COICA Web Censorship Bill S. 3804 Passes Senate Committee
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved a bill that would give the Attorney General the right to shut down websites with a court order if copyright infringement is deemed central to the activity of the site regardless if the website has actually committed a crime. Among the sites that could go dark if the law passes: Dropbox, RapidShare, SoundCloud, Hype Machine and any other site for which the Attorney General deems copyright infringement to be central to the activity of the site, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group that opposes the bill.
Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) is the latest effort by Hollywood, the recording industry and the big media companies to stem the tidal wave of internet file sharing that has upended those industries and, they claim, cost them tens of billions of dollars over the last decade. The mechanism by which the government would do this, according to the bill, is the internets Domain Name System (DNS), which translates web addresses into IP addresses. The bill would give the Attorney General the power to simply obtain a court order requiring internet service providers to pull the plug on suspected websites.
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