Many of us recall the recent “black out” day where several websites, including Google and Wikipedia decided to go “black” for the day in protest of pending legislation in both Houses of The Congress.
The following opinion piece, found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/opinion/steal-this-column.html discusses Jimmy Wales’s (of Wikipedia) reasoning for getting involved in the blackout. While Wales does not believe that it is acceptable to allow endless copyright infringement and he does recognize that there is a problem and that hacking into federal government agency websites is not helping, he believed that both SOPA and PROTECT IP went too far.
As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, those pieces of legislation are dead. But there is alternative legislation pending that might beef up enforcement without putting such a heavy burden on internet service providers and website owners. The OPEN Act, introduced in the United States Senate, would grant powers to the International Trade Commission to issue temporary restraining orders against websites that specialize in selling bootlegs and the like. The ITC would also have the power to stop payments to these websites. The OPEN Act’s text can be found here: http://wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Open%20Act%20As%20Filed%20by%20Sens%20Wyden%20Moran%20and%20Cantwell.pdf
Of course, the fun doesn’t stop with this new piece of legislation. While Americans have been celebrating the death of SOPA and PROTECT IP, the Europeans are working on trying to get something similar in place over there called ACTA (Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). This Act is supposed to target copyrighted and trademarked goods in commerce from counterfeiting. But, as with SOPA and PROTECT IP, opponents argue that it goes too far and will stifle internet freedom and innovation. In fact, the Europeans are taking this so seriously that they have held demonstrations and there are plans for more. The United States has already signed onto this Act and the issue has moved into focus in Europe. The issue is a bit more focused on overseas websites and for that reason hasn’t quite garnered the attraction in the US. For more information, please see here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/technology/06iht-acta06.html
In the meantime, we can probably all agree that these are interesting times for copyright law. It can be easily argued that copyright law needs to be changed to account for existing technologies.
Author:
Rebecca M. Stadler
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