Rights and wronged
An American anti-piracy bill tries to stem the global theft of intellectual property
ILLEGAL copying and sharing of copyrighted material is hard enough to stop within a country. But when the internet takes traffic across borders it is almost unmanageable. American-owned intellectual property, say, may be uploaded in one country and downloaded in a second, via a website whose computers are in a third, operated by anonymous enthusiasts (or criminals) from goodness-knows-where. So whom do you sue, and in which courts? The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), now before America's Congress, is the latest of many recent attempts to defend property rights on the internet.
The bill aims to cut off Americans' access to foreign pirate websites by squeezing intermediaries. Rights-holders, such as Hollywood film studios, will be able to request that a credit-card firm or advertising network stop doing business with a foreign site; or ask a search engine to take down links to the site; or ask an internet-service provider to block the site's domain name, making it harder to reach. The intermediary then has just five days to comply or rebut the complaint; after that the rights-holder can go to court.
This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline "Rights and wronged"
International November 26th 2011
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