[tobylane]

Useful foreign sites? BBC accepts user comments in some areas, someone posts copyrigh material to one of them and a court order is issued before a BBC mod takes it down? If a DNS block is made then, how long will it last, and how many people would it reach anyway?

[thebigshane]

Luckily, the BBC would not fall under this definition:

   the site is primarily designed or 
   operated for the purpose of, has only lim-
   ited purpose or use other than, or is mar-
   keted by its operator or another acting in 
   concert with that operator primarily for 
   use in, offering goods or services in viola-
   tion of— [...some existing laws...]

[Symmetry]

But the problem with SOPA is that the determination of whether a site is "primarily designed" for copyright infringement is subjective, and a determination made entirely by the party alleging copyright infringement. In theory people using DMCA takedown notices now are only supposed to use them for cases that are really copyright infringement, aka aren't subject to Fair Use or such - or has a legal right to use that song. In practice, copyright holders use automated systems that make no attempt to gauge whether or not some YouTube video or whathaveyou is actually infringing, but just issue a take down request for anything their automated systems find matches a pattern in their database closely enough, with sometimes hilarious results.

I expect that at least one major copyright holder will use a similar system with SOPA, since there seems to be even less theoretical penalty for doing so than with the DMCA. So yes, I expect that the BBC might very well be blacklisted just because one used posts a link to infringing material. And then it will stay blacklisted until maybe the slow wheels of human review come to the consensus that it was indeed an error, and fix it.

[sukuriant]

Imagine if Dropbox were a non-US company. That section you just argued could be easily misused to block that site. After all, you can share your files on as many computers as you want. Clearly it will all be music and movies. People that want Dropbox taken down only need one or ten examples. In a popular enough website, it would be easy to find some example people that have broken the ToS and uploaded copyrighted conent onto it and shared it with their friends. They could even plant those people!

Oh, but they broke the ToS, that means they're not following what the web site's purpose is? Well, now maligned websites just need to have a ToS that says "don't do bad stuff", and they're fine!

See where I'm going with this?

[thebigshane]

I realize that laws can be twisted by clever lawyers but I still think its quite a stretch to claim that a Dropbox-like site could be said to have its primary purpose be infringing copyrights.

For one thing, those files aren't publicly available by default. If they are publicly available, then the Dropbox team is probably already monitoring those files. If they are not monitoring those files then (this part is controversial...) maybe they should be investigated for copyright infringement, as long as they maintain due process.

[Natsu]

> If they are publicly available, then the Dropbox team is probably already monitoring those files.

I doubt that they are. Copyright is a matter of permission. How would any third party know who has permission to do what?

[sukuriant]

But, should the entire website be taken out of a dns just because one/ten people using the website are using it in an illegal way? That's what SOPA will do, and that's why it's bad.

Due process is good :)

[tobylane]

It sounds like it is trying to make laws fuzzy, because you can't make it outright unbalanced to the copyright owners, but the same owners are lobbying for more law in their favour. Laws have been declined or overturned for being fuzzy, I hope this is the true legal kind of fuzzy.