The E-PARASITES Act (the latest name for legislation originally named the PROTECT IP Act) has been proposed in the House. It is also called the “Stop Online Privacy Act” or SOPA. The bill, if enacted, would effectively allow websites to be blocked, without judicial review or due process, based merely on claims of infringement. It would also make it illegal to use any technology to bypass such blocks. It would also make it a felony to illegally stream content online.

Here is a summary of the guts of bill from the EFF:

As with its Senate-side evil sister, PROTECT-IP, SOPA would require service providers to “disappear” certain websites, endangering Internet security and sending a troubling message to the world: it’s okay to interfere with the Internet, even effectively blacklisting entire domains, as long as you do it in the name of IP enforcement. Of course blacklisting entire domains can mean turning off thousands of underlying websites that may have done nothing wrong.  And in what has to be an ironic touch, the very first clause of SOPA states that it shall not be “construed to impose a prior restraint on free speech.” As if that little recitation could prevent the obvious constitutional problem in what the statute actually does.

But it gets worse. Under this bill, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities.  Websites that simply don’t do enough to police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would qualify as “enough”) are now under threat, even though the DMCA expressly does not require affirmative policing.  It creates new enforcement tools against folks who dare to help users access sites that may have been “blacklisted,” even without any kind of court hearing. The bill also requires that search engines, payment providers (such as credit card companies and PayPal), and advertising services join in the fun in shutting down entire websites.  In fact, the bill seems mainly aimed at creating an end-run around the DMCA safe harbors. Instead of complying with the DMCA, a copyright owner may now be able to use these new provisions to effectively shut down a site by cutting off access to its domain name, its search engine hits, its ads, and its other financing even if the safe harbors would apply.

The full text of E-PARASITES is available here. And an explanatory video is here.

Taken together, this would effectively allow a government-mandated firewall on the Internet violating free speech rights of American citizens (and those around the world), all for the private benefit of the music and movie industries. It is outrageously over-reaching and should be firmly opposed.

And here is how you can easily oppose the bill without cost in less than a couple of minutes

Update: And you should read this essay by Lauren Weinstein, who clearly outlines the stakes involved.

Related articles

• Rep. Lofgren: Copyright bill is the ‘end of the Internet’ (news.cnet.com)
• House takes Senate’s bad Internet censorship bill, tries making it worse (arstechnica.com)
• Copyright bill revives Internet death penalty (news.cnet.com)