GigaOM: The web community and political activists fighting for less draconian copyright laws have seized the opportunity afforded to them by the defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act in the U.S. Congress to go after a bigger topic, the exportation of SOPA-style laws abroad. These laws, which include the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which opponents have dubbed ACTA 2.0, are in the news lately.
US music and movie industry companies helped to get pirate sites blocked in many countries but on their home turf, legal action is surprisingly absent. For years we have wondered why local ISPs are being left alone and we now have an answer. Former RIAA executive Neil Turkewitz says that SOPA's ghosts have been a major stumbling block.
Allowing private entities the power to censor the internet is never a good idea. If pirates can get blocked, so can unpopular bloggers and political groups. There are good reasons why SOPA failed, and if that failure is still bearing fruit, I applaud it.
Warnings from the EFF this week that Hollywood is making renewed efforts to obtain SOPA-like powers over Internet companies has touched a nerve, with filmmakers and anti-piracy activists attacking from all angles. The EFF should stop talking about the past, its critics say, and admit that the Internet won't get broken by Hollywood.
TorrentFreak has the exceptionally troubling story of a federal district court in Oregon issuing an incredibly broad and questionable order, effectively wiping a bunch of websites out, without ever letting the websites in question know that they were being "tried" in court. The request came from ABS-CBN, a giant Filipino entertainment company arguing infringement, of course. But the argument against these sites is somewhat questionable already, made worse by the demand that the whole thing be done under seal (without alerting the site operators). Then Judge Anna Brown granted the temporary restraining order, basically deleting these sites from the internet, without even a sniff of an adversarial hearing.
