November 17, 2011 | Online

Tech companies oppose online piracy bill

A bill designed to reduce online piracy is facing some major opposition from companies like Google, Mozilla and Facebook. They argue the Stop Piracy Online Act (SOPA) needs to be reworked, or it will negatively affect legitimate companies trying to do business online.

"We strongly support the goal of the bill -- cracking down on offshore websites that profit from pirated and counterfeited goods -- but we're concerned the way it's currently written would threaten innovation, jobs, and free expression," Pablo Chavez, director of public policy at Google, wrote.

The bill was proposed by Republican Lamar Smith, who wanted to help media outlets, software makers and retailers fight the illegal distribution of movies, songs and software, especially through overseas websites. SOPA, which is receiving bipartisan support, would make it easier to shut down websites that carried pirated content, forcing Internet Service Providers to immediately block access in the US to any site that is blacklisted. Billing companies, like PayPal and Mastercard, could also be asked to halt transactions on offending sites.

However, tech companies are not convinced the bill is fair. AOL, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo, and Zynga all joined with Google to argue SOPA needed to be revised before they could support it. They want to make sure that the government cannot arbitrarily call for a site to be shutdown without a proper investigation.

"We are very concerned that the bills as written would seriously undermine the effective mechanism Congress enacted in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to provide a safe harbor for Internet companies that act in good faith to remove infringing content from their sites," the companies wrote in a letter to the committee. "While we work together to find a way to target foreign 'rogue' sites, we should not jeopardize a foundational structure that has worked for content owners and Internet companies alike and provides certainty to innovators with new ideas for how people create, find, discuss, and share information lawfully online."

Not really. The DMCA has actually failed because it allows websites who do nothing but host stolen content to continue to do so. A site only has to remove content when the copyright holder notifies it about a specific video or image. It can then carry on its merry way distributing whatever stolen content for which it has not been served official notice.

“Inexplicably, and almost overnight, SOPA has morphed into a full-on assault against lawful US Internet companies,” said Markham C. Erickson, executive director of NetCoalition, a group representing Web firms and public interest groups opposed to the law. “This makes no sense to us, nor will it to the millions of Internet users who depend on it for communications, commerce and democracy.”

Hopefully a reasonable law will emerge that will balance the real need to fight online piracy with freedom of expression.

Tech Giants Like Google, Facebook Challenge Online Piracy Bill [PC Mag]