Congress Shelves Anti-Piracy Legislation
Friday, January 20th, 2012Jan 20, 2012
Congressional leaders have indefinitely postponed a vote on anti-piracy legislation just two days after major Internet companies staged an online protest against passage of the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House.
Thousands of Internet sites “went dark,” that is, took themselves offline, on January 18 to protest the Internet anti-piracy legislation then being debated by Congress. The websites displayed only a critical summary of the two bills, instead of their usual content, and urged website visitors to contact their congressional representatives. The bills would have imposed harsh measures on websites that were found to distribute or link to copyrighted material. Faster broadband networks combined with fast, powerful computers have made it easier to download and stream music, movies, and television shows. The bills were strongly supported by the Motion Picture Association of America and other media companies, which have poured millions of dollars into lobbying for them. Such companies claim that online piracy–that is, the illegal sharing or distributing of copyrighted material–is rampant on the Internet and harms content producers’ ability to make profits.
The bills provoked a major backlash. Critics, including the administration of President Barack Obama and powerful Internet companies, charged that the bills would grant overly broad power to media companies and could enable censorship. Critics took particular issue with the bills’ DNS (Domain Name System) filtering provisions, which could remove offending websites from the Internet’s directory. They also claimed that the legislation would have hampered growth, innovation, and investment and curtail the First Amendment right of free speech.
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