What is SOPA and how does it work? The Stop Online Piracy Act explained

A slightly more technical question. Does the bill take into account mirroring of content? Say a pirate in Russia posts something on a CDN and it gets mirrored automatically to a data center in Virginia. Does SOPA show any understanding of that kind of nuance?

Here is the reply I received:
Dear Henry,

Thank you for your correspondence regarding H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act. I appreciate your input on this important issue.

H.R. 3261, introduced by Representative Lamar Smith (TX), allows the Attorney General to seek an injunction that would block access to foreign websites dedicated to intellectual property infringement. Intellectual property is any product conceptualized by an individual that has commercial value. This includes among other things patents, trademarks and trade secrets. Common intellectual property infringement includes pirated software, illegal distribution of music or movies, or counterfeit merchandise.

Many of these foreign sites appear legitimate to unsuspecting consumers, who are tricked into purchasing shoddy products or downloading pirated content like music, movies or games. Some of these counterfeiters sell imitation goods such as infant formula or baby shampoo that expose children to serious health risks. Illegal online pharmacies market counterfeit drugs to consumers. At best, these drugs may simply be ineffective; but at worst, they can be harmful, or even fatal to consumers. Additionally, individuals put themselves at risk to identity theft, credit card fraud, and exposure to malware and computer viruses by visiting and making transactions on these sites.

Under this bill, once the Attorney General formally seeks an injunction against a foreign website, the Justice Department must go to a federal judge and lay out the case against the site. If a federal judge agrees that the website in question is dedicated to illegal and infringing activity, then a court order can be issued directing companies to sever ties with the illegal website. Third-party intermediaries, like credit card companies and online ad providers, are only required to stop working with the site. They cannot be held liable for the illegal or infringing actions taken by the foreign website.

Under existing law, it is already illegal to operate domestic websites that infringe on intellectual property rights, just as it is illegal to operate a brick-and-mortar store selling pirated goods. H.R. 3261 simply extends those prohibitions to foreign infringing websites.

This legislation elicits vigorous debate on both sides of the issue and I appreciate all the input from constituents I have received on this bill. Unfortunately I believe there are several misconceptions of the bill that I would like to clear up.

First, H.R. 3261 does not restrict lawful free speech and is not a form of censorship. The fact is the bill establishes judicial review and requires judicial approval for a site to be shut down. Ultimately restricting sites from offering fake designer purses or selling copies of the latest Hollywood movie is not an unlawful restriction of an individual’s Constitutional right to freedom of speech.

Next, the bill would not require an entire site to be shut down if a single page is found to be infringing. H.R. 3261 allows a court to target only the portion of the site that is engaging in criminal activity or infringing, leaving access to or funding of the rest of the site alone.

Finally, the legislation does not require internet service providers to engage in any monitoring, supervising, or policing of their networks. It only requires them to take action at the direction of the Attorney General if a federal court rules that a foreign site is engaged in criminal activity for which seizure would apply if it were in the U.S. Just like 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, internet service providers are only required to take minimum steps, with no duty to monitor.

H.R. 3261 has been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary, where it awaits further consideration. Please be assured that I will keep your thoughts in mind should this bill or any similar piece of legislation come to the floor of the House of Representatives for a vote during the 112th Congress.

Again, thank you for expressing your views on this crucial issue. I hope you will continue to contact me on federal matters of concern to you. If you would like regular updates, please sign up for my e-newsletter at http://hanabusa.house.gov.

Sincerely,
Colleen Hanabusa
Member of Congress

They just want to take a piece of your freedom, one step at the time. The World’s real pirates are very patiently leading us to global slavery under our noses, look around your self. This bill will pass, trust me, the way they passed the Federal Reserve bill, while everyone was sleeping, and we are still suffering because of that.

I hope I am wrong, but history repeats itself and not in a good way, some how the dark forces always win, I wonder how it’s happening ?

Thank you Nilay.

If this many people are doing it, it’s no longer piracy, it’s a flawed business model. What purpose do record companies serve nowadays that validates the massive industry they’ve build up? To me it looks like their CEO’s are furiously trying to retain the purpose of their copmany because the alternative would be firing 80 percent of their staff.

Did the writer of this honestly type “SOPA is a kneejerk reaction to the fundamental nature of the internet, which was explicitly designed to ignore outmoded and inconvenient concepts like the continuing existence of the United States.”
Excuse me? I’m sorry but you just lost a reader.

Some commentators here are asking what piracy has to do with free speech.

The short answer is, it doesn’t. However, SOPA is like trying to murder one man in a building by blowing the whole damn thing up. Everybody dies.

SOPA allows the government and big corporations to censor the internet. What’s stopping them sensoring messages that are anti-government? What about websites about controversial topics that might put bad light on the government? They will likely be censored as well.

then why dont the people start their own Revenge act AGAINST the companies proposing this crap?

where is the outcry to shut THEM down? or the bills to limit what they can do?

Nilay, great piece. More articles like this please. You have a tremendous platform and a unique ability to simplify complex subjects. I’m paying attention and I have high expectations for, you specifically. Keep on pushin’!

Nilay got owned by Leo Laporte last week on TWIT….Quite funny to see the young Nilay defending the 1%’s

So I figure that outside of the USA, this bill won’t be affecting anybody? As the author said, the bill will keep the metaphorical counterfeit stand alone, it’s just they’ll burn all the bridges in the USA that allow you to get to it.

What everyone is conveniently forgetting is why this stuff is being proposed in the first place; people are stealing. If you download movies through bit torrent, you need to STFU. It’s YOUR fault this is happening. This is kind of like blaming your parents for grounding you because you violated your curfew – over and over again.

If we didn’t have a bunch of irresponsible, immature internet anarchists out there who don’t respect the intellectual property of others, this wouldn’t even be an issue. As George Carlin said, it’s not the politicians that suck, it’s the public that sucks.

SOPA may or may not suck, but I haven’t seen an alternative solution. If you oppose a proposed solution to a problem, offer your own. Also, read the legislation yourself and don’t blindly rely on someone else’s interpretation of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1w6GtwOvnWM#!
Here is a great video about SOPA depicting an old man reminiscingon the days before internet went to hell.

The duplicity of CBS beggars belief.
This site is dedicated to documenting this historic discovery where one of America’s greatest media companies finds itself publicly exposed as an irresponsible hypocrite, that has ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the creative community and created copyright infringement damages into the trillions of dollars..

( http://www.filmon.com/cbsyousuck )

Be a HERO and Help STOP SOPA Now!! I’ll tell you How! This Video that Must Be SHARED!
http://youtu.be/WJIuYgIvKsc

The screenshot in the article , I think, is from this video :

http://goo.gl/shlZl

KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures own GoDaddy which is currently supporting SOPA; They will likely listen to the tech community if we ask them politely to help us stop SOPA.

I don’t see why the people who don’t pirate content have any reason to be worried. It seems like everyone who is against this is upset because their illegal content will be blocked. And even the firefox has an add-on to get around it so i don’t see what the big deal is.

Wow, just imagine what the Swedish Pirate Party would say about this!

this is as bad as the creatures from jekyl island. this is a violation. can we please focus on telling people who don’t know, thus don’t know to read these comments, that this is a very important issue. think positive, smile, laugh and make a difference every day no matter what days are significant to you. watch ’ dispicable me ’.

We love you, Nilay :) Article may be bias, which generally is a bad thing, but in this case it’s hard to see the positive aspect of the bill.

On another note, tho people have probably said it before, Sopa means Trash in Swedish!

OH and this is who are for it Lamar Smith (R-TX) Howard Berman (D-CA), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Steve Chabot (R-OH), John Conyers (D-MI), Ted Deutch (D-FL), Elton Gallegly (R-CA), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Timothy Griffin (R-AR), Dennis A. Ross (R-FL), Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Lee Terry (R-NE) Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Macmillan Publishers, Viacom, and various other companies and unions in the cable, movie, and music industries. AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce NBCUniversal, Pfizer, Ford Motor Company, Revlon, NBA, and Macmillan Fraternal Order of Police, the National Governors Association, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National Association of Attorneys General, the Better Business Bureau, and the National Consumers League. Business Software Alliance Go Daddy Bill Clinton Mike McCurry George W. Bush Mark McKinnon

And against Nancy Pelosi Darrell Issa (R-CA), Ron Paul (R-TX), International Trade Commission, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Mozilla Corporation, the Wikimedia Foundation, Reporters Without Borders,83 the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, and Human Rights Watch. Julian Sanchez, think tank Cato Institute, American Library Association, Tumblr, Mozilla, Techdirt, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Paul Graham, Y Combinator, New York Times and Los Angeles Times, Jimmy Wales, European Union, and that guy with the glasses.

I am a professor in an Italian University, I am paid by the Italian state for discovering new knowledge and teaching it to our students.
As I feel that no property rights can be claimed over human knowledge, I make available on my web site all my scientific publications, including sound, image and video samples. I make them available to everyone, not just to my students – of course for free.
And the 5 Gbytes hosted on my web site include a lot of copyrighted material (although I am usually author or co-author of it, so I have at least part of that copyright).
This is perfectly lawful under Italian law, which states “it is allowed to freely publish through the Internet, free of charge, images and music at low resolution or degraded, for teaching or scientific use only, if not done for profit” (comma 1-bis art.70 law 22 April 1941, n. 633, as amended in December 2007).
This means that it is absurd to consider systematically “criminal” the distribution of copyrighted audiovisual material (of degraded quality) over the Internet, this can be perfectly lawful, as in my case.
I am not a pirate, I am just an academic teacher doing my job, being paid by the State, and strictly following the (Italian) law.
Now, if SOPA is approved, my whole web site will be banned from the USA branch of Internet, cutting approximately at half the possibility to disseminate my scientific findings worldwide.
Furthermore, it could even become dangerous for me traveling to USA for conferences or scientific cooperation, as I could risk to be jailed…
Before closing the doors of Internet to foreign sites which “distribute copyrighted material”, the USA government should think about the fact that American copyright laws are not identical in other countries, and that for humanity it is of much greater value the possibility to share knowledge than protecting the rights of some publisher or copyright owner to get some money whenever one wants to access the knowledge “that they own”.
NO ONE CAN CLAIM TO OWN KNOWLEDGE, that is a common property of all humankind, and people as me, who are paid for creating and disseminating it, cannot accept limitations on its distribution, just for granting some money to companies who lucrate on the fact that, in the past, access to knowledge had to pass through expensive media such as printed journals, optical discs, etc….
And please note that art, in my view, is definitely part of human knowledge (perhaps the better part). So it makes no sense to “protect” from “piracy” beautiful music, paintings, photos and films. We teach our students to love them, we spend hours in the classroom explaining their hidden meanings and what are the secrets for creating such amazing expressions of the human talent, and we should be banned from the right of providing degraded-quality copies of such operas to everyone for elevating the human knowledge?

Did anyone see the weird article about Obama approving SOPA?

http://wp.me/p1wVus-9v

I oppose SOPA and PIPA on the grounds that they grant inappropriate powers to government and its cronies, but the loudness of the opposition to it leaves me feeling vaguely disgusted. If this much energy and outrage was put into making the theft of intellectual property socially unacceptable- chances are these kind of bills would not even be suggested.

What I don’t understand: All those people who think SOPA makes sense: How do you want to handle foreign DNS servers that can be used by everyone everywhere? Their express purpose is not in distributing copyrighted materials or circumventing SOPA (because SOPA is not in effect and they already operate, and have for decades).

Do you want to block them too? Do you want to make using them illegal, even though it already happens for myriads of legal reasons now, and not just to circumvent SOPA? Do you just want to allow them, so any ten-year-old just stops using US DNS servers? It does not make sense.

█ ████████ ██████ ██████████ ██ ████ ██ ████ ██████████ ██. ███ ███ This post has been found in violation of H.R. 3261, S.O.P.A and has been removed.

No tickling story, SOPA is not a name of a girl like Sopa Spears. It is a threat to creativity, including to bloggers who enlighten the world with tickling stories.