Stopping Online Piracy

It would be nice to stop all those people that steal music, movies, and books online and make them pay for their entertainment but that is not how the world works because something else is going fall apart. He is part of the article explaining how the two Acts are going to work:

The yearly revenue lost to U.S. companies is estimated at $200 billion, according to a report commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has come out strongly in favor of the SOPA and PROTECT IP bills. Because such overseas sites are out of reach of U.S. law, each bill would force American payment providers, such as MasterCard or Visa, to stop processing transactions involving sites that were found by a court to be infringing copyrights — in effect, cutting off their money. (A similar tactic was used against Wikileaks a year ago.)

From a technical point of view, the most worrisome provision of the SOPA and PROTECT IP bills is that both allow federal courts order Internet service providers (ISPs), such as Time Warner Cable or Verizon, and search engines, such as Google or Yahoo, to block websites which have been determined to infringe upon copyrights and trademarks belonging to the American entertainment industry.

The ISPs would have to block such sites by “filtering” their own Domain Name System (DNS) servers. Normally, DNS servers match the Web addresses humans know — such as www.securitynewsdaily.com — with the Internet Protocol network addresses that computers use, such as 207.86.128.60.

But the SOPA and PROTECT IP bills would change that system. As a result, if a U.S.-based user were to type in a Web address pointing to an infringing site, the ISP’s DNS server would be forbidden from giving the correct Internet Protocol address to the user’s browser.

Instead, the ISP would have to either re-route the user’s browser to a notice of copyright infringement, or return a standard “404” error indicating that the site could not be found. In the latter case, the ISP would have been forced to “lie” about the existence of the domain name — a breach of network protocol that could have effects reaching across the global Internet.

The effect of the bills on search engines would be slightly different. Google, for example, would filter out infringing sites from its results, which is technically simple but a disservice to the customer, who expects to be able to find anything he wants. Like the ISPs, search engines would be forced to “lie” and state that existing sites don't exist.

This would make it hard for people to use the internet and to see the other pages as they really are. Another problem is that the US hosts many routers and gateways, and this would also hinder the internet connectivity. Another problem that would come up is internet phone service communications would be much harder to get to and many businesses depend on the internet to reach out to their customers and communicate with them. Where do you stand on these Acts?