The Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as the Law and Soup, aims to block websites that offer links to content protected by intellectual property rights.
This bill, promoted by the United States Congress on October 26 last year, features Lamar S. Smith , a congressman who has the support of the Hollywood film industry, the major US labels and Entertainment Software Association, the organization that brings together the leading video game development companies.
The affected
Any website that contains links to content protected by copyright, such as music, movies, series, computer programs, etc., and that is not licensed for it, could be blocked, all this regardless of where the website is hosted (within or outside the borders of the United States).
Facebook and Twitter will be totally affected by this law, since even a comment from a user who had a link that directs to another site that violates the rule could cause blocking of the entire site.
Companies that register the domains of the infringing pages, payment intermediation services such as PayPal and even search engines that offer results that lead to the infringing pages (eg Google), will also be affected.
If the SOPA Law is approved, the Department of Justice will have the power to criminalize any website that hosts illegal content and will be imposed on internet providers, search engines and online advertising and payment companies.
It also stipulates that web companies that advertise or have businesses with offenders may also be blocked.
Measures against the law
As a quick and coordinated action against the bill, the Reddit social bookmarking service announced a blackout of its services. Measure supported by the Wikimedia Foundation (responsible for Wikipedia), as well as others that are against it such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo !, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Amazon, Mozilla, Paypal, among others.
If in the debate in the Congress of the next day 18 it is confirmed that the SOPA law continues its legal course, these large companies will organize a joint disconnection on a global scale on January 23, one day before the law is discussed again in The House of Representatives. If that happened, it would be a digital blackout unprecedented in the history of the Internet, which would mean millions of losses worldwide.