Censorship

The privacy-focused Tor Project is working on helping Iranians sidestep increased Internet restrictions that were put in place by the country's government today in anticipation of protests this weekend.

Antigovernment protests are reportedly planned for Saturday--the 33rd anniversary of the Islamic revolution that toppled the Shah. In response, the government has blocked access to Web-based e-mail services such as Gmail and social networks like Facebook. Officials have also, reports Forbes' Andy Greenberg, cut Web traffic that takes advantage of the kind of encryption used by secure e-mail services and social networks.

That's where U.S.-based Tor comes … Read more

Rep. Lamar Smith could pay a steep political price for authoring two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act and an online surveillance measure, that have become loathed by millions of Internet users.

He's facing an unexpected primary challenge from an ex-lawman who believes Smith has little regard for the U.S. Constitution--and who plans to use those bills as a lever to pry his opponent out of a congressional seat he's occupied since 1987.

Richard Mack, an Arizona sheriff who retired to Fredericksburg, Texas, is a self-described "constitutional conservative" with a long history of supporting causes … Read more

Hollywood is responding to the defeat of a pair of controversial copyright bills last month with a new strategy: a charm offensive.

Paramount Pictures sent letters last week to universities saying the company was "humbled" by last month's online protests that involved millions of Internet users--and that it now wants to "exchange ideas about content theft" and the best way to thwart it.

The letters were signed by Alfred Perry, Paramount's vice president for worldwide content and outreach. Paramount is a subsidiary of Viacom and one of the members of the Motion Picture Association of America, … Read more

It took an Internet-wide outcry from millions of voters to prompt Rep. Lamar Smith, author of the Stop Online Piracy Act, to postpone a vote on the controversial Hollywood-backed bill.

Now Smith, a conservative Texas Republican, is being targeted a second time: for championing legislation that would require Internet service providers to keep track of their customers, in case police want to review those logs in the future. His bill is called H.R. 1981.

The latest campaign is designed to build on last month's remarkable protests, which included Wikipedia going dark for a day and Google and Amazon.… Read more

Ever since GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole claimed that Hollywood produced "nightmares of depravity" that coarsened American culture and made "deviancy" mainstream, movie studios and record labels have enjoyed a spectacularly uneasy relationship with the Republican Party.

Copyright has been the exception to that strife: since the late 1990s, Hollywood-backed proposals to expand copyright law--the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Induce Act, the Pro-IP Act--have all been embraced, or at least not opposed, by Republicans.

The controversy over the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, has finally splintered that alliance. … Read more

President Obama's first "virtual town hall" in 2009 took a legalize-pot detour. This afternoon, his first Google+ hangout with a handful of voters turned to a no less controversial topic: a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright bills.

In response to a question about whether the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act would levy "too much censorship on the Internet," the president stopped short of saying he opposes the legislation.

"I think that it's going to be possible for us" to find a workable approach, Obama said during the event broadcast on YouTube, … Read more

Move over Jay Leno. Watch out David Letterman. The next person getting his own talk show is none other than WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Touting the new series on its Web site yesterday, WikiLeaks proclaimed that the show would feature in-depth conversations between Assange and "key political players, thinkers, and revolutionaries from around the world" all focusing on the theme of "the world tomorrow."

Calling Assange "a pioneer for a more just world and a victim of political repression," the WikiLeaks press release dubbed him uniquely qualified to conduct global discussions on how to … Read more

Internet opponents of a pair of controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bills won a temporary reprieve today, when upcoming votes in the Senate and House of Representatives were postponed.

But the lobbyists and politicians backing the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and Protect IP haven't given up.

"We must take action to stop" online piracy and counterfeiting, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, said today. Reid, who previously called the Protect IP bill an "extremely important" piece of legislation, said he believed it could move forward "in the coming weeks." (See CNET's FAQ on SOPA … Read more

All four Republican presidential candidates today denounced a pair of controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bills, lending a sharp partisan edge to yesterday's protest against the legislation by Wikipedia, Google, and thousands of other Web sites.

The bills are "far too intrusive, far too expensive, far too threatening (to) the freedom of speech and movement of information across the Internet," former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said during tonight's CNN debate in South Carolina.

Romney's rivals offered similar criticisms of the Senate measure, Protect IP--scheduled for a floor vote next week--and the House bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act, … Read more