Imagine trying to wage a legal battle against the MPAA without a source of income. Providers must comply within five days, hardly enough time to assess whether a given claim of infringement is valid. And the technical means by which this is achieved is through domain name service DNS filtering; a controversial and clumsy method for internet censorship.
This targets not only the offending content, but the entire site, even for a single act of alleged infringement. Such blunt and extreme measures are a threat to all sites that host user-generated content.
But SOPA's critics say the bill's backers don't understand the Internet's architecture, and therefore don't appreciate the implications of the legislation they're considering. In November, tech behemoths including Google GOOG , Fortune and Facebook lodged a formal complaint letter to lawmakers, saying: "We support the bills' stated goals.
Unfortunately, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities [and] mandates that would require monitoring of web sites. Where does the bill stand now? SOPA was once expected to sail quickly through committee approval in the House. But tech companies, who largely oppose the bills, mobilized their users to speak out.
Google GOOG , Fortune drew more than 7 million signatures for a petition that it linked on its highly trafficked homepage. The bills lost some of their Congressional backers as a result of the backlash. One major tenet of the original SOPA legislation has already been removed. As originally written, SOPA would have required Internet service providers ISPs to block access to sites that law enforcement officials deemed pirate sites. But the White House said its analysis of the original legislation's technical provisions "suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity," and that it wouldn't support legislation that mandates manipulating the Internet's technical architecture.
What are the alternatives? One option, of course, is that Congress does nothing and leaves the current laws in place. Alternative legislation has also been proposed. It also beefs up the enforcement process. It would allow digital rights holders to bring cases before the U. International Trade Commission ITC , an independent agency that handles trademark infringement and other trade disputes.
OPEN's backers had posted the draft legislation online and invited the Web community to comment on and revise the proposal. SOPA supporters counter that the ITC doesn't have the resources for digital enforcement, and that giving it those resources would be too expensive. Print Comment. 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?
Merely a detailed complaint conforming to the acts' requirements, which are minimal. The alleged offending site would have little or no opportunity to defend itself before it disappeared from the 'Net. Now a constitutional requirement in American law is for "due process" Also, a constitutional guarantee that a law shall not be unreasonable, arbitrary, or capricious.
The explanation continues, "The constitutional guarantee of due process of law, found in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U. Constitution, prohibits all levels of government from arbitrarily or unfairly depriving individuals of their basic constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property.
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