Saturday 5 November 2011

SOPA: Hollywood's latest effort to turn back time

The introduction late last week by members of the House Judiciary Committee of the "Stop Online Piracy Act," or SOPA, may test a long-standing reluctance by technology companies to take up arms in the legislative battleground.
The bill, introduced as the House version of the Senate's Protect IP Act, solves few of the glaring problems of the Senate bill and introduces many all its own. While Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) may have given in to hyperbole in calling SOPA "the end of the Internet as we know it," there is certainly a great deal in the bill that should concern even law-abiding consumers and leaders in the tech community.
Has Washington finally gone too far?
House leaders assured Silicon Valley they would correct serious defects in the Senate bill. Unfortunately, SOPA does just the opposite. It creates vague, sweeping new standards for secondary liability, drafted to ensure maximum litigation. It treats all U.S. consumers as guilty until proven innocent. If passed, the bill would give media companies unprecedented new powers to shape the structure and content of the Internet.
Critics of Protect IP pointed out that most of its provisions would only harm innocent foreign Web sites, since truly rogue Web sites could easily engineer around all of its provisions. Rather than give up on the idea of legislating a fast-changing Internet, the House authors have instead built in as many alternative definitions, open-ended requirements, and undefined terms as they could.
The result is not a better piece of legislation. It is simply one with no real boundaries. The House version throws legal and technical spaghetti against the wall, hoping some of it will stick.
The House bill, for example, dubbed the "E-PARASITE Act," proposes alternative versions of several provisions from Protect IP, including new authority for the attorney general to cut off access and funding for "parasite" foreign Web sites. (SOPA requires the U.S. copyright czar to determine the extent to which these foreign infringers are actually harming U.S. interests, data collection that logically should precede such sweeping new powers.)
Once the Justice Department determines a site "or a portion thereof" is "committing or facilitating" certain copyright and trademark violations, it can apply for court orders that would force ISPs and others who maintain DNS lookup tables to block access to the site.
Search engines (a term broadly defined that includes any website with a "search" field), along with payment processors and advertising networks, can also be forced to cut ties with the parasites. Operators of innocent sites have limited ability to challenge the Justice Department's decision before or after action is taken.
SOPA also includes its own version of another Senate bill, which would make it a felony to stream copyrighted works. The House version allows prosecution of anyone who "willfully" includes protected content without permission, including, for example, YouTube videos where copyrighted music is covered or even played in the background...
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Larry Downes @'c/net'

1 comment:

  1. And, as always, the artists will be on the losing end.

    Of course the media will spin it to make it sound like it's all for the benefit of artist but in reality it's for the fat middlemen who are currently getting lean.

    The irony is that they don't realize this getting lean healthier for them and leaves mroe for others to feast on.

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