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Internet Legislation And The Loss Of American Freedom

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Internet Legislation and the Loss of American Freedom SOPA, PIPA, and CISPA: though different, these bills were all presented with a similar goal in mind. These bills were intended to stop the digital copyright infringement of American intellectual properties, mainly in foreign countries, but the overly vague wording in the bills made it hard to decipher their real intentions (Yu). For a multitude of reasons, these bills were staunchly protested not only by American citizens, but they also received protest from numerous international groups (York). Though some may argue that SOPA, PIPA, or CISPA may have had some value, they did not have the intended result of ending digital theft, but rather invigorated a retaliating movement. The main …show more content…

Following this, all payment providers, such as PayPal, would be forced to block payments to the website. Finally, they would order ad services to stop placing their ads on the prosecuted website (Summary). The aforementioned companies were required to respond and take these actions within five days of being notified of the website’s malicious activity. If they failed to do so, the copyright holder would take these companies to court on accusations of disregarding the claims of copyright infringement (Summary). The strangest part about all of this is that the bill would take no action directly against the accused website, but would have only cut off access to it (Summary). This marks a primary distinction between PIPA and SOPA, which are often presented as equivalent bills. For one, PIPA does not force search engines to remove a website accused of hosting copyrighted content from their indexes, which is one of the most debated points of SOPA. It also has provisions that require greater court intervention, however it does not contain any sort of penalty for a copyright holder who goes after an innocent site, where as SOPA has provisions in place for such an occurrence (Couts).
These bills were met with a massive backlash when they were first announced. They were protested in New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and many other major cities. On the eighteenth of January 2012 over one hundred and fifteen thousand

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