Online Piracy Bill set for major battle
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It’s hard to understand some of these bills, and this is one of them. What is a “rogue” website? What is “piracy?” Is that stealing from other sources and publishing works as their own?
Is it a site that aggregates news, attributes, and rewrites or paraphrases? If the latter that’s more than half of the major news magazines such as the Huffington Post, and hundreds of others, including MadMike’sAmerica.
Here’s the Newser summary:
A battle is heating up on Capitol Hill over a controversial new bill targeting online piracy. Yesterday Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other web companies took out full-page newspaper ads railing against the House’s recently introduced Stop Online Piracy Act, even as supporters sung its praises at a hearing. “The problem of rogue Web sites is real, immediate and widespread,” said sponsor Lamar Smith.
The bill is backed by lobbyists from media and even pharmaceutical companies, who say piracy costs them $135 billion a year, the Washington Post reports. But tech companies say the bill would cause lawsuits and force them to shut down sites, since it makes them responsible for infringement from their users. Search engines also would be responsible for blocking links to infringing sites, according to the New York Daily News. “Almost overnight, SOPA has morphed into a full-on assault against lawful US Internet companies,” says the director of one industry group. Verizon is opposed, too, complaining that the law would force it to develop new technologies to block foreign piracy sites. (A ZDNet writer thinks SOPA is an awful idea.)
Tell us what you think about this latest move by the special interests to regulate the internet through enacting online piracy legislation.
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Interesting.
Peter, publishing news and attributing (citing) it is done every day in major publications other than on the internet. I am not really sure how enforceable this will be in general. The entire purpose of using attributes and citations has been to give credit where credit is due and to create a trail of information flow. The SOPA may well end both of those. If someone “just hears something” there is nothing to prevent them from writing about a rumor. Not that the internet needs any help being a wide open rumor mill but this will make it even more rampant.
I don’t think it can possibly be enforced Bill, and expect by the time it gets to the floor full debate it will have been watered down several times. By the time it gets to the senate committee it will drip through their fingers.
This bill, if made law, will have major consequences for everyone using the internet.