New U.S. Copyright Act Toughest Yet, Gives Corporations Governmental Powers

[admin]

The Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act, more widely known as the PROTECT IP Act, promises to give government agencies and corporations sweeping powers to ban, block and seize any website deemed to be engaged in copyright infringement.

As an extension that formalizes recent domain name seizures by The Department of Homeland Securities and ICE, the bill aims to extend these powers to cover domains names that are not even hosted in the U.S.

The DoJ will then be able to, using tax payer funds, file civil actions on behalf of copyright holders (most of whom are billion dollar multi-national corporations), in order to seek a preliminary order against the websites. Once the order is granted, the domain name can be seized, or if the domain name is not owned by an U.S. entity, then the Attorney General has the power to order search engines to remove all references to the website, order ISPs to block said website, and even order financial service providers to cease any relationship with the offending website, all without the right to appeal or due process by the website owner.

Corporations themselves also get some of the same new powers to act without having to go through the full legal process. Copyright holders can request financial service providers to cut support for the websites that they don't like, but they cannot yet force ISPs and search engines to act.

Any infringing site that "endangers the public health" can fall prey to this proposed copyright act, a definition that critics say is far too vague. The act will be introduced in the coming weeks in the U.S. Congress, and it appears that it is already widely supported on both sides of politics, thus ensuring a relatively smooth passage unless opposition arises.

Here's an official summary of the PROTECT IP act:

Protect Ip Summary

(Story Source)

[drfsupercenter]

I still say this is unconstitutional. The government having the power to do whatever they want when it comes to domain names is very easily abused, it could easily infringe on freedom of speech - imagine them shutting down something like TorrentFreak that reports on the latest BS the government pulls, just because they have torrent in their name. Shameful.

[admin]

The stories today about how Bin Laden emailed people, and now they've got hundreds of emails of people linked to the terrorist mastermind. The story also says the US government now has to go the the court and request subpoenas from ISPs of the email addresses (most were American companies too), to get more information about the terrorist networks.

What struck me was that, if the PROTECT IP bill is passed, it would actually be easier for the government and copyright holders to block websites that are only *suspected* of providing copyrighted content, to cut of their funding, and to remove references to the website on search engines, than for the government to just get some basic info about *known* terrorists from the likes of Gmail.

So you might actually see the government using IP laws to block terrorist websites (that's probably where the "endangers the public health" comes in), as opposed to using national security laws. But then again, if the government decides what "endangers the public health", and what doesn't, then they can pretty much block any website they don't like (for example, with people being addicted to Facebook, which could become a public health issue, why not ban Facebook?).