Senate Judiciary committee approves anti-piracy bill

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/05/senate-judiciary-committee-approves-anti-piracy-bill-.html

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday unanimously approved a bill that seeks to rein in foreignwebsites that traffic in pirated movies and TV shows, a move that drew widespread support from a broad coalition of entertainment industry groups.

The proposed law, dubbed the Protect IP Act,is strongly backed by Hollywood's chief lobbying group, the Motion Picture Assn. of America, as well as the Independent Film & Television Alliance, the National Assn. of Theatre Owners and other industry and labor organizations.

The legislation would give the Justice Department authority to seek a courtorder against the registrant or owner of a domain name tied to websites that sell counterfeit goods, including sites that are foreign-owned. Among other measures, the act also authorizes arights holder who is a victim of copyright infringement to take court action against a domain name owner orregistrant.

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In b4 someone argues slippery slope. I think this is a step forward to curb piracy, if we can at all.

How would they enforce something like that against a foreign site?

So now we can send in Delta against site owners in Russia?

Sounds like there's gonna be some fun jurisdiction fights in the future.

I need to get me one of them lobbying groups. "Subsidized wenches and Mountain Dew slushies for all males of the same age as cybrcatter", cybrcatter

How would they enforce something like that against a foreign site?

Oleg_Huzwog

BFD. The piracy sites merely change their domains. For crying out loud, there's already a Firefox app that will help redirect you to the new domain of previously seized websites.

Whatever, the gub'mint will contine to wipe its collective ass with the Constitution all in the name of combating "piracy."

How would they enforce something like that against a foreign site?

Oleg_Huzwog

The law would allow the government to blacklist sites from American DNS servers (ie if you typed "www.seizedsitename.com" into your browser's address bar, instead of resolving to the website you'd be sent to a big, fat, "Seized by *insert government agency here*" image like this), forbid credit card and advertising companies from doing any business with blocked sites and forbid search engines from linking to blocked sites. So in theory, even if the site in question isn't based in America the law will still cut off any users from accessing the site as well as prevent the site from earning any revenue.

Of course there are already some very easy workarounds, as the US only has jurisdiction over certain top-level domains (all the site has to do is change to something like "www.seizedsitename.me to beat the blacklist), foreign ad services wouldn't be affected (AFAIK), and there are likely some pretty easy ways to skirt the restrictions on credit card companies (for pirate sites, anyway; counterfeiters are going to be in for more of a headache).

And since DroidPhysX brought up the slippery slope bit, in a somewhat similar DNS seizure operation ICE ended up seizing a bunch of legitimate websites, the highlight being a hip-hop blog that was seized for posting downloads of songs supplied by the record labels themselves for promotional purposes (nevermind questions like linking vs. hosting or whether the US should be able to enforce this law on sites that are perfectly legal in their host country). Good start.

I wonder how many millions of our tax dollars were wasted on this measure that will accomplish absolutely nothing at all. It's like they don't even understand how the thing they are trying to combat works....at all.

Sigh

How would they enforce something like that against a foreign site?

Oleg_Huzwog

The US government threatens foreign business sanctions if they don't comply with them.

That's how.

So if the Pirate Bay was up and running still (is it? I honestly don't know anymore) in Sweden or whereever and a US Attorney wanted them shut down and the Swedish government refused, the US could implement a tarrif on Swedish imports until they did comply.

[QUOTE="Oleg_Huzwog"]

How would they enforce something like that against a foreign site?

Netherscourge

The US government threatens foreign business sanctions if they don't comply with them.

That's how.

Unless those other countries plan on blacking out the internet entirely, it'll never happen. This law is completely unenforcable.

I wonder how many millions of our tax dollars were wasted on this measure that will accomplish absolutely nothing at all. It's like they don't even understand how the thing they are trying to combat works....at all.

Sigh

Alter_Echo

this is what happens when you get a bunch of power hungry people together to regulate things way over their working knowledge.

Americans selling out their rights to private corporations. Nothing new here...

Americans selling out their rights to private corporations. Nothing new here...

htekemerald

[QUOTE="htekemerald"]

Americans selling out their rights to private corporations. Nothing new here...

surrealnumber5

[QUOTE="Oleg_Huzwog"]

How would they enforce something like that against a foreign site?

Netherscourge

The US government threatens foreign business sanctions if they don't comply with them.

That's how.

So if the Pirate Bay was up and running still (is it? I honestly don't know anymore) in Sweden or whereever and a US Attorney wanted them shut down and the Swedish government refused, the US could implement a tarrif on Swedish imports until they did comply.

[QUOTE="surrealnumber5"]

[QUOTE="htekemerald"]

Americans selling out their rights to private corporations. Nothing new here...

cybrcatter

this type of thing isnt really new, the fbi has been able to seize websites for a while im pretty sure, i know for a fact that they seized an illegal streaming site which ironically was back up and running within a few days of its seizure, all bills like this will really do, if anything, is very very very "slightly" curb a very small chunk of piracy, but for the vast majority of those who would rather not support the industry....this wont affect them at all

How would they enforce something like that against a foreign site?

Oleg_Huzwog