ABOUT THE BOOK

Early 2012 witnessed a remarkable, evolutionary confrontation in the political world. For perhaps the first time, major Internet firms showed strong opposition to a set of laws being debated in the U.S. Congress. They opposed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate. The confrontation was the the result of a long-standing debate between the titans of Hollywood, and moguls of Silicon Valley over the ownership of content on the Internet.

The SOPA and PIPA Acts were fundamentally designed as a means to prevent piracy of music and video content online. They would provide expanded rights to U.S. law enforcement authorities to pursue individuals and companies that infringed on copyrights of intellectual property.

The Acts were primarily aimed at preventing U.S. Internet users from accessing illegal content. In particular, the Acts would have restricted Internet companies from dealing with illegal websites, search engines from linking to those sites, and coercing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to those sites. It would also grant the government root access to the domain name system on the web so that it could control and block pirated content or websites.

EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK

As a result of the theft of their intellectual property, the entertainment industry primarily began to resort to the legal system. They pursued their claims using classic legal maneuvers including civil and criminal prosecution. Shawn Fanning of Napster was targeted for prosecution and eventually forced to shut his site down.

While the industry had some successes in shutting down popular sites, hackers easily created new sites to replace the old ones as soon as they were shut down. Deterrence worked in some cases to punish consumers for stealing music and video. However, smart hackers created ways to hide their IP address or to host their sites off-shore away from the jurisdiction of U.S. law enforcement.

Steve Jobs

Enter: Steve Jobs, who introduced the iTunes platform in January, 2001. Jobs was the iconic founder and CEO of Apple, the largest most innovative and most profitable technology company in the world. His force of will inevitably would have had an impact on the piracy debate. Coincidentally or not, the 2012 vote on SOPA and PIPA occurred just months after the death of Steve Jobs.

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CHAPTER OUTLINE

Hacker’s Guide To Understanding SOPA and PIPA
+ Introduction
+ Roots of the Problem
+ Initial Response
+ SOPA and PIPA Introduced
+ ...and much more

The complete text of the current version of the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Este ebook analisa o projeto de lei conhecido como SOPA ("Stop Online Piracy Act"), destacando seus principais aspectos e os vícios jurídicos nele contidos, tanto sob o aspecto do Direito Americano, quando sob o prisma dos Tratados Internacionais de Direitos Fundamentais.