RL Congressional PVP

The Protect IP Act and corresponding SOPA is a broad reaching act coming up to Congress that has some dangerous implications.

Establishes a system for taking down websites that the Justice Department determines to be "dedicated to infringing activities." The DoJ or the copyright owner would be able to commence a legal action against the alleged infringer and the DoJ would be allowed to demand that search engines, social networking sites and domain name services block access to the targeted site. In some cases, action could be taken to block sites without first allowing the alleged infringer to defend themselves in court.
Unfortunately for a blogger like myself, this could be rather painful and detrimental to my blog. My blog could permanently disappear off the face of the earth.

See, despite my unique URL, I am actually hosted on blogger.com. Google is an international company, with an indeterminate number of blogs hosted on their service. Potentially if only one of these bloggers posts something controversial/copy-protected, the DOJ has the option to block that server (and all sites hosted by blogger.com). Sure, this is a last resort, assuming the client does not take down the offensive material, but  this is a slippery slope..

Needless, this is the wrong way to do it. This is the Internet. We still haven't been able to permanently block spammers, and this legislation thinks they can fix piracy by blocking individual sites? Block this? I move to another host, move my domain to a UK blog provider. Block my domain, and I'll change from .info, to a .com, .tv or ?? who knows, what's on sale on GoDaddy?  (have you ever looked at the expired domains list?) It only costs me money and you get to suffer in trying to find me.

 Today, FelConcentration has links to more info and methods to contact US representatives. I suggest reading the full text at OpenCongress under "Read the Rest" on the Official Summary, it may help answer questions.








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