Yesterday, a number of websites in the US including Wikipedia, Google and Facebook, protested against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act). These are two bills that are being pushed at the US Congress and may potentially affect websites not only in the US but worldwide.
How will this affect us since this is a US law in case it was passed you say? Internet censorship.
In Section 102 of the bill the US attorney general is permitted to take action against foreign sites (those that do not fall under U.S. jurisdiction) if “the owner or operator of such Internet site is facilitating the commission of [copyright infringement].”
Note that the bill doesn’t clearly qualify if an offending site violates copyright infringement if the sole purpose of the site is theft, it just states that the site facilitates it. This means that a site owner can be charged with copyright infringement even because of the action of its users, for example: posting a photo of a copyrighted material on a forum or uploading a video of someone (apart from the singer) singing a copyrighted song.
The bill thus allows copyright holders the right to issue lawsuits against website owners and operators, if their websites have features that make it possible to post infringing content.
If the attorney general takes action against a site for copyright infringement, a court order would require the following:
- Internet service providers will be required to block your access to the site within five days.
- Search engines will be forced to remove all references to the offending sites from their indexes.
- Ad providers will be required to stop providing ad service to the site.
- Payment providers will be required to terminate service to the site.
This obviously isolates a website and may in turn lead to its shutdown, considering how easy it is to violate copyrights, either by doing it consciously or not. Scary!
Will the Internet turn dark again, this time permanently?
