What is SOPA – Stop Online Piracy Act

Everybody is speaking about it these days, lets say something about what is this SOPA thing about.

SOPA as a legislative bill is introduced to uphold material, ingenuity, private enterprise, and originality therefore to discourage the one’s property’s burglary. The stop online piracy Act was proposed as the United States law in the form of bill by the Republican so to make bigger the U.S. law enforcement ability in order to fight against online copyright issue of any give and take business or an intellectual property.

This law specification is including the court-orders regarding networks advertising and online payment facilities so a business can be conducted properly without any rule of law violation by the participating websites. And if any such an action of violation is done by a business site or a search engine then it is the duty of ISPs (internet service providers) to wedge (block) the access to such websites and search engines.

According to the proposed legislation, the existing criminal law needs to be enlarged by adding the copyright law along with its violation penalty of a maximum of 5 years imprisonment. With reference to the same bill, there could be the possibility of declaring a number of proxy servers as well as the Tor project as illegal in case of violating the copyright laws. That’s why; EFF (electronic freedom foundation) has warned to the certain websites like Vimeo and Flickr that they will be blocked soon after if this proposed bill will become a law. In other words, that bill would give the authority to the Judiciary Department of U.S. to inquire about the court orders in opposition to those websites, which are not fall under U.S. jurisdiction and so on.

But certain objections against the SOPA as well the Protect IP Act (Senate bill) were placed and on 18th of January, a number of protest actions as a result of this legislation are held including the petition drives and million of signatures as collected by Google etc. But on 20 January, 2012 the Rep. Lamar Smith (USA republican who initiated that bill) was pushed back that plan by saying that the committee is dedicated to find out a proper solution of the under discussion problem of online piracy in order to protect the American intellectual assets and other innovation. And as a result of this policy, the house committee consisting on judiciary will reschedule the legislation issue so to have a unanimous solution.

But those in favor of this bill are considered that such laws could correspond to the industry and revenue as well. These obligatory steps could strengthen the copyrights enforcement laws especially in cases of the foreign websites involvements. But opponents considered that the proposed legislation could be against the innovation, and proffering the possibilities of blocking the right of entry to the specific internet domains just because of the rights violation of somebody material, posted on a webpage or some other sources.

In short, following concerns can be raised as SOPA will circumference a protected harbor like: bill goals should be to protect the content creator’s intellectual property and there should be no negative impact on websites (hosting user’s content) and online communities.

To read about (PIPA) just follow this link

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