S.O.P.A (StopOnlinePiracy Act) An Introduction

SOPA stands for StopOnlinePiracy Act. It is actually a Usa bill introduced by U.S representative Lamar  Smith to expand the ability of U.S law imposed to take action against online copy right on intellectual propertys and counterfeit. The slogan of SOPA is “To advertise success, creativeness, entrepreneurship and innovation by fighting the theft of U.S. property and for other purposes”. The provision also includes the requesting of court orders to ban the advertising sites and payment facilities in case of online fraud business, and search engines from linking to the websites and to block the website from assessing by requesting to the internet provider. The can also be imposed for criminal offence to add in illegal streaming of copyrighted content, and enforce a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison. The goals of law are to protect intellectual property of content creators and safeguards against counterfeit drugs.

SOPA Stopping Online Piracy

There are many website around the world which use to make fools to the viewers by some kind of frauds, by copyrighted and makes a huge amount of profit, this law will help the citizen of U.S to save from this type of frauds and punishment will be imposed to the website owner. The bill was originally proposed that the law can be implemented and can seek the court orders towards internet sites outside the U.S. legal system accused of copyrighted and can ask the internet provider to block the website so that the website can no more be accessible and payment facilitation will be blocked.

On December 12, 2011, the original bill has been retable and revised, titled as “Manager’s Amendment”, the bill contains a number change due to some critics of the original bill. The amendment has limited the bill, the law can be imposed only to the websites which are non U.S. Intellectual propertys are just one of America’s major and leading job creators within the global market place, but then also the inventors, authors and entrepreneurs have been forced to stand and watch that there are works are compromised by the foreign websites and here this law helps them, saves from the foreign infringers. Many websites also use to sells the expensive drugs which are liable to sell without proper medical prescriptions, there are many drugs which can be highly effectible and can cause death, this law helps to protect from this type online selling of drugs.

Besides all the good’s, the law has some disadvantage over some of the world’s highly viewed and highly rated websites. A well known journalist named as Rebecca Mackinnon make an argument that the bill which making all the companies legally responsible for the actions of users could boast some of the critical effects on the sites that are user generated such as YouTube, where a huge number of users uploads and downloads numerous music and videos on the site every second. Then EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has warned that if the bill passes and act as a law, websites like Etsy, Flickr and Vimeo like to be shut down for forever. The bill expected to come with more convenient policies so that genuine user sites may not get tampered totally.

SOPA