Quote:
Originally Posted by Redrob
Sounds no worse than content owners having to respond with a DMCA notice for every takedown request to the pirates. Now the pirates have to respond with a "But, it's not me!" request.
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No need to enlarge the text that you post. We here can read just fine and it does not do anything more than underline your belief that what you post is factual and correct.
Key words in your statement: "Sounds no worse".
The reality: "The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA creates a “market-based system to protect U.S. customers and prevent U.S. funding of sites dedicated to theft of U.S. property.” It achieves this by empowering copyright owners who have a “good faith belief” that they are being “harmed by the activities” of a website to send a notice to the site’s payment providers (e.g. PayPal) and Internet advertisers to end business with the allegedly offending site.
The payment providers and advertisers that receive the notice must stop transactions with the site as per the SOPA legislation. No judicial review is required for the notice to be sent and for the payments and advertising curtailed—only the good faith representation of the copyright owner.
Damages are also not available to the site owner unless a claimant “knowingly materially” misrepresented that the law covers the targeted site, a difficult legal test to meet.
The owner of the site can issue a counter-notice to restore payment processing and advertising but services need not comply with the counter-notice.
There is also a catch: a site owner who issues a counter-notice automatically consents to being sued in U.S. courts (a strong disincentive for sites based abroad).
With few checks at all, SOPA gives copyright owners a sharp tool to disrupt and shut down websites. Based on their past conduct, there is no reason to think that copyright owners will use this tool with any measure of restraint." - Jason Mazzone (law professor and Author of Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law (Stanford University Press, 2011)