User:Slowking4/congressional briefing agenda 2014

Wikipedia Congress Briefing

Rationale:

in light of the blackout, there is a need for follow up briefings of Congress, keeping in mind that they are an older generation. education campaign on general principles, not any specific legislation.
typically small groups could brief staff of members of congress, targeting committees, or volunteers’ member.

need to recruit students, outside the beltwayers

our statements at briefings should be as individuals (in personal capacity as volunteers ) or descriptive of the movement preferences, not statements representing the chapter.

for our web site let's get some pictures of the training and perhaps the event ; we've been asked for this for reporting purposes

Timeline

training April 12, 2014, 1-5pm
briefings May 5, 2014 10-5 PM

Resources

United States House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet
United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Patricia Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi (2011). Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226032283. [1]
U.S. Register of Copyright calls for significant copyright reforms

schedule 1 hour meetings, on Monday.

http://judiciary.house.gov/index.cfm/subcommittees + zoe lofgren + van holland
http://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=CommunicationsTechnologyandtheInternet + wyden

Suggested brief:

What is wikipedia?

w:Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles Users can contribute anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with their real identity, if they choose.

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an American non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based. It operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Meta-Wiki [2]

Wikimedia DC is the regional outreach organization for Wikipedia and the other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. Our mission is to promote participation on Wikimedia projects in the Washington, DC area and throughout the United States. [3]

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Reform

Lofgren called her proposal "Aaron's Law." The core of Lofgren's proposal is to make the violation of an online service’s user agreement (commonly referred to as "terms of service") a non-criminal activity. She underscored the importance of reforming a law that dates back to 1986 and one that's being harshly critiqued.

"The government was able to bring such disproportionate charges against Aaron because of the broad scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the wire fraud statute," wrote Lofgren. "It looks like the government used the vague wording of those laws to claim that violating an online service’s user agreement or terms of service is a violation of the CFAA and the wire fraud statute." [4]

the Justice department is open to reform given some failure at trial. [5]

Trans Pacific Partnership treaty & Copyright Alert System

Some of the provisions relating to the enforcement of patents and copyrights alleged to be present in the US proposal for the agreement have been criticized as being excessively restrictive, providing intellectual property restraints beyond those in the Korea-US trade agreement and Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).[6]

other countries are making trade agreements without IP provisions [7]

"It’s been a long time coming, but the copyright surveillance machine known as the Copyright Alert System (CAS) — aka “Six Strikes” — has finally launched. CAS is an agreement between major media corporations and large Internet Service Providers to monitor peer-to-peer networks for copyright infringement and target subscribers who are alleged to infringe — via everything from “educational” alerts to throttling Internet speeds." Daniel Nazer, EFF

Orphan Works Reform

wikipedians seek to dissiminate public domain works including orphans. we support orphan works reform as workshopped by the Library of Congress.[8] we participated in the Library of Congress, Office of Copyright conference. We are for reform.

Wikipedians in Residence in Native American Languages

We need two Wikipedians in Residence as a pilot project for developing Wikipedias in Native American Languages as a project for language revitalization classrooms. Djembayz (talk) 20:20, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Might be good to just tell them that Wikipedians in Residence exist, and that we support basically all such efforts, and the Native American case is an especially good one. Since there probably is no specifici legislation with a proposal for Wikipedians in Native American Languages, we just want them to have a general background, and to know these things exist, and that they work and do some good. So I suggest a broader title for this section. -- econterms (talk) 19:13, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

Backround

not in brief but be prepared to answer questions

Mass Surveillance

Wikipedia switched from http: to https: recently after being mentioned as an XKeyscore exploit of http.[9]

SOPA

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was a United States bill introduced by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. Provisions include the requesting of court orders to bar advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with infringing websites, and search engines from linking to the websites, and court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to the websites. The law would expand existing criminal laws to include unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content, imposing a maximum penalty of five years in prison.[10]

What is DNS?

The w:Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network.

By design, all domain name servers world-wide should contain identical lists; with the blocking changes proposed, servers inside the United States would have records different from their global counterparts, making URLs less universal.

One concern expressed by network experts is that hackers would offer workarounds to private users to allow access to government-seized sites, but these workarounds might also jeopardize security by redirecting unsuspecting users to scam websites. Supporters of the bill, such as the MPAA, have argued that widespread circumvention of the filtering would be unlikely.

Users might go to unregulated alternative DNS systems, and hindering the government from conducting legitimate Internet regulation. MAFIAAFire Redirector, a software extension for the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers, redirects links from domains that have been seized by governments to backup sites, in order to bypass the blocking. The software is open source. [11]