SOPA

[Treewyrm]

Govedo, actually it's quite different from what you're saying. Here is a thing, suing people and dragging cases through courts is expensive for one thing and sometimes it just doesn't work for them if it's done on mass scale, so what they want is to simply walk around that, and without any due process they'd simply point a finger to a website and claim it infringes copyright, assists in copyright infringement and something along those lines, they will not need to provide any evidence to that, but the ISPs will be forced to comply with DNS takedowns, payment processing companies such as visa, mastercard and paypal will also be forced to comply. They aren't making just another law, they already did that with previous bills such DMCA, no, they want to be the law in internet, above the judicial system. This is an instrument to get rid of any competition that they may perceive as threatening to them. And they're well-known to abuse those exclusive rights that are given to them, now they want even more and it's really getting ridiculous. So yes, contrary to what you're saying that will change a lot if it gets through. Not instantaneously but that'll be getting progressively worse as they'll make more and more use of that. Sometimes it isn't done because they would directly profit from such takedown, often the case is to have a "chill effect", in other words to scare others, showing they can sue individuals for millions and millions for a few lousy mp3 songs.