SPAR #2: SOPA

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) are beneficial to American Society.

According to Hillel Parness, a practicing attorney in New York and a member of the Intellectual Property faculty at Columbia University School of Law, the statutes on which SOPA and PIPA expand are already in effect inside of the United States. The only major change these acts make is to expand those laws to cover domains that reside outside of the country as well as within our borders. “If there was a risk of abuse, that risk has always been there.”

If you accept that copyright law is beneficial to American society, protecting the creations of our citizens, then it follows that SOPA/PIPA, an international extension of these laws, would benefit our society as well.

Fullton, S. M., III. (2011, November 23). Legal Analysis of SOPA / PROTECT-IP: No, It's Not Censorship [Web log post]. Retrieved from Read Write Enterprise: http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/11/legal-analysis-of-sopa-protect.php

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) are not beneficial to American Society.

SOPA and PIPA would mildly benefit (see evidence on next page) the multi-billion dollar industries in question. This would come at the cost of smaller Internet-based companies being harried for allowing their users to post a link to an offending site, to offer search results that point to an offending site or to upload anything that anyone with a lawyer deems worthy of suing over. The only protection that comes between a site accused of infringing a copyright and being wiped off the face of the Internet is a five day grace period where they can write a letter to the court which issued the order explaining how the judge misidentified the site as supporting piracy. This type of law flies in the face of ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ a pillar of US law. The accused is denied a trial, and is convicted of a crime without being made aware of the proceedings until the sentence has already been passed.

Stop Online Piracy, H.R. 3261, Sec. 102, 112th Cong. (2011), http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:h.r.03261:.