SOPA – What does it all mean?

Last Updated on Tuesday, 3 January 2012 05:28 Written by Mike Hoffman Friday, 30 December 2011 04:41

The official position of Arvixe is against SOPA. This is an educational article informing blog readers about the current SOPA bill and its potential impact on the web hosting industry.

Over the span of the last two months, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) [1] has garnered much attention and criticism. In a nutshell, this bill was designed and proposed to help protect artists and intellectual property owners. Sharing and illegal downloading of music, movies, and software  has been very prevalent since the inception of the internet, and even beforehand – some of our older readers might remember swapping floppy discs for the latest computer games. This bill also extends to the realm of counterfeit goods, such as purses and perscription drugs sold online.

SOPA would allow the US Justice Department to seek court orders against websites that host or provide access to these illegal goods. Proposed on October 26th, the CEO of the BBB says that online piracy costs companies billions of dollars a year [2]. We are all very familiar with the suits brought against sites like Napster, which were easy to bring down under US law since all facets of the website were in the US domain [3].