Fight Against SOPA & PIPA Facebook Cover
Fight Against SOPA & PIPA Facebook Cover
What are SOPA and PIPA?
The United States Congress is proposing two laws that address the problem of wide-scale unlicensed distribution on the Internet of motion pictures, songs, trademarked goods, and patented pharmaceuticals.
- One of the proposals is called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and would direct search engines in the United States to block Internet sites outside the United States that are primarily engaged in distributing unlicensed content.
- Another proposal called PIPA (Protect IP Act) would block websites located in the United States as well.
The Obama administration is putting a stop to these proposals. It wants the Internet companies and the content companies to get together and come up with more functional and less destructive solutions.
What Would Happen ?
In both proposals, if they became law, the government of the United States would determine on application if a website was primarily engaged in unlicensed distribution. A court might hold a hearing but only if the people who run the website showed up. Otherwise, the site would be blocked by an order directing all websites in the United States with search capabilities or links to refuse to resolve any results or clicks to the blocked address.
Blocking addresses is hard to do without damaging every address on the Internet. The blocking methods suggested in these two proposals would completely confuse existing Internet functions. They would encourage multiple hacks to get around the blocks (and the proposals, it turns out, would be ineffective against very simple work-arounds). Maybe a few copyrights get saved but the price is opening massive wormholes in the Internet permitting hackers to re-direct traffic all over the place — to malware, spyware, and phishing operations.
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