated by US tech giants. Yet US law seems to be moving against the tech sector. I say its about time Silicon Valley started lobbying Washington.

It sucks living in Canada. Most days. Not today.

After all, it's aiding and abetting someone who's not acting in their interests ...

1. Set up OSCommerce or Magento site with design roughly copied from legit rights owner. 2. Get local 'middleman' to donate paypal account in return for small cut 3. Buy a bucket load of adwords 4. Run massive scale xrumer / scrapebox / etc 'SEO' campaign 5. Repeat thousands of times over

Getting domains de-indexed via the DMCA process on Google, never mind taking after-the-fact legal action, is just treating the symptoms.

Given that Paypal and Google are at the forefront of this issue, they are where the responsibility lies in terms of preventing the sites from transacting: by denying them a payment method and heaps of traffic respectively. I am sure that both companies are working hard on this issue, but having looked at the problem over the past couple of years, it hasn't always seemed to be that much of a priority.

Beyond that it is basically a question of international trade treaties and better local law enforcement in the territories where the offenders operate (predominately China) - i.e. NOT an easy fix.

You can understand the frustration of rights owners who are obviously going to take every opportunity to use legal action domestically. If they get a fairly tech illiterate decision in their favour that has potential dangerous consequences for the internet at large, then this is as much because they are just swinging at everything (back to those moles) than any great desire on their part to restrict legitimate rights and freedoms.

Finally, it is important to realise that this is not a victimless crime. What brought this home to me was a few years back when I overheard a nurse in the neonatal unit my son was being looked after in at the time excitedly talking about a pair of brand name boots she'd bought on the internet.

I realised that she had absolutely no clue they were fake because why should she? She had found the legitimate-looking site on the first page of Google and had paid with Paypal.

This was not a transaction carried out 'out the back of a van', where caveat emptor might more readily apply. A lot (majority?) of consumers don't realise that for all the brand loyality they might have in respect of Google and Paypal, etc^, they are services that are easily misused by unrelated third parties and so should not be taken as any sort of 'trust mark' in they way that shopping in large well-known department store does.

^Amazon and eBay deserve honourable mentions as being popular conduits for counterfeit scams too (although eBay in particular deserves a lot of credit for taking the subject more seriously than most).

Obviously the court's decision sets an awful precedent. But the third paragraph clearly states that Chanel checked that the sites were actually selling counterfeit goods. So your analogy doesn't work.

This is what you get when you support markets and capital over people.

You NEED a government to regulate for the common good, or else your individual freedoms will be happily dispensed with by the market as it seeks to further extract additional surplus value from your labor and profit as much as it can from your existence. The market is a greedy bitch and does not care about your freedom. Limited powers of the state mean you will take on the market yourself. You will lose everything.

Overextend != over-regulate. The former is the action of the ruling class on behalf of the market to protect capital and increase its spheres of influence. The latter is the action of the ruling class attempting to placate the people, sanctioned for a time by the market so as to bide time until the people forget why the regulation was created in the first place (so a couple generatons later, the capitalists can spin a yarn that the regulation should go and nobody knows any longer how royally they fucked things up to necessitate the regulation in the first place).

You appear to be forcing your black and white political ideals onto something that is a little more complex that "Regulation Bad! Market Good!"

Nonsense.

First, fashion designs are not only un-patentable, but they can’t even be copyrighted. Think about that for a second: if you design a piece of clothing, it’s not your design—anybody can simply start creating and selling exact copies and there is nothing you can do legally to stop them. If you write a book, record a piece of music, make a movie, take a photograph, paint a painting, or write a piece of software, your creative expression is protected by copyright and nobody can copy the form of what you’ve done. This is not true for fashion designs.

People routinely criticize luxury goods for being emblazoned with logos, and I often hear geeks put down consumers of luxury goods for being stupid enough to buy things with someone’s logo all over it. But given the complete lack of legal protection afforded to the designers, the logos in part came about so that the products could be protected under trademark law instead: they’ve got logos all over them because there’s no other good, reliable way to protect their work from being knocked off!

Incidentally, another thing I often hear professed snickeringly as proof of the triviality of fashion is the fact that trends change so quickly—new designs are pushed out many times a year and maintaining a highly fashionable wardrobe is like trying to stand on quicksand. This, again, isn’t necessarily for any insidious reason or because consumers are stupid—it’s simply because the good designs are knocked off almost immediately and unless new ones are pushed out constantly it’s difficult to, in the consumer’s mind, differentiate oneself from and stay ahead of the copiers.

But even if the above weren’t true, most luxury goods are qualitatively better products anyways. They’re better made and better designed. I knew someone once who had a Louis Vuitton wallet that their mother had handed down to them, originally purchased in the 60s, that was still in 100% perfect condition after constant use fifty years later. Take a look at your wallet and think about whether you expect it to be in one piece fifty years from now.

A Chanel suit is made with a hell of a lot more than $20 worth of materials and time, but even if it weren’t it’s irrelevant. Everyone here A/B testing their SaaS apps at wildly different price points should know it’s meaningless what the marginal cost of the goods are—what matters is how much you can sell them for to maximize profit.

Second, designing clothes in actuality takes a lot of money and time. Fabric is, relatively speaking, an incredibly expensive raw material in and of itself, but on top of that is the fact that it’s bulky, produced overseas, and needs to be shipped around the world multiple times—from the mills to the factories to the retail floors. It costs a mind boggling amount of money simply to ship samples of fabric from the mills to the design studios alone. Then add in the fact that every piece of clothing you wear is not sewn together by robots, but by human laborers.

Given the inherent difficulties, I really can’t blame luxury goods makers for the very brilliant and successful legal and sales tactics they employ in order to make a business out of it. It’s really no different from what 37signals has done, except that doing it with a physical product is a lot harder. You write software: there is no physical overhead and everything you create belongs to you. Fashion is very different. Given the lack of legal protections for their products the fashion industry makes for an interesting petri dish for what repercussions we might see if software or other patents were abolished.

Fake products using a trademarked name is a different matter-- they are of inferior quality, and widespread distribution seriously damages the legitimate brand.

This just isn't true. Many times, the $20 bag uses inferior materials and doesn't go through the quality checks of the bigger companies. It's also about brand name. Some brands are worth more than others.

"There's no reason to target the counterfeitters as they're not hurting your business model. They're selling to people who know they're getting ripped off, but Gucci and what not are selling it to rich idiots who don't know they're getting ripped off."

It does hurt their business model. There are many people selling counterfeits as the original. If the company does nothing about it, people will not only expect to get it at the cheaper price in the future, but will complain if the quality sucks or it falls apart after a few weeks of use, which will hurt the companies image.

"Hardworking baby nurse falls for scam on the internet."

ZOMG That's one of the stupidest justifications for fucking up DNS and censoring the Internet that I've ever heard.

A lot (majority?) of consumers don't realise that for all the brand loyality they might have in respect of Google and Paypal, etc^, they are services that are easily misused by unrelated third parties and so should not be taken as any sort of 'trust mark' in they way that shopping in large well-known department store does.

The nurse controlling your preemie's heart rate monitor is too stupid to know the difference between Google and Nordstrom's.

Oh give me a fucking break.

I had a preemie too. Those nurses are all sharp as tacks. She knew exactly what she was doing.