Past issues
Contact
The Newsstand
Email updates
Classifieds- Home
- Follow us
- Our Newspapers
-
- Bayside Times
- Oakland Gardens, Bay Terrace
- Little Neck Ledger
- Douglaston, Glen Oaks, Floral Park, North Shore Towers
- Whitestone Times
- College Point, Malba, Beechhurst
- Flushing Times
- Auburndale, Kew Gardens Hills, Fresh Meadows
- Jamaica Times
- Hollis, St. Albans, Cambria Heights, Springfield Gardens, Rosedale, Richmond Hill, Laurelton, Queens Village
- Forest Hills Ledger
- Kew Gardens, Rego Park, Maspeth, Glendale, Middle Village, Woodhaven, Ozone Park, Howard Beach, Ridgewood
- Astoria Times
- Long Island City, Woodside, Corona, Sunnyside, Elmhurst, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights
- Investigative reporting
- Shots in the Dark
- Telling the stories of communities wounded by violence.
- Blogs
- No Holds Barred
- With Ken Kowald
- Queens Campaigner
- Covering the political races that matter to Queens.
- QGuide
- Columns
- Topics
- Calendar
- Classifieds
- Special sections
- About us
-
Facebook
Twitter
RSS Senators Right to Back Off
Print this story
Digg this
Del.icio.usU.S. Sens. Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand have backed off their support for a piece of legislation that would have greatly restricted user access to the Internet.
The U.S. House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy and the Senate’s Protect Intellectual Property acts were intended to stop online piracy. They were championed by Hollywood and the recording industry, which lobbied heavily for their passage.
Critics charged that the bills would have allowed the government to shut down websites that facilitate illegal downloads of copyrighted materials. Google, Facebook and Wikipedia, three of the most popular sites on the Internet, could feel the hands of Big Brother closing around their necks. To raise awareness of its concerns, Wikipedia went black for 24 hours Jan. 18.
Schumer and Gillibrand said they held discussions with officials from Facebook, Yahoo and Google before deciding to withdraw support for the bill. The reasons for opposing these bills should have been obvious. As they stand now, they put the burden on these sites to protect intellectual property.
Under the current arrangements, these sites regularly remove a video, article or song if they are informed the posting violates a copyright. Under the new law, these sites would be responsible to check in advance that the millions of things they or users of the site post do not violate a copyright. If they make a mistake, they could be shut down.
What would the next be? Would the United States follow China, which blocks nearly all access to the Internet?
Filmmakers and the recording industry have a legitimate right to protect their properties, but not at the expense of the millions who use the Internet every day and the businesses that pour billions of dollars into the economy.
We do not have a solution for stopping online piracy, but we are not particularly worried. As they have for decades, Hollywood and the recording industry continue to post enormous profits. They are free, with the help of Congress, to go after the pirates but the Internet should also operate freely.
©2012 Community Newspaper Group
Enter your comment below
By submitting this comment, you agree to the following terms:
You agree that you, and not TimesLedger.com or its affiliates, are fully responsible for the content that you post. You agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening or sexually-oriented material or any material that may violate applicable law; doing so may lead to the removal of your post and to your being permanently banned from posting to the site. You grant to TimesLedger.com the royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual and fully sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such content in whole or in part world-wide and to incorporate it in other works in any form, media or technology now known or later developed.
