SOUP . Stop Online Piracy Act . Bill of Law presented to the House of Representatives of the United States , according to its creators: Promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation by combating piracy of American property. [one]
The project was presented on 26 of October of 2011 by Representative Lamar S. Smith with an initial group of 12 members. [2] The law, if approved, allows the United States Department of Justice to combat online piracy, obtaining court orders against people or websites that allow or facilitate copyright infringement.
SOPA’s advocates include firms like ABC , CBS , Creative America , EMI, and ESPN , among others. [3]
Summary
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- 1 Contents
- 1 Repercussions
- 2 In favor
- 3 Against
- 2 Closing Megaupload
- 3 References
Content
The bill would allow the United States Department of Justice to obtain court orders against websites accused of copyright infringement – or of permitting or facilitating copyright infringement; even though these sites are hosted on servers outside the jurisdiction of the United States.
If the proposal is approved, the US authorities could freeze revenue and advertising on websites, force search engines to “remove” these web pages from their results and even ask Internet providers to block access to them. domains as it includes:
- Blocking by internet providers to the website or service in question, including hosting, and even at the DNSlevel (although this has been discussed).
- Internet collection facilitators (such as PayPal) must freeze funds and restrict the use of the service.
- Advertising services should block the web or service. For example, Google Adsensecannot offer a service on reported websites if this law were to be approved.
- Links to the reported website or service must be removed.
The penalties proposed by the law are disproportionate, for example five years in prison for every ten songs or movies downloaded within six months of their release. [4]
Repercussions
- Anonymous browsing networks would become illegal.
- The communications would be officially spied on to determine if the law is broken.
- Sites where user-generated content is encouraged could not operate because it would be extremely impractical to monitor everything published with the fear of receiving a disproportionate demand since the law does not distinguish between provider or user in these cases.
- One of the basic aspects of the web would be affected: linking by means of doing so to a site that may be suspected of violating the intellectual property of a work. By linking, you would also be violating the SOPA law.
In favor
In favor of passing the law are powerful groups that have enormous amounts of money, such as the pharmaceutical industry – the lobby that invests the most in Congress – the Motion Picture Association of the United States, or the multimillion-dollar record companies, all of which they intend with the law to stop the copying of their materials or the dissemination of fraudulent content, which causes them great losses.
A study presented by this group of supporters examined nearly 100 sites with illegal content and says they attracted just over 53 billion visits each year. Global losses from smuggling these sites reached, they argue, in 2010 alone the amount of $ 135 billion.
The operators of these vandalism sites violate laws, do not pay taxes and do not place any value on the content that is produced in the United States.
Against
Seven thousand websites shut down its services on 18 of January of 2012 against what many call abuse of power in Washington , since the proposed legislation could censor Internet services and its use by millions of Internet users to favor industry corporations filmmakers such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the music industry, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), among other staunch advocates of intellectual property.
Several senators who initially supported the bill spoke out against it, after major web sites such as Google , Facebook , Wikipedia and Yahoo! , mainly in their American versions, they supported the “blackout” in protest at the project and have planned another for January 23 . [5] If the action takes place, especially that of Google, this company would affect the positioning of most of the websites on our planet by not indexing their publications. [6]
Megaupload closure
On January 19, 2012, the FBI closed the Megaupload file transfer page, filing charges against seven of its workers for acts of piracy on the Internet. According to the Department of Justice, this is the largest operation for copyright offenses in history . [7] he US government alleges in its lawsuit that this website caused the entertainment sector $ 500 million in losses, especially in illegally broadcast films.
In all, the FBI filed charges against seven people, four of them under arrest, including the founder of the company, Kim Dotcom.
In retaliation for the closure of Megauplodad, the hacker group Anonymous , shut down the websites of the United States Department of Justice, the Universal Music producer, the American Recording Industry Association, the association of police chiefs of Utah and the copyright registration page. [8]
It is, they say, “the largest attack ever perpetrated by Anonymous” in which at least 5,635 people participated.
