Just when we thought the battle lines had been drawn on the Stop Online Piracy Act, tech giants Facebook, Google and Zynga have announced their opposition to the proposed bill.
The companies joined the opposition with a letter to members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives about theStop Online Piracy Act, also called the E-PARASITE act,CNET reports. While they support the bill’s goals of preventing rogue sites from distributing copyrighted materials, the tech giants say the act would “undermine the effective mechanism Congress enacted in the Digital Millenium [sic] Copyright ACT (DMCA) to provide a safe harbor for Internet companies that act in good faith to remove infringing content from their sites.”
The letter also claims the act would “pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation’s cybersecurity.”
Protecting copyright holders may seem like a no-brainer, but some of the bill’s harsh stipulations have caused controversy. For example, posting a video with any kind of copyrighted material could be considered a felony. This includes background music, film clips, clips from national broadcast sports games — even cover songs. This last one has led to the rise of the website FreeBieber.org, which is worried pop-star Justin Bieber could be retroactively prosecuted for posting cover songs to his YouTube channel.
The bill is divided into two parts. The first deals with sites outside U.S. jurisdiction which freely distribute and facilitate copyright infringement. The second part is about increased penalties for all infringements. The House Judiciary Committee scheduled a hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act for Nov. 16.
The bill has received a lot of support from the entertainment industry and leaders from both political parties. The opposition of major tech companies helps balance the playing field.
Do you think Facebook and Google can help swing the vote, or is the act an inevitability? Will Bieber and other good-faith copyright infringers pay the price? Let us know in the comments.
Image courtesy of Flickr, kevin dooley
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