The dreaded Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is in the rearview mirror, dead now for more than a year and a half. And activists are pushing hard for it to stay that way—even though there's only the slightest whisper of a return.
Since August, more than 100,000 people have signed a White House petition titled "Stop SOPA 2013." A new campaign by the activist group Fight For the Future, integral to the original fight, proclaims that "One of the stupidest parts of SOPA is back."
But there's no such bill pending in Congress. No politician is openly willing to touch the subject after a popular Internet strike and call-in protest left Congress "shell shocked" back in January 2012. Chris Dodd, a former senator and current head of the Motion Picture Association of America—one of SOPA's biggest lobbyists in Congress—may have initially threatened a SOPA return, but he quietly backed down a few months later. Read More!
SOPA Didn't Die. It Just Became SOFT SOPA!
January 2012 saw an explosion of controversy over two Internet-related bills that had been progressing through Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT-IP, further shortened to PIPA) in the Senate. While these bills ultimately were not enacted, some of their disconcerting features appear to be arising once again via enforcement efforts of the executive branch.
The SOPA-PIPA combination was the culmination of several years' worth of efforts by a coalition of intellectual property enforcers to beef up enforcement remedies against alleged Internet-based infringements. An earlier effort was the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which Senator Patrick Leahy introduced in 2010, but which died because of persistent opposition by Senator Ron Wyden. The new legislation, introduced in 2011, sought primarily to create new enforcement mechanisms and remedies against owners of websites accused of involvement in copyright and trademark infringement. Backers defined its targets as "foreign rogue websites," supposedly beyond the reach of normal U.S. enforcement activities. (In fact, the definition of "foreign rogue websites" excluded sites such as Sweden's Pirate Bay, which had never been brought to court in the U.S., while including foreign companies that had appeared in the U.S. to defend litigation.)
To reach these "rogue websites," the legislation aimed as follows:
•To require Internet service providers to take measures to prevent their U.S. customers from reaching the websites by interfering with the domain name resolution process;
•To require advertising networks to cut off advertising revenue of the websites by excluding them from advertising networks; and
•To require payment processing companies to stop payment processing for merchants operating the websites.
In addition, the legislation added another, broader enforcement provision, namely, to raise to a felony the crime of unlawful public performance of copyrighted works. Read More!
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