November 17, 2011
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) says passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act "would mean the end of the internet as we know it." Photo: AP
Weeks after the Silicon Valley representative’s comments, the vitriol reached a crescendo Wednesday during the measure’s first hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, when Registrar of Copyrights Maria Pallante testified the U.S. copyright system would “fail” if Congress does not take action.
“The rhetoric around this bill is over the top,” said Rep. Howard Berman, the California Democrat whose district includes Hollywood.
Lofgren’s statements, however, aren’t that farfetched. Not if you actually read the bill.
Lofgren’s words do not mean she favors online piracy or the online distribution of counterfeited drugs.
Lofgren, her Silicon Valley constituents and civil rights groups are concerned about what’s actually contained inside the four corners of the 79-page proposal. It amounts to the holy grail of intellectual-property enforcement that the recording industry, movie studios and their union and guild workforces have been clamoring for since the George W. Bush administration: The bill grants rights holders the unfettered power to effectively kill websites they believe are dedicated to infringing activities — without needing to get a judge’s permission.
The measure would also boost the government’s authority to disrupt and shutter “rogue” websites that hawk or host trademark- and copyright-infringing products, including allowing the government to order sites removed from search engines. The bill allows the Justice Department for the first time to obtain court orders demanding American ISPs to stop rendering the DNS for a particular website, a feature even the bill’s main backer conceded Wednesday was problematic for a host of reasons, including that it’s a threat to a secure and uniform internet.
Most distressing, however, the measure paves the way for private rights holders to easily cut off advertising and banking transactions to what the bill’s backers call “rogue” websites, without court intervention.
And therein rests a major problem. The definition of a “rogue site” is so vague that the law is ripe for rights holders to abuse to cut off the financial pipelines of websites they view as designed to “enable” or “facilitate infringement.” The bill also allows rights holders to target websites that turn a blind eye to avoid knowing their site is used for infringement.
File-sharing sites or cyberlockers are also included.
The list of such sites that could be considered “rogue” is legion. They range from the notorious Pirate Bay hub for all things free, to cyberlockers like DropBox or Box.net. Sites filled with user-generated content, such as YouTube, aren’t immune either because they generally don’t actively police their sites for infringement.
“We have a lot of concerns that it sweeps in legitimate sites,” Katherine Oyama, Google’s policy council, testified during the House hearing Wednesday... read more at source: ThreatLevel
