According to Variety.com, (I do think its the 1st time we cited this source) the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is going to propose changes to the Stop Online Piracy Act, (SOPA) to make it applicable to only to sites located outside of the US
Under the change it would require that foreign sites be blocked by preventing them from resolving to that Web address.
“The new text of the bill removes provisions that would prevent courts from issuing orders that would harm the domain name system and calls for an “inter-agency expert” to study any impact it has on DNS. ”
“It removes language that would have required redirection when users try to access an unlawful site.”
“The changes also remove a requirement in which copyright holders would first have to serve a notice to payment processors and ad networks before taking action in courts to force them to cut off support of rogue sites.”
Here is my answer to this in a comment on my blog:
I understand everything your saying. I have been posting about the great threat’s of “SOPA/Protect IP Acts” to the Internet in general, and the ‘domain world’ specifically…since last spring.
One of my more in depth post…quite long, but I tried to point out a few things to get the ‘domain world’ thinking a bit.
http://dannosblog.com/2011/11/18/2116/
I do not think they would be offering up this “alternative plan’…if they had the votes now to pass “SOPA or Protect IP Act”.
So let them vote on them.
If you think the ‘dog and pony’ show at:”keep the web open” is going to make much of a difference on how the lawyers write up this new bill…I would beg to differ…Hollywood will still have its hand in it all the way.
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(8) LANHAM ACT: already allows you to be sued for TM & copyright infringements, without any “due process” as it is up to you to prove your innocents in Federal Court. As it relates to domain names, If found guilty of say registering a “typeO” domain name(s) and had it/them parked…your liable for up to 100K per domain name & 3x the revenue each domain earned while you had it parked.
There is no ‘due process’ under this ACT. Just to name one company taht has used this many times… “MS” has used it hundreds of times a have received multi million judgements…It can just about ‘bankrupt’ people or company’s’…defending themselves, just in lawyer fees. You lose if you lose & you lose if you win.
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(9) NONDOMESTIC DOMAIN NAME: This will be used by the “IPCzar” (ICE& HLS) to go after people who they have shut down on domain extensions controlled by the US and put their site back up under a different country domain…not controlled by the US.
So until, the IP Czars powers under the “Pro-IP 2008″ are challenged…this bill only gives them added powers…I do not see where this bill is going take the domain & website seizure power away from the IP Czar and “ICE/HLS”.
Until this is corrected, I see no reason at ALL for any kind of new law.
Plenty of protections & laws already on the books for ALL these folks:
LANHAM ACT
DMCA safe harbors
And more…
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“OPEN only applies to entirely non-US websites and provides adequate due process”
Great! …now ‘non-US’ domain/website owners will have more ‘due process’ protection than US domain/website owners currently do. 😉
Love ALL your comments and views Phillip, always nice to see someone that is truly ‘engaged’ on these so very important issue’s, but on this subject we are just going to have to agree to disagree 😉
Best As Always,
‘D’
BTW: Some Interesting Reading & Comments On TorrentFreak
OPEN, The Alternative to SOPA
http://torrentfreak.com/open-the-alternative-to-sopa-111208/