Inside the SOPA Bill and PIPA Act

Over the last year a movement to stop online piracy has been the talk of Washington, D.C. The two bills that were drawn up to stop online piracy are called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Preventing Real Online Threats To Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act). Both the movie and music industries are in support of SOPA and PIPA, however, the general public is not.

Within the last few weeks the fight has heated up. The fight is all about content. Companies like RIAA, The Motion Picture Association of America, The United States Senate, The United States House of Representatives, Net Coalition.com, CEA, Public Knowledge, and Center for Democracy & Technology are all involved.

This content war hit the fan back in the summer of 2010. The Department of U.S. Immigration and Costumes confiscated the domains of nine software, movies, and music sites claiming that they were in validation of copyright infringement. Within a month, a serious discussion in Washington, D.C. began about online content.

The first attempt to stop online privacy was introduced with a bill titled COICA (Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act). COICA was designed to go after websites considered to be rogue. However, the COICA Act was over broad, contained due process problems, and would disrupt the workings of the Internet if passed. The public’s uproar virtually killed COICA.

Since the death of the COICA Act the same Senator (Patrick Lehe) created another bill titled PIPA (Preventing Real Online Threats To Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act). PIPA is very similar to the COICA Act with many of the same problems, thus the birth of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).

SOPA was officially introduced as a bill to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2011. SOPA is actually worse than PIPA. Companies that have wrote to the U.S. House of Representatives in opposite to SOPA are LinkedIn, Yahoo, Mozilla, The ConsumersUnion, Google, U.S. PIRG, Zynga, Global Network Initiative, eBay, and many more. On November 16, 2011 the hearing for SOPA was held. During the hearing letters from some of the above companies were read. Many of the letters focus on how SOPA would affect the security and stability of the Internet.

Here is a brief summary of SOPA. SOPA gives the Attorney General the ability to seek a court order to stop websites that contain infringements, copyright materials, and other element deemed not in the public’s best interest. If a court order is issued companies like Google, Paypal, eBay, etc must comply with the order and block that domain from their systems.

By the last week in November 2011 officials like Nancy Pelosi, Ron Paul, and Darrell Issa came out against the SOPA Bill. Now it appears a new bill has been created titled, OPEN (Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade). OPEN is the proposed replacement for the SOPA Bill. The officials behind the new OPEN Bill are Ron Wyden and Darrell Issa.