Will 2012 see the end of the internet as we know it? The House Judiciary committee tried to finalize the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) before Christmas for a vote early next year. But fierce opposition – much of it online – seems to have given pause to the bill’s main author, Lamar Smith. He is now expected to hear from expert witnesses early next year before the bill goes to Congress.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as H.R. 3261, is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011, by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) and a bipartisan group of 12 initial co-sponsors. The bill expands the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. Now before the House Judiciary Committee, it builds on the similar PRO-IP Act of 2008 and the corresponding Senate bill, the Protect IP Act.

Attempts to improve the ethical behaviour of groups are often counter-productive. If legislation is used, then people will observe the letter of the law rather than improving the desired behavior. The bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who requests the court orders, the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a felony. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.

Here are some good links to visit, if your interested:

GoDaddy, a prevalent web-hosting company has pulled out of supporting SOPA

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/house-takes-senates-bad-internet-censorship-bill-makes-it-worse.ars

http://mashable.com/2011/11/16/sopa-infographic/

How will it effect me?

If accepted, in just a few words is – it will give unseen power abilities to the Copyright Owners to deal with websites that display or distribute their content. So, you might wonder – what’s the big deal? Piracy is not a good thing and we should fight against it. As much as this is true, at the same time there are a few very concerning key points of the Act, which I would like to list right below.

• Your whole website can get suspended just because you have 1 small copyrighted Item even if it is not actually yours, e.g. you own a forum and somebody else uploads copyrighted pictures.
• Not only that, but you can get your DNS records changed, your Payment processing suspended and your web advertising cut off.
•  So simply put – SOPA provides too much power within the Copyright Owners’ hands. That’s never been a good thing.

I do not condone Copyright Infringement, but what SOPA wants to enforce is simply too much. It is a censorship with no limits. And it changes everything we loved the Internet for.

So, if you likewise are against this, you can go and add your name to it, so our voices be heard:

http://americancensorship.org/

The big guys in the Internet industry already did this! You can see a letter signed by Google, Ebay, Facebook, etc here:

Download (PDF, 195.51KB)

 

This entry was posted on Friday, December 23rd, 2011 at 19:15 by dsmith and is filed under Attack, Business, Facebook, FUD, ISP, Security, SOPA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.