Doug Moeller - Autonet Mobile CTO

Protect IP Act /SOPA

Something very important is being voted on in the U.S. House and Senate that will affect all users of the Internet. The PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are bills aimed at protecting Intellectual Property.

Under SOPA's provisions, service providers like Autonet Mobile would be required to monitor and police our users’ activities. While PROTECT-IP targeted sites 'dedicated to infringing activities', SOPA targets websites that simply don’t do enough to track and police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would be enough). And it creates new powers to shut down folks who provide tools to help users get access to the Internet the rest of the world sees (not just the 'US. authorized version').

As law, PROTECT IP would empower government law enforcement to:

Seize domains of sites involved in the distribution of illegally obtained copyrighted material.
Compel ISPs to block access to seized domains (such as from cached servers).
Compel credit card companies to block access to infringing sites.
Prevent advertising companies from selling or carrying ads for infringing sites.
Require search engines like Bing and Google to block access to infringing sites.

This would require us to become the police force for copyright infringement and we'd be the subject of countless lawsuits from the usual suspects. As written this law is bad for the copyight holders, the public and the ISP's. The only one's who will win are the lawyers.

You can read more about it here.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/11/explosion-opposition-internet-blacklist-bill

If you want to read the full text of the act you can download it here.

http://leahy.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/BillText-PROTECTIPAct.pdf

Posted at 06:39PM Nov 16, 2011 by dmoeller in Doug Moeller  |