Washington lawmakers are seriously considering the website’s legal compliance. The United States Congress is now considering two bills, which if signed into law, would provide innovative weapons for law enforcement and content owners to enforce intellectual property rights. If you are a content owner providing content on the Internet, you have a significant interest in the current legislative process.
The competing bills currently being considered, the Intellectual Property Protection Act (Protect IP) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), are targeting websites that focus on infringing rights. copyright of content owners. What’s creative and controversial about these proposed laws from a website’s legal compliance perspective is the enforcement mechanism – shutting down offending websites regardless of whether they are in the US or abroad.
Typical criminals targeted by Protect IP and SOPA are websites that hack and illegally stream movies, TV shows, and music. However, if you are a content owner with valuable content that may be the target of infringers, these proposed statutes can provide important legal recourse to protect your intellectual property.
The Law on the protection of intellectual property
The target in Protect IP is websites that are “engaged in infringing activities”. The key to determining whether a website conforms to this standard is whether it can be proven that the website has “no significant use” other than to participate in or facilitate infringement.
The remedies for violations are three:
* block domain name from DNS servers and search engine results (available only to US law enforcement agencies),
* require financial institutions (i.e. primarily credit card processors) to stop doing business with infringing websites to the extent of US online customers (available to both US and US authorities). for content owners), and
* Ban advertising services serving infringing websites from continuing to do business with them (available to both US law enforcement and content owners).
Stop the Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
SOPA is similar to Protect IP, but there are differences. The key difference is that SOPA lowers the level of testing requirements by determining which sites are “infringing”, which means that content owners would have an easier task of coming up with solutions.
Under SOPA, content owners would only have to prove that an infringing website is “dedicated to the theft of US property” – clearly a much lower proof requirement than Protect IP.
Unlike Protect IP, SOPA would employ a procedure similar to the current DMCA notification and counter notification procedure before taking action against an infringing website. The notice would allow payment network providers and Internet advertising services the opportunity to stop dealing with infringing websites prior to court order action.
Conclution
Given the harsh remedies of both bills, the shutdown of offensive websites, the criticisms are numerous, particularly regarding SOPA. Critics argue that the harsh remedies amount to censorship with related violations of freedom of expression, and argue that there will be serious unintended consequences.
Most commenters predict that a statute with the same goals as Protect IP and SOPA will eventually find consensus and become law. If you are a content owner providing content on the Internet, the result is likely to affect you significantly.