LOS ANGELES, Dec. 29 (Xinhua) -- Two bills under discussion at the U.S. Congress attempting to stop online piracy have met with strong opposition in the country, and supporters of the bills are facing boycott.
The two bills, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), have been introduced in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives respectively.
SOPA was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives back in October. It attempts to curb the actions of Internet pirates.
But critics claimed that it would curb the actions of pretty much everyone. It would ban online advertising on sites deemed to be piracy distributors, get their listings deleted from search engines, and even remove their DNS listings from servers so that users would be unable to visit the sites in question. And streaming copyright material could be punished by five years in jail.
Critics insisted that this bill would ban proxy servers that hide Internet identities and global position, and that this will set a precedent for further Internet censorship, both in the United States and abroad.
Critics held that by making Internet services responsible for copyright violations, rather than individual abuses, the likes of YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, eBay, Etsy and more may not be able to stay in business while actual pirates would find a way around it.
Frederick Iwans, general manager of the 1&1 Internet Inc., sent out a message to its customers to state its opposition to the two bills.
"As a global provider of domains and hosting services, we oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or Protect-IP (PIPA) Acts currently under consideration," Iwans said in the message.
"While we observe the concerns of those who are troubled by the potential impact on protecting intellectual property online, 1&1 feels there is an urgent need to strike a balance between dissemination of and access to information and protection against its illegal use within the public domain," the message said.
According to the message, the U.S. government is currently reviewing SOPA and PIPA as possible ways to prevent unlawful distribution of copyrighted materials available on the Internet.
"These current proposals, if passed, would allow for significant interventions into the technological and economical basis of the Internet. This could put the vast benefits and economic opportunities of entirely legal and legitimate e-business models at risk,"said the message.
Generally, companies offering technological services should not be forced to be the executor of authority in such matters. If they were to act upon every implication of content infringement without any judicial research into the actual usage of its customers, the integrity behind their customer's freedom of information and speech would be enormously harmed, according to the message.
Meanwhile, companies that have openly stated their support for the bills are under pressure with an online boycott underway.
Customers angry over domain hosting site GoDaddy's support of the controversial online piracy bill SOPA have pledged to transfer their domains to other hosting companies.
During the first two days of the boycott, GoDaddy lost 37,000 domains as customers took a stand, according to The Domains, who pulled the figures from DNS changes and web hosting activity monitoring site daily changes. The company hosts 50 million domains around the world.
Following a wave of criticism for supporting SOPA, GoDaddy announced that it no longer supports the bill it helped draft over the past few years.
GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman said in a statement "We have observed a spike in domain name transfers, which are running above normal rates and which we attribute to GoDaddy' s prior support for SOPA, which was reversed."
"GoDaddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time," the statement said.
According to the Stanford Law Review Online, the main problem with SOPA is that it will "pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for stability and security of the Internet's addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet's extraordinary growth, and for free expression."
(Source: Xinhua)
