House to Debate Revised SOPA on Thursday
The House Judiciary Committee will conduct a hearing on the highly controversial piracy bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) this Thursday. Lamar Smith (R - TX), the head of the committee, has made significant changes (pdf) to the original SOPA bill (pdf). These changes include requiring a judge to order service providers to stop doing business with a web site if that site is accused by a copyright holder of being "dedicated" to copyright infringement activity. This is a big change; the original version would have allowed copyright holders to request service providers to blacklist a company, and only after the company had been taken offline would that company have the chance to argue in its own defense. Other changes include a clarification that .net, .org, and .com sites were exempt from the bill since the bill is designed to focus on foreign infringing sites.
Some of the language that has caused so much controversy is still included in the bill; Internet Service Providers would still be required to seize domain names through the DNS system and search providers would still be required to exclude the accused site from search results. Critics of the legislation have used these two contingencies to characterize the bill as the Great Firewall of America, since allowing the government to change dns entries and manipulate search results limits free access to information.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has called this week "Stand Up and Fight - A Week to Take Action Against Censorship" - offering an anti-SOPA toolkit and an overview of what citizens can do if they want to speak out against SOPA.
Lloyd Doggett (D - TX), Darrell Issa (R-Calif) and others have proposed an alternative piracy bill called OPEN that is being developed as part of a public conversation. Critics of both bills say the public problem this legislation is trying to address has been greatly exaggerated by the RIAA and the MPAA, and not enough objective evidence has been offered to demonstrate that piracy is a problem worth legislative effort. image credit: http://www.dallasvoice.com
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