On October 26, 2011, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was introduced to the United States House of Representatives by Representative Lamar Smith and 12 co-sponsors. The bill focuses on giving the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) and copyright holders the ability to seek bans against websites that promote or house copyrighted and/or illegal material. This includes, but is not limited to, denying online payment systems the ability to work with the accused websites, search engines such as Google to link to the websites, and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) banning the websites.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has called SOPA "Internet censorship" and stated, "[it] could allow the U.S. government and private corporations to create a blacklist of censored websites, and cut many more off from their ad networks and payment providers. This bill is bad news, and its supporters are trying to push it through before ordinary citizens realize just how much damage it can cause."
The bill would make streaming copyrighted content via the Internet a criminal offense and comes with a maximum of five years in prison. Website owners, if accused, have five days to submit an appeal to the government before their website is shut down and revenue is lost.
Before going into the next portion of SOPA, we must first discuss a little about the Digital Millennium Copyrigth Act (DMCA). The DMCA, in short, grants immunity to website owners/hosts from what users post onto the website. For example, YouTube has immunity to whatever its users post onto the website - YouTube does not get into trouble if copyrighted information is published, but the content must still be removed. The same goes for Facebook and Reddit. Under SOPA, the owner of the website would be the main one at fault, even if they did not publish anything illegal.
Moving on, SOPA also gives immunity to ISPs. A primary example is Comcast, who also owns NBC. Comcast, under the bill, would be given the ability to ban websites (without going through the government) that it deems are encouraging copyrighted/illegal content, but in truth, could just be competing with NBC in some way. Comcast is a supporter of SOPA.
The House will continue its debate of the Stop Online Piracy Act after the winter recess. What are your thoughts on SOPA? Let us know in the comments below.
[...] Will 2012 be the year of the copyright? Hear us out on this one – copyrights have been out for ages now, but keeping in mind everything with the recent "Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)," things may be changing, changing fast and drastically. SOPA aims to end online piracy and while its intentions are certainly good-hearted, this isn't the way to end piracy on the Internet. It would give corporate entities too much power, and even partially go against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But if this passes (and even if it doesn't), Internet users can expect to see a lot of changes with how intellectual property is shard online. We're slowly passing the time of being able to illegally download nearly everything you need off of the Internet and companies are beginning to punish those who do. You can read more about SOPA here. [...]
[...] can read everything you need to know about the Stop Online Piracy Act here. // Filed Under: Featured, Internet, [...]