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aradicaldreamer:

If you use social media in ANY capacity you need to get educated on what the Protect IP/ E-Parasite does and sign this petition IMMEDIATELY. Our very own civil liberties are being impeded upon and many sites like Twitter, Facebook, and even Tumblr can potentially be shut down due to open-ended wording on the bill that would allow the government to regulate sites they feel are infringing upon copyright laws related to the entertainment business. If you share a song, a link to a song, a movie, sing a song and record it, or ANYTHING that could be remotely associated to copyright infringement, YOU could end up behind bars for a minimum of 5 years.

Read the entire official bill here. Get educated. And STOP the Protect IP/ E-Parasite bill from passing if you value your right to freedom of expression online.  

corporatelaw:

“The Protect IP Act is a proposed bill making its way through the Senate as S. 978 that aims to curb online counterfeiting, among other things… While the Protect IP Act’s stated goals are beyond dispute —to prevent the online sale of counterfeit goods —the means toward achieving those goals remains ripe for debate.” (From The Protect IP Act : A Powerful Tool, A Powerful Controversy by Venable LLP) 

On October 26, 2011, Representative Lamar Smith introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the House’s version of the Senate’s Protect IP Act. 

This isn’t the first time anti-infringement legislation has been attempted in Congress. Writes Mathew Ingram at Gigaom:

“To recap a bit of history, the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA is the House version of a previous bill proposed by the Senate, which was known as the PROTECT-IP Act (a name that was an abbreviation for ‘Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property’). That in turn was a rewritten version of a previous proposed bill that was introduced in the Senate last year. Not wanting to be outdone by their Senate colleagues when it comes to really long acronyms, the House version is also known as the E-PARASITE Act, which is short for ‘Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation.’

Intended “to promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes,” the E-PARASITE bill has sparked significant debate after only one week, debate that will likely grow until the bill is either passed, rejected, or modified.

What’s in the bill?

That depends on who you ask. The bill’s intent is honorable: to protect IP holders from websites which serve no purpose other than to infringe on their intellectual property. 

But California Rep. Zoe Lofgren calls it the “end of the internet,” while the Screen Actors Guild hails it for protecting the online marketplace from rogue websites that threaten its vitality by “stealing the work of American innovators and undermining legitimate business.”  

Broadly speaking, the Act is designed to protect US copyright and intellectual property owners from rogue websites that steal their IP and distribute counterfeit goods. It would give the US Attorney General additional tools for blocking foreign websites that steal and sell American innovations and products. It would make it a felony to stream copyrighted works. It would increase criminal penalties for trafficking in counterfeit medicine. Critics say it would do a lot more:

•  allow the Attorney General to create a blacklist of international sites that (it says) infringe IP rights, focusing ISPs to block all sites on the list or risk losing DMCA safe harbor protections

•  allow the government to shut down websites containing a thousand pages even if only one page was determined to be “dedicated to theft of US property” 

•  allow the Attorney General to force the companies that maintain DNS lookup tables to change those tables so as to block access to infringing sites

•  It would require search engines, payment providers and advertising sites tocut off access to websites based solely upon the receipt of notice alleging the site is infringing IP rights

Who is behind the bill?

The E-PARASITE bill has broad bi-partisan support in Congress. In the House, four Representatives authored the bill, which was co-sponsored by another eight. In the Senate, the Protect IP Act (essentially taken over by the House bill) had the backing of up to 35 Senators, a full third of the chamber. 

Outside of Washington, the draft legislation has the support of a broad range of business leaders, the Screen Actors Guild and other unions, and state Attorneys General, as well as (not surprisingly) the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, the US Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups.

On the other hand, a number of important groups are critical of the bill, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, technology industry groups, and tech entrepreneurs, VCs and journalists.

Why is the bill being criticized? 

Take your pick: 

•  Because it would kill jobs in the ever-expanding tech industry

•  Because it would stifle innovation

•  Because it effectively strips away all safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protect online service providers against copyright liability if they block access to allegedly infringing material when notified of potential infringement 

•  Because it would create a “Great Firewall of America” that blocks access to certain websites (almost certainly in violation of the First Amendment)

•  Because it allows rightsholders to indiscriminately target websites without liability for getting it wrong

•  But mostly because, as one critic puts it, it is “ridiculously bad”

What happens next?

The bill is scheduled for a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee on November 16, 2011. Until then, expect the debate to continue, perhaps becoming more vehement as the hearing approaches. And watch this space: we’ll be adding legal commentary as it comes in to JD Supra.

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Additional Commentary

• Stop Online Piracy Act on CNET
• Alexander Howard (O’Reilly Media) Google+
• Open Congress
• US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Statement 
• Stop Online Piracy Act [Walkthrough] 
• Joe Biden On The Internet: ‘If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It… Unless Hollywood Asks You To’  

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Follow Intellectual Property Law updates on: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook| JD Supra

negelirelden:

As was unfortunately expected, the House version of PROTECT IP has been released (embedded below) and it’s ridiculously bad. Despite promises from Rep. Goodlatte, there has been no serious effort to fix the problems of the Senate bill, and it’s clear that absolutely no attention was paid to the significant concerns of the tech industry, legal professionals, investors and entrepreneurs. There are no two ways around this simple fact: this is an attempt to build the Great Firewall of America. The bill would require service providers to block access to certain websites, very much contrary to US official positions on censorship and internet freedom, and almost certainly in violation of the First Amendment.

Oh, and because PROTECT IP wasn’t enough of a misleading and idiotic name, the House has upped the ante. The new bill is called: “the Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation Act” or the E-PARASITE Act (though, they also say you can call it the “Stopping Online Piracy Act”).

The bill is big, and has a bunch of problems. First off, it massively expands the sites that will be covered by the law. The Senate version at least tried to limit the targets of the law (but not the impact of the law) on sites that were “dedicated to infringing activities” with no other significant purposes (already ridiculously broad), the new one just targets “foreign infringing sites” and “has only limited purpose or use other than” infringement. They’re also including an “inducement” claim not found elsewhere in US regulations — and which greatly expands what is meant by inducement. The bill effectively takes what the entertainment industry wanted the Supreme Court to say in Grokster (which it did not say) and puts it into US law. In other words, any foreign site declared by the Attorney General to be “inducing” infringement, with a very broad definition of inducing, can now be censored by the US. With no adversarial hearing. Hello, Great Firewall of America.

And while defenders of this bill will insist it’s only designed to target truly infringing sites, let’s just recall a small list of sites and technologies the industry has insisted were all about infringement in the past: the player piano, the radio, the television, the photocopier, the phonograph, cable tv, the vcr, the mp3 player, the DVR, online video hosting sites like YouTube and more. All of these things turned out to be huge boons for the industry. And yet, with a law like this in place, the old industry gets to kill off technologies they don’t understand. Scary stuff.

And it’s not just foreign sites impacted by this law (despite what supporters would have you believe). It appears to expand who would have to take on the entire burdens of enforcing this blacklist — broadly naming “service providers” as defined in the DMCA. That’s significant, because a big part of this bill is to undermine and strip away the safe harbors of the DMCA. The DMCA set up an important balance that gave online service providers freedom from liability if they pulled down content upon notification. This new bill provides a massive and ridiculous burden: allowing the Attorney General to create an internet blacklist that all service providers will need to block access to:

A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order, including measures designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) from resolving to that domain name’s Internet Protocol address. Such actions shall be taken as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within 5 days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order.

On top of that, the bill says any attempt to get around such blocks can lead to liability. Would this put liability on things like MAFIAAfire? It sure sounds like it:

To ensure compliance with orders issued pursuant to this section, the Attorney General may bring an action for injunctive relief…

against any entity that knowingly and willfully provides or offers to provide a product or service designed or marketed for the circumvention or bypassing of measures described in paragraph (2) and taken in response to a court order issued pursuant to this subsection, to enjoin such entity from interfering with the order by continuing to provide or offer to provide such product or service.

While the text of the bill insists that nothing in it takes away the DMCA’s safe harbors, once again this is a claim without the facts to back it up. A large part of the bill is an effective attempt to strip away the DMCA’s safe harbors.

The only extraordinarily minor change against the interests of the entertainment industry is that the bill ever so slightly changes the “private right to action,” which allows individual copyright holders to take action under this bill. This was a big problem in the old bill, and the only requirement here is that prior to making use of this private right to action, copyright holders have to provide “notice” to payment processors and ad providers. But then those service providers are expected to take action anyway, or face liability. So all this really does is take the court out of the process, and make it even easier for copyright holders to effectively kill off sites they don’t like.

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