US Internet Censorship Bill stopped for now…

US Internet Censorship Bill stopped for now...

… but you know it’ll be back.

Under the guise of trying to stop Online Copyright Infringements, the
“Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (S. 3804) gives the power of creating two separate black lists to the US Courts and to the Attorney General.

ISPs would need to comply with the first blacklist generated by the courts, and would be highly encouraged to follow the second, Attorney General created, blacklist.

With this ability, a company easily request of the Attorney General to add another company’s website (such as YouTube) under the guise of saying they are facilitating copyright infringement. The kicker is that they don’t need to prove copyright infringement, AND can simply state that the company is infringing on a third, non-related companies, copyrights.

So Yahoo could very easily say Google is infringing on Microsoft’s Copyright and within a few days Google would be unavailable to a good portion of the US Population as major ISPs bow to pressure and start honoring the blacklists.

While unsubstantiated, rumor says that this law is heavily based on Australia’s anti-Child Porn law which also creates blacklists of sites for ISPs to block. But according to various leaks and news reports, only 1/3 of the blacklist is Child Porn sites. The rest of the list is softcore porn sites, online gambling, Wikileaks, and scariest of all, websites that are critical of the Australian Government.

If you are not already signed up with the EFF, I highly recommend doing so. When this comes back up they will send out an email that includes links to email, mail, and call your Senators to tell them that this is a bad idea.

Electronic Frontier Foundation’s S.3804 web page.

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