They repeatedly raised the issue of so-called rogue websites with lawmakers and members of the press over the past two years, all the while pumping campaign donations into the war chests of key legislators. On the other side, a handful of digital liberty groups, Internet trade groups and other activists raised objections, but they were ignored by most lawmakers and mainstream media outlets.
But the groups ran into a brick wall last week, with an estimated 13 million people participating in Wednesday's online protest and an estimated 50, websites going dark during the day. Opponents sent an estimated 3 million email messages to Congress during the protest.
Beyond the protests, the two bills represented a huge intrusion into the Internet, allowing the U. Department of Justice to seek court orders requiring Internet service providers to cut off access to foreign websites accused of copyright infringement and search engines to remove results to those sites.
Using a fast-track legal process where most accused website owners wouldn't get a chance to respond to the DOJ requests, the court proceedings raised serious questions about due process and censorship of legitimate content on those sites. And the blocking of sites raised serious concerns about cybersecurity, with Web users likely to turn to foreign, and potentially unsafe, alternatives to find the sites.
Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced PIPA on May 12, and forced a committee vote on it two weeks later, without one public hearing dedicated to the bill. Leahy's spokeswoman noted that the issue of rogue foreign websites came up in several hearings over the past two years, but none focused on the bill exclusively. Both lead sponsors hung on to the contentious ISP filtering provisions in the bills until earlier this month, when public outcry was starting to coalesce. The old-politics approach didn't work in the face of a "public avalanche" of public opposition, even though some estimates had supporters of SOPA and PIPA outspending opponents by a to-1 margin, said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, a trade group opposed to the bills.
That's why the legislative process should have fair and balanced hearings. Supporters of the bill, including Leahy, Smith and some trade groups, repeatedly complained about misinformation spread by the other side. There was plenty of misinformation to go around. Some opponents insisted the bills would "kill" the Internet, when that was an exaggeration. I figure that if Alex is asking these questions then so are lots of other people.
There are many people who have no qualms about acquiring and sharing the intellectual property of others without paying for it. What these crooks are doing is purely and simply stealing; they are "pirating" and distributing content such as music, books, videos, movies and software, and hawking knockoffs of tangible goods such as pharmaceuticals, brand name handbags, perfumes This is big business. Not surprisingly and not unreasonably, the people who produce these products and the people assigned to manage the sale and distribution of said products are, to say the least, not happy.
The Internet makes it easy to set up a website to promote, sell and distribute these pirated and fake products. So, who represents the content owners?
These are very well-heeled groups whose lobbying efforts operate on an amazing scale and who have been among the greatest supporters of legislation targeted at improving the ability of law enforcement to stop the distribution of pirated intellectual property. For the sake of simplicity, let's refer to the content rights holders and their trade organizations collectively as "Big Media. Now, I think all of us law-abiding citizens respect the rights of content owners and see piracy as morally corrupt and antisocial.
We'd support laws that made it easier for companies and organizations to defend and control the duplication and distribution of their intellectual property, but only insofar as those laws might actually address the real issues, don't allow for over-reaching, and aren't obviously ripe for creating unintended consequences. The core idea of these proposed laws that have been aggressively and expensively lobbied for by the likes of Big Media, would allow a company that believes, rightly or wrongly and for substantive reasons or simply because it fulfills their commercial or political agenda, to file a complaint with the U.
Department of Justice that a website was infringing their intellectual property rights. If DNS resolution is prevented then the site effectively disappears from the Internet. What evidence would the DOJ require to force this to happen? That ambiguity alone has many Internet companies concerned. This is a dangerous precedent, even though the proposed legislation is only trying to de-index sites that commit acts of piracy. Google has already faced legal opposition overseas — for instance, China places restrictions on what content Google can present in search results — and a U.
That may be the case. It makes sense from this perspective , and piracy is a real and growing problem. The majority of major media companies Comcast, News Corp. We may collect cookies and other personal information from your interaction with our website.
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