SOPA: 10 Key Facts About Piracy Bill

What's the status of two controversial bills designed to block foreign, rogue websites and prevent U.S. residents from accessing pirated movies and music?

The proposed bills are the House's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate's Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (Protect IP Act, or PIPA). Numerous businesses and technologists--for starters--have criticized the bills, leading an estimated 7,000 websites Wednesday to either black out their site (in the case of the English language version of Wikipedia) or to alter their site design to demonstrate their opposition to the bills (as in the case of Google and Mozilla).

[ Cyberattacks are expected to rise this year. Learn more about the 10 Security Trends To Watch In 2012. ]

With opposition mounting, here's where the bills now stand:

1. SOPA is still alive.
Are both SOPA and PIPA now stalling? In fact, SOPA's chief sponsor, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), said Tuesday that he expects to bring the bill to a House Judiciary Committee markup hearing in February. At such hearings, legislators can debate the bill and propose amendments, as well as vote on whether the bill should then be passed to the full House. "To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses, and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America's intellectual property, we will continue to bring together industry representatives and members to find ways to combat online piracy," said Smith Tuesday in a statement.

2. Payment provider cooperation is required.
SOPA would encourage--though not require--payment providers such as Visa and PayPal to not facilitate business transactions with any website that the government had deemed to be hosting pirated content. According to Smith, "the bill maintains provisions that 'follow the money' and cut off the main sources of revenue to foreign illegal sites ... and it provides innovators with a way to bring claims against foreign illegal sites that steal and sell their technology, products, and intellectual property."

3. SOPA loses court orders.
One sticking point for SOPA has been that service providers would be required to comply with a court order, obtained by the government, requiring them to block access to rogue foreign websites, and which would indemnify their actions. But in response to criticism of the provision, Smith recently removed the court-order provision from SOPA. As a result, it's not clear how website-blocking orders might be obtained or policed.

4. Bills continue to evolve.
Both SOPA and PIPA have continued to evolve in response to criticism. Notably, PIPA author Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) admitted that service providers wouldn't support any bill that filtered domain-name servers (DNS) for anti-piracy purposes. Likewise, to help prevent abuse, the bills' authors have added provisions that would impose damages--including costs and attorneys' fees--on anyone who makes a false claim.

5. DNS tinkering isn't popular.
As an anti-piracy technique, domain name filtering is proving to be quite unpopular. Notably, Google--which of course earns advertising revenue based on page impressions--has said it will resist any such measures. Likewise, both SOPA and PIPA have been derided by service providers, technology experts, as well as the Business Software Alliance, for being too sweeping in their approach. 6. Critics cry censorship.
Because SOPA and PIPA would block Internet users from seeing sites that the U.S. government--or perhaps third parties--had accused of hosting pirated content, critics of the bills have posited that the legislation could serve as a censorship weapon for copyright holders. Or as Wikipedia said on its blackout notice Wednesday, "the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet."

7. Movie studios still like the bills.
If technology companies are largely arrayed against SOPA, the same isn't true for music producers and movie studios, which continue to look to legal sanctions to increase their revenue and reduce piracy. Notably, Chris Dodd, a former senator and now the Motion Picture Association of America CEO, released a statement labeling the blackout as "a dangerous gimmick," as well as "an abuse of power" by the companies involved.

8. The White House has criticized the bills.
Over the weekend, three of the Obama administration's leading technologists issued a statement that acknowledged the need to control online piracy, but criticized SOPA and PIPA for being overly broad. "We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet," they said.

9. Legislative marketing, versus reality.
What do you call a bill that promises to stop online privacy, but which has been criticized by many leading technologists? Without a doubt, at one level, the proposed bills are legislators' attempt to say to constituents and donors, "Look, I proposed a bill about stopping online privacy." But will their approaches actually solve the piracy problem? Blocking websites is inelegant from a technology perspective, and thorny from a freedom-of-speech standpoint.

10. Rogue websites remain difficult to stop.
Beyond DNS filtering, how else might authorities target rogue foreign websites? As part of Operation In Our Sites, federal authorities have used court orders to seize the domain names for hundreds of sites that they determined were hosting pirated content. But there's little to stop the operators of those sites from simply transferring operations to a new domain name, or--in some cases--suing the government for wrongfully seizing their site.

Heightened concern that users could inadvertently expose or leak--or purposely steal--an organization's sensitive data has spurred debate over the proper technology and training to protect the crown jewels. An Insider Threat Reality Check, a special retrospective of recent news coverage, takes a look at how organizations are handling the threat--and what users are really up to. (Free registration required.)