US GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS lobbied the US Congress to give law enforcement agencies more powers in its so-called war on 'piracy'.
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency could be granted the authority to request court orders to require payment processing firms such as Paypal to cease providing services to websites that it deems are engaged in illegal activity. Maria Pallante, the acting US Registrar of Copyrights told the House Judiciary Committee that the legislation could also stop US advertising networks from placing advertising on such websites.
Pallante claimed that search engines "routinely point to rogue websites" even in situations when the user is looking for a legitimate website. She added, "In fact, sometimes the illegitimate sites appear much higher in search results, displacing authorized sources of copyrighted content."
Not surprisingly, someone from the MAFIAA was on hand to back up these claims, with Frederick Huntsberry, COO of Paramount Pictures playing the patriotism card. "Every single film we distribute is promptly stolen and then illegally made available online without creating any jobs, without reinvesting any revenue in the creation of new films, without paying taxes, and without contributing to the US economy", Huntsberry told lawmakers. We're surprised that he didn't claim that stopping movie filesharing would wipe out the towering US national debt in one fell swoop.
Given that Pallante claimed that US firms such as Paypal, advertising networks and search engines either offer services to or point to "rogue websites", it's hard to see how Huntsberry's claim of these websites are not contributing to the US economy holds water. Still, you have to give him credit for spinning the same MAFIAA line in a slightly different way.
Pallante's claim that search engines point to and rank illegal websites higher could well raise the ire of the search engine operators. It might give rise to the law enforcement agencies telling firms like Google and Yahoo how to filter, rank and display results in their search algorithms.
Earlier this month, ICE took down thousands of websites while trying to take down a few websites that allegedly were involved in distributing *****************. This example was used by David Sohn, senior policy counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology as a cautionary tale about ICE's approach.
Sohn told lawmakers that ICE "had not thoroughly ensured that the action it was taking was narrowly tailored to the criminal actors, and the result silenced protected speech and harmed the reputations of innocent parties".
While often high-handed and certainly very profitable companies such as Paypal deserve little in the way of public support, it will be interesting to see how they will fight the MAFIAA's desire to take away their business.
Source: here
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency could be granted the authority to request court orders to require payment processing firms such as Paypal to cease providing services to websites that it deems are engaged in illegal activity. Maria Pallante, the acting US Registrar of Copyrights told the House Judiciary Committee that the legislation could also stop US advertising networks from placing advertising on such websites.
Pallante claimed that search engines "routinely point to rogue websites" even in situations when the user is looking for a legitimate website. She added, "In fact, sometimes the illegitimate sites appear much higher in search results, displacing authorized sources of copyrighted content."
Not surprisingly, someone from the MAFIAA was on hand to back up these claims, with Frederick Huntsberry, COO of Paramount Pictures playing the patriotism card. "Every single film we distribute is promptly stolen and then illegally made available online without creating any jobs, without reinvesting any revenue in the creation of new films, without paying taxes, and without contributing to the US economy", Huntsberry told lawmakers. We're surprised that he didn't claim that stopping movie filesharing would wipe out the towering US national debt in one fell swoop.
Given that Pallante claimed that US firms such as Paypal, advertising networks and search engines either offer services to or point to "rogue websites", it's hard to see how Huntsberry's claim of these websites are not contributing to the US economy holds water. Still, you have to give him credit for spinning the same MAFIAA line in a slightly different way.
Pallante's claim that search engines point to and rank illegal websites higher could well raise the ire of the search engine operators. It might give rise to the law enforcement agencies telling firms like Google and Yahoo how to filter, rank and display results in their search algorithms.
Earlier this month, ICE took down thousands of websites while trying to take down a few websites that allegedly were involved in distributing *****************. This example was used by David Sohn, senior policy counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology as a cautionary tale about ICE's approach.
Sohn told lawmakers that ICE "had not thoroughly ensured that the action it was taking was narrowly tailored to the criminal actors, and the result silenced protected speech and harmed the reputations of innocent parties".
While often high-handed and certainly very profitable companies such as Paypal deserve little in the way of public support, it will be interesting to see how they will fight the MAFIAA's desire to take away their business.
Source: here
