Bill Wilson
NetRight Daily
12/14/2011
Faced with a barrage of criticism for new legislation that professes to deal with Internet piracy, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith has introduced a manager’s amendment that has, according to Smith, “addressed I believe all of the legitimate concerns out there.”
There’s only a small problem. It doesn’t come close to addressing all of the concerns with this legislation. In fact, it doesn’t appear to have changed much about it at all.
This legislation will still give government the power to censor the Internet in the name of protecting copyright. It will still threaten any website that allows users to upload content with being shut down, including social networks and search engines.
It still takes the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and throws them in the garbage. Those safe harbor provisions have for years protected websites that provided easy takedown procedures for potential infringing materials, and already had a system in place for their removal under current law.
The bill will still allow copyright holders to pursue private actions against alleged infringing websites with the force of law behind them, including seeking the termination of advertising and payment services, whether the site is foreign or domestic…
…To avoid litigation, Internet companies will simply stop allowing uploading and file sharing all together…
Read the entire article at NetRight Daily.
Related: Wikipedia could soon go dark in protest of House internet bill
The House set to vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) this Thursday, a bill that depending on who you are is seen as either protecting intellectual property or censoring the Internet. The bill seeks to remove “rouge” websites hosting unauthorized copyrighted material, but in the process, as the bill is written, could take down sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter as collateral damage…
Click here to Tell Congress to Kill the Internet Censorship Bill!
