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Congress is now considering the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which would let copyright-holders take action against the intermediaries—such as payment services, search engines, and internet service providers (ISPs)—that supply money and traffic to pirate sites. If the intermediaries do not cut these sites off, they will face lawsuits.In principle, the move is a good one. Content companies need more effective legal remedies against piracy. And the thrust of the bill is sensible. Search engines direct users to pirated content and make money off the ads that appear next to the search results. The threat of lawsuits might encourage them to do much more to ensure that a search for, say, “Lady Gaga mp3 download” brings up legitimate online music services only. And putting the burden of enforcement on the private sector has advantages: the aggrieved party will have a better idea than the state whether a copyright infringement is worth pursuing.But the bill has problems too. The loose definition of infringement in SOPA could include sites that unwittingly carry comments linking to pirated material. That would make it too easy to launch spurious claims and too onerous for intermediaries to deal with them, and could discourage entrepreneurs from setting up new sites allowing users to post things (which, in the era of social media, is almost all websites). Large firms can cope with the extra hassle, but the fear of lawsuits could stifle smaller companies and start-ups.A second big drawback is that SOPA obliges ISPs to put filters in place to prevent their customers reaching pirate websites easily. That risks damaging the internet’s vital internal addressing system, which lets people use words instead of numbers to access websites. It also clashes with DNSSEC
