HOLLYWOOD VS. THE INTERNETWHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

KEITH MCINTIRE

PROF. DR. STEVEN ENGLEHART

BUS 1002

1/21/12

WHAT IS PIPA ?

Force U.S. internet providers to block access to websites deemed as enablers of copyright infringement

• Seek legal action by suing search engines, blog sites, directories, or any site in general to have the black listed sites removed from their website

• Will be able to force advertising services on infringing websites, and those supporting of them, to remove them from their advertising accounts

• Companies will also have the power to sue any new websites that get started after this bill is passed, if they believe that they are not doing a good job of preventing infringement on your website

WHAT IS SOPA ?SOPA, if passed, will work in conjunction with PIPA. SOPA is nothing more so than the U.S. government and private corporations black list.

• The U.S. Attorney General can now seek a court order that would force search engines, advertisers, DNS providers, servers, and payment processors from having any contact with allegedly infringing websites

• It will allow private corporations to create their own personal hit lists composed of websites they feel are breaking their copyright policies, ironically this doesn’t have any odd feelings of a legal mafia at all. These companies will be able to directly contact a website’s payment processors a notice to cut all off payment involvement with the targeted website. This payment processors and website of question will then have five days to act before it is simply taken down.

• Payment processors will have the power to cut off any website they work with, as long as they can provide a strong reason of why they believe this site is violating copyrights

WHAT IS SOPA ?

The Bills allow the U.S. attorney general to seek a court order against a targeted offshore website that would, in turn, be served on Internet providers in an effort to make the target virtually disappear.

• More Specifically, Section 102 of SOPA says that, after being served with a removal order:

(i) IN GENERAL - A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order…Such actions shall be taken as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within five days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order.

In short what the bills do is force American social networks, blogs, and search engines to censor the Internet. If they do not follow the bills, they

in turn will be shut down.

PROBLEMS WITH THE BILLS

Your site can be shut down whether or not you’ve done anything wrong

SOPA doesn’t actually affect real pirates.

• When a site is blocked by domain name the IP address is still active. Real pirates have no problem using IP addresses

Ordinary users can go to jail for five years for posting copyrighted material.

• So you know that cute You Tube video of your child dancing to a song? Well that can get you five years in jail.

 If you create or consume content on the Internet, under SOPA the government would have the power to pull the plug on your website. If you’re a casual consumer, your favorite websites could be penalized and shut down if they seem to be illegally supporting copyrighted material.

WHO COULD BE AFFECTED ?

Websites that could potentially be affected

• Facebook

• Wikipedia

• Yahoo

• Google

• You Tube

• Craigslist

• Mozilla

• Reddit

• BoingBoing

WHO COULD BE AFFECTED ?

• Total: 61 supporters, 189 opponents

• Senate: 37 supporters, 22 opponents

• House: 26 supporters, 100 opponents

• Democrats (across the Senate and House): 40 supporters, 55 opponents

• Republicans (across the Senate and House): 22 supporters, 67 opponents

WHERE DOES CONGRESS STAND ?

• Lamar Smith is the main force behind SOPA

• Patrick Leahy is the main force behind PIPA

• The Recording Industry association of America

• The Motion Picture Association of America

WHO STANDS BEHIND IT ?

• Al Gore

• Wikipedia

• Facebook

• Microsoft

• You Tube

• Twitter

• Business Software Alliance

• Reddit

• Harvard Prof. Laurence Tribe

• Ron Paul

• Mozilla

• Ebay

• Google

• Human Rights Watch

• Yahoo

• Tumbler

• Y Combinator

• 4.5 Million People signed Google’s anti-censorship petition

WHO STANDS AGAINST IT ?

WHAT CAN YOU DO ?

• Write an email to congress

• Not in the US? Petition the State Department

• Lobby Congress

• “Censor” your website in protest

• EDUCATE YOURSELF

REFERENCES

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c112:1:./temp/~c112zlavj9:e11714: Retrieved January 21st, 2012

http://www.forbes.com/sites/derekbroes/2012/01/20/why-should-you-fear-sopa-and-pipa/ Retrieved January 21st, 2012

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/sopa-opponents-supporters/ Retrieved January 21st, 2012

http://www.capmac.org/iphonesig/?p=7277 Retrieved January 21st, 2012

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/01/19/4-5-million-people-signed-googles-anti-sopa-petition/ Retrieved January 21st, 2012

http://americancensorship.org/ Retrieved January 21st, 2012