The Stop Online Piracy Act (along with the Senate version known as the Protect IP Act), introduced last month in the House by Representative Lamar Smith, aims to level a significant blow against offshore “rogue sites” that host copyright material. SOPA would allow the U.S. attorney general to obtain a court order against these sites and serve the relevant ISP to take down the site. Furthermore, the Act would allow the DOJ and copyright owners to seek court orders blocking payments to these sites from online ad networks and payment processors.
The bill, however, has been the target of harsh criticism from lawmakers and industry titans alike. The principle arguments against the Act is that it is detrimental to the economy and impinges on free speech. Indeed, the bill’s detractors point out that it “strikes at the very core of the internet” by introducing a walled garden ecosystem of censorship that sacrifices openness and innocent user-generated content for the whims of Hollywood. However, not even all of Hollywood is united in its effort to pass the bill — even international pop sensation Justin Bieber has offered his own two-cents, calling for Senator Amy Kloubchar (a sponsor of the Senate version) to be “locked up [and] put away in cuffs…” The bill’s aim is to crack down on intellectual property infringement, but it has been lambasted for its overaggressiveness (as a disproportionate response to a relatively narrow issue of online IP infringement) and detrimental impact on user-generated services such as YouTube. Moreover, critics point out that the ingenuity and entrepreneurship epitomized by an open Internet would be compromised as start up costs for websites would rise exponentially to implement the necessary compliance measures demanded by SOPA.
The growing chorus of anger, disappointment , and skepticism directed towards SOPA put its future (at least in its current form) in grave doubt. Indeed, as an issue that has proven so inflammatory that it has united tech giants like Yahoo! and Google, prominent lawmakers, Justin Bieber, and even a group of illustrious law professors, the SOPA might find itself taken offline soon enough.