The Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA Law

 

It’s a law initiative H.R.3226 proposed by the president of the Judicial Committee of the House of Representatives, Mr. Lamar S. Smith, to the United States Congress on October 26th, 2011, its target is to promote prosperity, creativity, undertaking, and innovation, by fighting the intellectual property digital steal in the USA and whose purpose is to establish controls both for Internet users an for Web sites or Internet providers, by virtue of protecting intellectual property rights and fight the online piracy.

SOPA law seeks to eradicate online social practices that violate intellectual property rights such as sharing, broadcast or exchange, without authorization, books, movies, music, software, or any other protected work, by imposing severe penalties up to 5 prison years.

To carry out its aim and purpose, SOPA law empowers the Justice Department and the intellectual property rights owners, to get court orders against those websites or Internet providers that allow, ease or promote the infringement of intellectual rights.

Within the foreseen consequences for those SOPA law offenders are the following:

 

• Website or domain service blocking (hosting, DNS, ISP) by the Internet providers.
• Fund freezing and usage restrictions of the service provided by the companies who ease the online payment.
• Publicity service blocking in websites reported for intellectual property rights transgression.
• Links elimination to the website by content generators or search engines.

 

Finally, it’s worth analyzing the advantages and disadvantages that SOPA law has;

 

ADVANTAGES

• Seeks to eradicate bad practices on the Internet.
• Seeks to eradicate the online piracy.
• Provides an intellectual property rights legal frame in the digital field.
• Seeks to broaden the protection field for copyright and industrial property rights owners.
• Encourage companies to respect intellectual property rights.

 

DISADVANTAGES

• The anonymous navigation networks would become illegal.
• Restricts freedom of speech and the information societies dynamics.
• Communications would be constantly monitored to watch for the dispositions fulfillment.
• It would stop being legal the use of links or open code.