SOPA Viewpoints: Sites go offline in US piracy laws protest

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A number of high-profile websites are taking part in a 24-hour "blackout" to protest against two bills being considered by Congress to tackle copyright infringement.

The House of Representatives' Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) are designed to block access to sites containing unauthorised copyright material.

Content owners would be given the power to request court orders to shut down sites associated with piracy and advertisers and ISPs would be forbidden from doing business with infringers based overseas.

Sopa would also require search engines to remove suspect foreign sites from their results.

A more detailed explanation of the bills can be read here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16596577




Your thoughts people?

 

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Basically what this means is, apart from tackling piracy, is that they will no longer have to go through normal court cases to take any website down they deem to be doing anything that even resembles links or information that may infringe their rights. All they would have to do is say, " I think they maybe, i'm not sure but take them down anyway"!!

This is JUST WRONG!!!

 

But if you google tpb it always seems to be there.

Its ridiculous to criminalize people for doing the modern equivalent of recording an LP onto a TDK C90 tape back in the 80's.

Its when people make money out of it (viz. megaupload) it becomes a prob, as in Portugal re drug use laws (where ALL use, even hard drugs is LEGAL, but all dealing is ILLEGAL).

Losses to copyright holders can be somewhat exagerated since if people had to pay then they simply would not buy if they could not afford to. Large companies like MS are happy their products are pirated in third world countries since these are vast markets and it brings them huge exposure. If pirating was not possible these people would be using Linux, and MS would lose out.