This is to anyone that thinks that those of us that live in the United States still live in ‘the land of the free’ …
Tomorrow sees one of the most pivotal pieces of internet legislation pass through the halls of power in Washington. The ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ SOPA bill, combined with PROTECT IP Act, seeks to give the US Justice Department the power to force Internet Providers into blocking access to any website that is suspected of hosting or linking to copyrighted material.Provision for ‘going after’ ‘disputed sites’ hosting companies; search engines that link to them; payment services that support them, and other ancillary services will also be granted through the act.
So basically, any corporation could yell out ‘Copyright Infringement!’ to any website on the ‘net, and then the site will just disappear. It doesn’t seem that it’ll matter what site they’re talking about, any site can be brought down, by removal of it’s name from all of the DNS servers in the US. Any US Based site taken down this way will remove it from the whole world, and it could possibly happen to some sites based in other countries. (though harder, and it’d be less likely to happen outside of our controllable area.)
Small and large businesses that are based off of the ‘net could just vanish and die, I must say that this cannot happen, if it does, there will be some huge, bad, changes to come.
Click the link below to have your say
