If SOPA Passes, Impact Will Devastate Reddit. How Many Others?
Web companies like Mozilla Firefox, Google, Facebook and Twitter, Internet engineers, as well as civil liberties and human rights groups have been garnering support from their hundreds of thousands of online users to contact their representatives and stand against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) which many feel is an egregious attempt, in the specious name of piracy, to sub rosa, control internet freedoms. Slave trafficking, online child pederasty, online pornographic predation, these rise to the level of human misery and suffering that should be mitigated online by congress. But online "piracy"? The complications and impact the Act would have on every site that encourages the the free exchange of ideas would be devastating. Cui Bono?
The controversy continued yesterday as deliberations proceeded in the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. And according to one report, after a "marathon debate" it was obvious to one observer that key committee members supported the proposed legislation. There was a 12-hour haggling session in an attempt to rewrite or alter SOPA which resulted in wins for large copyright holders, and defeats for the bill’s critics.
Committee votes on the try-to-fix-SOPA amendments varied, but according to reports two-thirds to three-quarters of Judiciary committee members allied themselves with the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America and they refused to compromise.
“The bill is a good one and I look forward to reporting it out of committee,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, a longtime copyright hawk, and founder of the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus.
SOPA combines the most recent effort of MPAA, the RIAA, and others to stem "rampant piracy "on the Internet, especially from offshore sites such as ThePirateBay.org. If SOPA is passed, the Justice Department would be able to obtain a court order and serve it on search engines, Internet providers, and other companies, commanding them (on penalty if they resist) to disappear an alleged piratical Web site from the Internet. It’s opposed by a wide range (PDF) of Internet companies, engineers, and civil liberties groups.
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