Here's a link to one side of the issue:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-ron-w ... 97305.html

Here's a link to one side of the issue:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-ron-w ... 97305.html

Here’s the Internet we get after this becomes law. The prosecutor walks into a courtroom with evidence that a website — or, more likely, 1000 websites — are “dedicated to infringing activities.” If he/she can persuade the judge of that, those websites vanish from the Net (through a complex wave of judicially-mandated action that has to be obeyed by ISPs, domain name registrars, etc.). No need for messy “adversary proceedings,” “due process,” or similar niceties. No need to bother with details like “is there a defense to the charge?” No need even for the prosecutor, under the statutory terms, to prove what a copyright plaintiff would have to prove if this were an ordinary infringement suit: i.e., that the website operator in question had “actual knowledge of specific infringing files” on the site in question. None of that.

It’s nice of Congress, I suppose, to provide that a neutral judge has to have seen the evidence and issued an order before sites can be eliminated; I’m sure there are plenty of folks in Congress and the US Attorney’s Office who would like to eliminate that last bit of messiness and administrative inconvenience, too. But there’s a good reason why, except in truly extraordinary circumstances where public health and safety are imminently threatened, we don’t throw people in jail, or deprive people of their livelihoods, or divest them of their property, whenever a prosecutor and a judge agree that those are just punishments.

In the interest of equal time, Sandy, I'd like to point out that both linked articles are in opposition to the proposal. You owe us one or two in support of it.......assuming there are any such on the internet

You know, when copyrights first started in the U. S., they were limited to like 17 years. It's only been in the last 50 years or so that major corporations have been able to get the laws changed to allow their work to be protected nearly in perpetuity

The duration of copyright protection recently changed as a result of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. The easiest rule to state is that Copyrights have expired on all United States works registered or published prior to 1923. As a result, all such works have entered into the public domain. Beyond that, however, it is more complicated to determine when a copyright will expire. Like the old provisions, the duration of copyright protection under these new provisions depends upon when the work was created and first published. The three relevant time frames are:

works created on or after January 1, 1978;
works created before January 1, 1978, but not published until after this date; and
works created and first published before January 1, 1978.