sopa and pipa

[djweb]

Sopa and Pipa anti-piracy bills controversy explained

The Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) is the parallel bill being considered by the Senate.

The proposed legislation is designed to tackle online piracy, with particular emphasis on illegal copies of films and other forms of media hosted on foreign servers.

The bills propose that anyone found guilty of streaming copyrighted content without permission 10 or more times within six months should face up to five years in jail.

The US government and rights holders would have the right to seek court orders against any site accused of "enabling or facilitating" piracy. This could theoretically involve an entire website being shut down because it contains a link to a suspect site.

US-based internet service providers, payment processors and advertisers would be outlawed from doing business with alleged copyright infringers. Sopa also calls for search engines to remove infringing sites from their results - Pipa does not include this provision.

The bills would also outlaw sites from containing information about how to access blocked sites.

The bills originally demanded that internet service providers block users from being able to access suspect sites using a technique called Domain Name System (DNS) blocking.

[Kinvara]

SOPA, Protect IP, and Bill S.978