House SOPA Debate Raises Specter of a “Lawless” Internet

 

The House Judiciary Committee spent hours on Thursday debating Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the bill that some call “piracy protection” and others say threatens the Internet as we know it.

If passed, SOPA would lead to the creation of a “blacklist” of websites that infringe on copyrights. Private companies who allege that a site is unlawfully publishing their copyrighted content could, with a judge’s signature, demand that ad networks and companies such as PayPal and Visa stop doing business with such sites. Internet service providers would need to prevent Americans from visiting them.

The bill has been widely supported by record and movie companies, which depend on copyright protection, and opposed by some of the largest Internet companies in the world, including Google, Facebook and Twitter.

During the debate, Rep. Lamar Smith, who introduced the bill in October, argued that “While the internet should be free, it should not be lawless” and that the proposed law “will make it more difficult for those who engage in criminal behavior to reach directly into the U.S. market to inflict harm on American consumers.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-California) and others argued that the proposed law was too extreme. “We never tried to filter the telephone networks to block illegal content on the telephone network,” he said, according to Wired. “Yet that is precisely what this legislation would do relative to the internet.”

No vote was taken on the bill, but an amendment that would have excluded universities and research institutions from having to blacklist sites was defeated.