Forgive me, that I do not consider proof. You made a rather bold statement, I hope you are correct. Yet in all of my research I do not see what you claim.
When it comes to sites hosted in China in particular, the government has been trying to crack down on copyright violations, and many of the top sites for, say, movie downloads, have already been taken down.
It is, obviously, a slow process right now. By comparison, in the US and Europe, when I file a DMCA takedown request (I know, can you believe it? There are folks out there stealing my columns!) the offending page -- or entire site -- is usually down by the next day.
In China, it can take months of court action -- or longer. But they're working on it. Not just to be good global players (though that's part of it) but also to protect home-grown industries.
Another example of cross-border action is the recent case against Megaupload, which was a big site hosted on servers around the world that hosted a lot of infringing content. Their trick would be to take stuff down when anyone complained -- but then put it right back up again. Complying with the letter of the law, but not the spirit. Well, according to the prosecutors, they knew and encouraged the posting of infringing content, and supposedly there are internal communicaitons to back this up, so they were in violation of the letter of the law, as well -- you only get "safe harbor" from lawsuits, under the DMCA, if you take down infringing content as soon as you're told about it AND you don't know the content is infringing ahead of time AND your business model isn't based on content infringement.
So the authorities are going after the biggest infringers first. But that doesn't mean that it's always going to be that way. With each new case, the the takedown process gets a bit more organized, a bit more streamlined.
Meanwhile, the number of legitimate sites with legitimate content is increasing -- Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, iTunes, the Amazon store, etc... etc...
So at the same time as the illegal content is getting harder to find (it's not like they can advertise themselves) the legal content is getting more user-friendly and more inclusive.
Overall, it seems like a pretty good strategy for content creators -- going after the biggest offenders with a big stick, reducing the supply of this stuff, and, at the same time, offering free or low-cost legitimate content, reducing the demand for the illegal stuff.
"If someone steals your content and distributes it over the Internet, you can sue them. Even if the site is hosted in China or in some other remote part of the world, there are processes in place to get redress."
And I mentioned in my article that there are already plenty of laws on the books -- in every country -- regulating the Internet to some degree.
Personally, I think we've found something close to a reasonable balance between regulation and freedom.
If someone steals your content and distributes it over the Internet, you can sue them. Even if the site is hosted in China or in some other remote part of the world, there are processes in place to get redress, and they're improving on a steady basis, pushing pirates, infringers, pedophiles and other lawbreakers farther and farther to the fringes of the Internet.
Meanwhile, the ability to use encryption, anonymous logins, etc... offer people a degree of freedom and security online that really isn't available in most other spheres.
Should we tweak it some? Probably. But I don't think we need any large-scale changes in the way the Internet is organized.
"If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free" - Franklin D. Roosevelt.
We're seeing the erosion of our access to the Internet -- swiftly in some countries, eroding away over time in others -- but we cannot sit by, idly and complacently. If you don't want to wrap yourself in a flag or songs of liberty, just think of the hard financial facts: The Internet economy was worth $700B in 2010, according to Boston Consulting Group. I don't want my government or a bevvy of governments having the right to turn-off that economic spigot.
Hi Maria, why not include EU, USA and several other countries along Russia and China? As mentioned by Michael P. Kassner, control is already there by national/federal laws in many of them.
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Social media has been with us for a decade -- but employer policies and the law are anything but firm about the most appropriate usage of this powerful tool.
Businesses often struggle to decide which domain to use. When it comes to purchasing a domain name, you have plenty of extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .net, to .me, and even .mobi. But which one should you pick?
I've been writing about how the next evolution of the Internet might just be an advertising revolution, and how corporate IT can stay involved as the enablers and providers of the technologies that make this possible.
In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
