A piece of legislation backed by the MPAA was introduced in the House of Representatives this week and threatens to upend the way we use the Internet.
The E-Parasites Act, a contrived acronym for Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation, seeks to give the attorney general broad power to create a blacklist of websites that “induce” copyright infringement. Service providers would then be legally compelled to block these websites.
Let’s say you’re using an online digital locker service like Dropbox to store your Microsoft Word files. Someone else on the site, however, is using it to house illegally downloaded MP3s. The record label finds out, approaches a judge and says, “Dropbox is inducing its users to commit copyright infringement. We request you block it, or we’ll go to MasterCard — which handles Dropbox’s money matters — or the site’s advertisers and legally demand that they stop facilitating the site’s inducement of copyright infringement.”
The law can either shutter a website until it removes copyright-violating material or financially ruin it. In either scenario, your Word files are gone.
Should the E-Parasites bill become law, virtually every company on the Internet will be expected to constantly patrol their users for copyright infringement. It also effectively neutralizes the “safe harbor” part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, that protects companies from being prosecuted after copyright material has been uploaded to their websites.
It would be pretty difficult for Twitter and YouTube to exist if they had to constantly monitor and scan every single tweet for verboten content. Sure, illegitimate websites would be hampered, but experts feel it would place unprecedented economic burdens on legitimate ones.
“This bill is a disaster,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Corynne McSherry. “It’s a jobs-killer that would hurt legitimate businesses. In this type of economic environment, we should be trying to create jobs, not destroy them.”
The Motion Picture Association of America disagrees with that assessment, arguing that “rogue websites” cost millions of jobs and dollars worth of damage in the process.
Sound like geek-speak to you? Think again. Many of today’s most popular websites and services that we use every day depend on those DMCA safe harbors. Put it this way: The only reason YouTube, Facebook and a host of others are able to exist is because these safe harbors protect them from destructive litigation, or worse. If E-Parasites goes into effect, rights holders can go to companies like MasterCard and PayPal, tell them that YouTube is engaging in copyright infringement, then tell them to cut off funding. And if that happens, say bye-bye to YouTube.
“No American wants to be told what website they’re allowed to go to,” said Holmes Wilson, co-founder of the Fight for the Future digital advocacy group. “If this passes, you could go to Dropbox in the morning and find a message from the government saying it was blocked.”
In effect, the law would create a separate, “America-approved” Internet, just like the kind found in China with its Great Firewall. The move would “send signals to oppressive regimes around the world that censoring the Internet is OK so long as it’s done in the name of intellectual property,” said McSherry.
Then there’s the technical side to consider. To block “rogue” websites, the proposed law interferes with the technology that translates easy-to-remember website names into their actual numbered addresses. (Do you really trust Washington bureaucrats with one of the Internet’s most vital technologies?) But if you happened to know the numerical IP address of a website — a quick Google search will reveal it — you’d be able to bypass the roadblock and visit the site.
So in the unlikely event that thedaily.com gets blocked, you’d be able to reach it by typing 50.16.191.138 into your address bar.
Said McSherry: “Interfering with the Internet is not how you protect it.”
The E-Parasites Act, a contrived acronym for Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation, seeks to give the attorney general broad power to create a blacklist of websites that “induce” copyright infringement. Service providers would then be legally compelled to block these websites.
Let’s say you’re using an online digital locker service like Dropbox to store your Microsoft Word files. Someone else on the site, however, is using it to house illegally downloaded MP3s. The record label finds out, approaches a judge and says, “Dropbox is inducing its users to commit copyright infringement. We request you block it, or we’ll go to MasterCard — which handles Dropbox’s money matters — or the site’s advertisers and legally demand that they stop facilitating the site’s inducement of copyright infringement.”
The law can either shutter a website until it removes copyright-violating material or financially ruin it. In either scenario, your Word files are gone.
Should the E-Parasites bill become law, virtually every company on the Internet will be expected to constantly patrol their users for copyright infringement. It also effectively neutralizes the “safe harbor” part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, that protects companies from being prosecuted after copyright material has been uploaded to their websites.
It would be pretty difficult for Twitter and YouTube to exist if they had to constantly monitor and scan every single tweet for verboten content. Sure, illegitimate websites would be hampered, but experts feel it would place unprecedented economic burdens on legitimate ones.
“This bill is a disaster,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Corynne McSherry. “It’s a jobs-killer that would hurt legitimate businesses. In this type of economic environment, we should be trying to create jobs, not destroy them.”
The Motion Picture Association of America disagrees with that assessment, arguing that “rogue websites” cost millions of jobs and dollars worth of damage in the process.
Sound like geek-speak to you? Think again. Many of today’s most popular websites and services that we use every day depend on those DMCA safe harbors. Put it this way: The only reason YouTube, Facebook and a host of others are able to exist is because these safe harbors protect them from destructive litigation, or worse. If E-Parasites goes into effect, rights holders can go to companies like MasterCard and PayPal, tell them that YouTube is engaging in copyright infringement, then tell them to cut off funding. And if that happens, say bye-bye to YouTube.
“No American wants to be told what website they’re allowed to go to,” said Holmes Wilson, co-founder of the Fight for the Future digital advocacy group. “If this passes, you could go to Dropbox in the morning and find a message from the government saying it was blocked.”
In effect, the law would create a separate, “America-approved” Internet, just like the kind found in China with its Great Firewall. The move would “send signals to oppressive regimes around the world that censoring the Internet is OK so long as it’s done in the name of intellectual property,” said McSherry.
Then there’s the technical side to consider. To block “rogue” websites, the proposed law interferes with the technology that translates easy-to-remember website names into their actual numbered addresses. (Do you really trust Washington bureaucrats with one of the Internet’s most vital technologies?) But if you happened to know the numerical IP address of a website — a quick Google search will reveal it — you’d be able to bypass the roadblock and visit the site.
So in the unlikely event that thedaily.com gets blocked, you’d be able to reach it by typing 50.16.191.138 into your address bar.
Said McSherry: “Interfering with the Internet is not how you protect it.”
