The European Parliament has adopted a resolution which criticizes domain name seizures of “infringing” websites by US authorities. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger “the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication.” With this stance the European Parliament joins an ever-growing list of opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act .
Starting in 2010, US authorities have used domain name seizures as a standard tool to take down websites that are deemed to facilitate copyright infringement.
Despite fierce criticism from the public, legal experts and civil liberties groups, taking control of domain names is now one of the measures included in the pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), legislation designed to give copyright holders more tools to protect their rights against foreign sites.
Opposition to SOPA has been swelling in recent days, and today the European Parliament adds its voice by heavily criticizing the domain seizures that are part of it.
A resolution on the EU-US Summit that will be held later this month stresses “the need to protect the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names.”
If SOPA does indeed become law the US would be able to shut down domains worldwide, as long as they are somehow managed by US companies. This includes the popular .com, .org and .net domains, and thus has the potential to affect many large websites belonging to companies in EU member states.
This can lead to problematic situations.
During one of the seizure rounds earlier this year, US authorities took the domain name www.rojadirecta.org, which belongs to the Spanish company Puerto 80. The site in question had been declared legal in Spain by two courts, but it only took a simple warrant for ICE to take it offline. This is the warning that’s being displayed on the site:
Puerto 80 is currently involved in a legal battle in the US to get their domain back, and has reportedly suffered significant losses in traffic and revenue from their streaming portal.
So basically what this has to do with games? Lets say you hate some game (or software, product, company, publisher – basically ANYONE in the US), create a website that points our all the bad things in the game and then the company who created the game can shut you down just because they live in USA and just because they can… Scary perspective!
It’s funny how America is promoting freedom of speech and yet they try to censor the Internet.
PS Companies like: AVG, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, Dell, Intel, Corel, Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft or Apple support the idea of SOPA.
Source: TorrentFreak
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