- Feb 9, 2007
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If you haven't caught wind of this yet, it's all over the news. The bill (Protect IP in the Senate, and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House) appears to be a big shift in copyright protection law from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Here are some of the more striking bullet points I've gathered:
* "The U.S. House of Representatives bill would allow a private party to go straight to a website's advertising and payment providers and request they sever ties" (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2062544/Google-takes-Congress-online-piracy-bill.html)
* "The U.S. Justice Department, under the bill, could also request court orders to compel U.S. search engines and other sites to block domain names or search results." (see above link)
* "At present, if Facebook, You Tube or other leading websites are found to be holding copyright material without permission, then they are told to take it down. Sopa would make it possible for the US to block the website. Such far-reaching powers could kill smaller firms and put off investors from financing new companies, said Holmes Wilson, co-founder of Fight For The Future, a lobbying group." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technolog...ndemned-internet-blacklist-bill?newsfeed=true)
You can send letters to your congressmen in ~10 secs through either of these sites (I used the EFF one):
http://americancensorship.org/
https://www.eff.org/
Groups like Creative Commons, Mozilla and the Free Software Foundation are sponsoring the letter drive through banner links on their sites. And as mentioned in the articles, the bill is being opposed by Google, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo.
* "The U.S. House of Representatives bill would allow a private party to go straight to a website's advertising and payment providers and request they sever ties" (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2062544/Google-takes-Congress-online-piracy-bill.html)
* "The U.S. Justice Department, under the bill, could also request court orders to compel U.S. search engines and other sites to block domain names or search results." (see above link)
* "At present, if Facebook, You Tube or other leading websites are found to be holding copyright material without permission, then they are told to take it down. Sopa would make it possible for the US to block the website. Such far-reaching powers could kill smaller firms and put off investors from financing new companies, said Holmes Wilson, co-founder of Fight For The Future, a lobbying group." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technolog...ndemned-internet-blacklist-bill?newsfeed=true)
You can send letters to your congressmen in ~10 secs through either of these sites (I used the EFF one):
http://americancensorship.org/
https://www.eff.org/
Groups like Creative Commons, Mozilla and the Free Software Foundation are sponsoring the letter drive through banner links on their sites. And as mentioned in the articles, the bill is being opposed by Google, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo.
