What happens if the sopa bill passed

That system has been abused on occasion, but it ultimately works because it allows YouTube to avoid direct responsibility for the actions of its users — it would have been otherwise sued out of existence. There's no such balance of interests for the payment processors or ad networks under SOPA or PIPA: they simply have to block their accounts within five days of getting a letter, unless their accused customer writes back with a letter promising to come to a US court.

A site like YouTube would remain protected under copyright law, but become extremely vulnerable to having its finances choked off by overzealous copyright owners under SOPA — imposing a huge additional cost on new startups that host user content and effectively undoing the flawed but effective protections for those services currently in copyright law.

Oh, but it gets worse. Much worse. SOPA section offers legal immunity to ISPs that independently block websites that host illegally copied material without any prompting from the government. That's a major conflict of interest for a huge ISP like Comcast, which also owns NBC — there would be nothing stopping Comcast from blocking a foreign video service that competes with NBC if it could claim it had a "reasonable belief" it was "dedicated to the theft of US property.

Now, you may have noticed that while all these rules are totally insane, they're all at least theoretically restricted to foreign sites — defined by SOPA as sites with servers located outside the US. That's important to know: at its simplest level, SOPA is a kneejerk reaction to the fundamental nature of the internet, which was explicitly designed to ignore outmoded and inconvenient concepts like the continuing existence of the United States.

Because US copyright holders generally can't drag a foreign web site into US courts to get them to stop stealing and distributing their work, SOPA allows them to go after the ISPs, ad networks, and payment processors that are in the United States. That user has the right to file a counter-motion demonstrating that the content doesn't infringe on any copyrights. If the two sides keep disagreeing, the issue can go to court. SOPA tackles that by moving up the chain.

If you can't force overseas sites to take down copyrighted work, you can at least stop U. You can also make it harder for U. Internet users to find and access the sites. The proposed bill's text says that a site could be deemed a SOPA scofflaw if it "facilitates" copyright infringement. Sites like YouTube, which publishes millions of user-uploaded videos each week, are worried that they would be forced to more closely police that content to avoid running afoul of the new rules.

The bill requires every payment or advertising network operator to set up a process through which outside parties can notify the company that one of its customers is an "Internet site is dedicated to theft of U. Filing false notifications is a crime, but the process would put the burden of proof -- and the legal cost of fighting a false allegation -- on the accused.

As the anti-SOPA trade group NetCoalition put it in their analysis of the bill: "The legislation systematically favors a copyright owner's intellectual property rights and strips the owners of accused websites of their rights. Who supports SOPA, and who's against it? In general, media companies have united in favor of them, while tech's big names are throwing their might into opposing them. The bill's supporters dismiss accusations of censorship, saying that the legislation is meant to revamp a broken system that doesn't adequately prevent criminal behavior.

But SOPA's critics say the bill's backers don't understand the Internet's architecture, and therefore don't appreciate the implications of the legislation they're considering.

In fact, though, many of the issues highlighted by Wikipedia and others were already being discussed. It addressed much of what tech companies complained about, such as removing the requirement for intermediaries to act within five days; not specifying domain name blocking; and removing the requirement to target sub-domains.

But the statement went on to emphasise the need to tackle rogue sites both through legislation and voluntary measures. Meanwhile, some sponsors of the bills have recently withdrawn their support. In the Senate, a hearing scheduled for this week has been postponed to next month.

Not necessarily. And once two bills are passed they will have to be reconciled, which will take time. Given the controversy, the divisions in Congress, the complexity of the legislation, other political priorities and the fact that is an election year, there is no guarantee that any bills will be passed soon.

The United States is particularly vulnerable due to the importance of the creative industries including movies, music and sports in its economy. It has not yet been implemented and telecoms companies BT and TalkTalk were again in court this week, seeking to have the Act reviewed on the grounds that it does not comply with EU law.

Separately, a judge ordered BT to block access to the Newzbin file-sharing site, after it sought to escape jurisdiction by moving its servers offshore and changing its name. France has passed the so-called Hadopi Act and Spain announced anti-piracy legislation at the end of last year. New Zealand is another country that prompted a blackout with its anti-piracy proposals. Earlier this month, the European Commission published its own proposals.

In Sweden, the operators of the Pirate Bay file-sharing site were given prison sentences after being found guilty of copyright infringement. The site survived that blow, but this month a Dutch court ordered cable companies to block access to the site. For more articles on the topic of ISP liability, click here. The material on this site is for law firms, companies and other IP specialists.

Although the bills were ostensibly aimed at reaching foreign websites dedicated to providing illegal content, their provisions would allow for removal of enormous amounts of non-infringing content including political and other speech from the Web. Each would interfere with the Internet's domain name system DNS , which translates names like "www.

SOPA would also allow rightsholders to force payment processors to cut off payments and advertising networks to cut ties with a site simply by sending a notice. These bills are targeted at "rogue" websites that allow indiscriminate piracy, but use vague definitions that could include hosting websites such as Dropbox, MediaFire, and Rapidshare; sites that discuss piracy such as pirate-party. Had these bills been passed five or ten years ago, even YouTube might not exist today — in other words, the collateral damage from this legislation would be enormous.

There are already laws and procedures in place for taking down sites that violate the law.