Stop Online Piracy Act

[sandstorm]

What it would do;
  "This bill would establish a system for taking down websites that the
Justice Department determines to be dedicated to copyright infringment.
The DoJ or the copyright owner would be able to commence a legal action
against any site they deem to have "only limited purpose or use other
than infringement," and the DoJ would be allowed to

Comments

[deadhavyn]

It comes down to censorship and I don't--and probably never will--approve of censorship. First it will be blocking sites that stream or host illegal content. Then congress will decide that they have the right to take down websites that attack the government. Then it will be decided that we can't go on this specific site because the site supports a movement that Congress doesn't agree with, and so forth and so on.

Sure, piracy/copyright infringement is a big issue and it needs to be dealt with. But by supporting this bill, Congress is starting us on a path that will censor the entire internet just like China does and then citizens of the USA will only have access to a small portion of the internet.

Yea, I definitely don't agree with what they're doing. There are probably other things they can do.

[tabular_rasa]

This seems to open too many doors to other Internet-restrictive policies; it sends up red lights to me.

[lenny_maybe]

From the perspective of an online content creator, this is worrying. Many content creators rely on video upload, file sharing, social and blog sites to share and monetise their work, as well as communicate with their fans. It's impossible to argue that a large amount of content on said sites isn't copyright infringement, so there is huge potential for online content creators to lose some or all of their livelihood because of copyright infringement activities they aren't carrying out.

This act doesn't seem to have clear boundaries and that too is very worrying.

[starisee]

Nobody should ever be able to decide (on a whim, or a reason pulled out of a hat, for all we know) about what should or should not be available for information intake.

Will they really try to throw reigns on anonymous? I can't see this going well if it passes, I remember what happened to sony/playstation, tbh.

[leeneh]

You might see a lot of US sites relocate to servers in some of the other 200+ countries in the world - in sheer protest - should your country do anything so stupid.