The U.S. congress is briefly on holiday (yes, I know, it is ridiculous), but as CNN has reported, this is a brief respite before
The idea behind the Stop Online Piracy Act is "intended to help put a stop to foreign websites that illegally post, and sometimes sell, intellectual property from the United States. Federal law-enforcement agencies would be empowered to shut down those sites and cut off advertising and online payments to them"
a potentially litigious storm kicks off. The decline of the record and motion picture industries due to piracy have finally become a concern for those in congress; at least serious enough to approach new legislation giving the government unprecedented power to shut websites down. It goes without saying that most of the search engines are not too pleased.
The idea behind the Stop Online Piracy Act is “intended to help put a stop to foreign websites that illegally post, and sometimes sell, intellectual property from the United States. Federal law-enforcement agencies would be empowered to shut down those sites and cut off advertising and online payments to them, ” as CNN reports, but these carte blanche tactics have seen a huge outcry from the likes of Yahoo, Twitter, eBay et al. Lawmakers say piracy costs jobs, but if the likes of the internet’s most powerful are feeling the squeeze, it’s not unlikely they’ll kick back also. There’s been talk of the Internet ‘founding fathers’ shutting down for brief periods in protest. Now, that will cost even more jobs.
The problem seems to stem from policymakers’ hasty, blanket proposals for a very difficult problem, and as co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin said, “The bills give the U.S. government and copyright holders extraordinary powers including the ability to hijack DNS (the Internet’s naming system) and censor search results (and this is even without so much as a proper court trial).” What Brin and the others want is more constructive problem solving, but with piracy costing businesses almost $800 billion a year, the pressure is on lawmakers to find a fast solution. Otherwise what? Hollywood might take one of those ‘holidays’ too? Unlikely.
