SOPA “Requires online service providers, Internet search engines, payment network providers, and internet advertising services, upon receiving a copy of a court order relating to an AG action, to carry out certain preventative measures including withholding services from an infringing site or preventing users located in the United States from accessing the infringing site. Requires payment network providers and Internet advertising services, upon receiving a copy of such an order relating to a right holder's action, to carry out similar preventative measures.” (Thomas.loc.gov)
In the era of the Patriot act and the infringement on basic rights of Americans I can see why these industries feel they wield the power to subjugate the internet and those who use it. These industries could correlate the copyright proposals to the results of the RIAA vs Napster case in some ways. Napster knew of the infringing material and the Napster seemed to support and facilitate piracy but Napster was its own company that controlled and developed its own network. Napster is not the internet. If you apply the logic of SOPA and COICA it would be like holding the American highway system liable for drug trafficking. Every onramp in this country would have to be guarded and suffer the time and cost of searching every vehicle.
“This overly broad definition could be read to give the Attorney General the power to order services ranging from public libraries to backbone providers to search engines to newspaper websites to host a blacklist of domain names.”(publicknowledge.org)
It’s obvious these industry groups and their constituents in Congress understand little in how the internet works. If they did they would know the monumental effort and expense these laws would require. Looking at the cost of China’s censuring efforts “Human rights activists believe the effort employs 30,000 people.”(news.bbc.co.uk).” and “by 2002 the preliminary work of the Golden Shield Project had cost [US dollars] $800 million”(Wikipedia.org). It would be the equivalent of holding Internet Service Providers liable for every virus, spam email and junk email that passes through their servers.
“This all would have happened without an adversarial hearing during which a site’s operator could defend their right to continue about their business without being shuttered. In most cases, the operators of an affected site would lose their domain and face other negative effects before they even knew what had happened.”(Herman, 3)
Filtering for copyright material would be just as complicated if not more as junk email filters and anti-virus filters. It would also be ineffective. Pirating technology is always one step ahead of anti-piracy. New preventative measures would bring more sophisticated ways of pirating. It’s a Gustapo approach for a never ending cycle of man hours, cost, and futility for little benefit to copyright holders and zero benefit for the internet community.
Bill Summary & Status - 112th Congress
(2011 - 2012) - H.R.3261 - All Information - THOMAS (Librar…Retrieved (4/23/2012) http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:HR03261:@@@D&summ2=m&
Mary Hennock. The cost of China's web censors. Retrieved (4/23/2012) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2264508.stm
Wikipedia. Internet censorship in the
Peoples republic of China. Retrieved (4/23/2012) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China
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