Memo to MPAA: Congress didn’t pass SOPA

Remember 2012, when there was that giant Internet backlash against the Stop Online Piracy Act that, amazingly, Congress listened to and hence the content-industry-backed legislation died a loud death? Well apparently the Motion Picture Association of America didn't get the memo that SOPA failed. SOPA provided for DNS-redirecting of blacklisted sites. It gave the Justice Department the power to seek court orders from search engines like Google not to render search results of infringing websites. What's more, the failed proposal also would have codified that content owners like the MPAA and Recording Industry Association of America have the legal backing to seek court orders demanding that judges require financial institutions and ad networks to stop doing business with sites that content owners prove are dedicated to infringing activity.

According to Mitch Stoltz, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the MPAA is invoking SOPA-like powers to take down sites dedicated to infringing motion pictures, saying, "the studios are asking for one court order to bind every domain name registrar, registry, hosting provider, payment processor, caching service, advertising network, social network, and bulletin board - in short, the entire Internet -- to block and filter a site called MovieTube. If they succeed, the studios could set a dangerous precedent for quick website blocking with little or no court supervision, and with Internet service and infrastructure companies conscripted as enforcers. That precedent would create a powerful tool of censorship -- which we think should be called SOPA power, given its similarity to the ill-fated SOPA bill. It will be abused, which is why it’s important to stop it from being created in the first place."