If you are not aware of what SOPA and PIPA are, you obviously do not use wikipedia, google and many other sites often. Several went black yesterday in protest about these two bills currently going through the US legislature.
Essentially they are DCMA on steroids. If a copyright holder sees a copyright violation on a site they will be able to get a court directive for that site to remove the offending artwork in 24hrs, or the site is removed from the internet. It will not show up on search engines, ISP will not take you there etc.
This is not just the page that contains the material, but the whole site! I am not sure that the page actually has to be specified in the court order, but I have not gone into to much detail so I may be wrong.
An example. If an image is posted on Caedes, or found to have been posted, the copyright owner can demand that Caedes removes all and any copyright violations of that copyright holder in 24hrs. That is, someone would have to go through all the images on Caedes and check that they did not contain any copyright violation, and remove those that did. If not, poof, Caedes disappears. This site would still exist, but you would not be able to get to it, from anywhere in the world.
It would no longer be enough to get the poster of the material to say they own it, that is no defence under SOPA. One of the reasons the bills are unpopular is the obvious miss-use that they can be put to. We could probably get other sites taken down for the type of copyright infringements they have at present on some members here. However, it would only take one posted image here for the same thing to happen to Caedes.
This is unlikely to happen to Caedes for one simple reason. The site is heavily moderated.
I mention this because of the recent threads on the posting of copyright material. Moderation is good and necessary, and will become increasingly so if these bills get passed. We should be glad of the effort that is put in.
Essentially they are DCMA on steroids. If a copyright holder sees a copyright violation on a site they will be able to get a court directive for that site to remove the offending artwork in 24hrs, or the site is removed from the internet. It will not show up on search engines, ISP will not take you there etc.
This is not just the page that contains the material, but the whole site! I am not sure that the page actually has to be specified in the court order, but I have not gone into to much detail so I may be wrong.
An example. If an image is posted on Caedes, or found to have been posted, the copyright owner can demand that Caedes removes all and any copyright violations of that copyright holder in 24hrs. That is, someone would have to go through all the images on Caedes and check that they did not contain any copyright violation, and remove those that did. If not, poof, Caedes disappears. This site would still exist, but you would not be able to get to it, from anywhere in the world.
It would no longer be enough to get the poster of the material to say they own it, that is no defence under SOPA. One of the reasons the bills are unpopular is the obvious miss-use that they can be put to. We could probably get other sites taken down for the type of copyright infringements they have at present on some members here. However, it would only take one posted image here for the same thing to happen to Caedes.
This is unlikely to happen to Caedes for one simple reason. The site is heavily moderated.
I mention this because of the recent threads on the posting of copyright material. Moderation is good and necessary, and will become increasingly so if these bills get passed. We should be glad of the effort that is put in.