COICA, and why you NEED to care about it.

If you care about your internet browsing experience, you should read this NOW.

So if you're not into politics or government doings, you may be unfamiliar with what COICA is. COICA, is S.3804, or the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which was proposed by Senator Patrick Leahy and Senator Orrin Hatch. It's currently being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

That's nice and all, but why do I care?
To answer that, you need to know what that means. This bill will allow, via court order, to create a blacklist of Internet domain names, by referral of the Attorney General. Your ISP, financial translation providers, and online ad vendors, like google AdSense, would be required to block any domains on this list. That means you, as the end user, would be Permanently blocked from any website that this bill incorporates. In essence, it's an internet censoring system.

Any domain that is "dedicated to infringing activity" would be subject to being added to this blacklist. As any good politician, this is a massively broad term which can be almost defined at the time they want to block it. Basically, any site where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are "central to the activity of the Internet site" would be blocked.

Don't think you do use any sites like this?
Number 1, you're probably lying to yourself; 2, you're not thinking about what kind of websites this covers. Let's take YouTube. a while back a company called Viacom (better known as the CBS Corporation) tried to bring down YouTube under the premise that their copyrighted material is central to activity of Youtube, but was keboshed because under our current law, it is completely legal so long as they remove any illicit material in a timely matter. Under this new law, however, Viacom would have been successful. If this bill passes, Viacom doesn't even need to prove YouTube is doing anything illegal -- as long as they can persuade a court that enough other people are using it for copyright infringement, that's enough to get the whole site censored.

"Censored" is not too strong of a word?
If you think about how the law in the US works right now, if you're doing something illegal online, you are brought to court where they then can shut you down if you lose. COICA will bypass that court case by simply blocking the site from US users. The funny thing is that the US government has been criticizing China and Iran for this kind of act, where Obama informed the United Nations that "We will support a free and open Internet." Is that so?

COICA doesn't take you down from the internet. Au contraire, it just blocks people living in the US from being able to view the website at all. For now, it'll be the big fish, but COICA, with its vague reasoning's, would technically allow a site to be blocked due to special interest groups demands. What if a large enough corporation is trying to sell a product someone is giving away for free now? This all bypasses due process. Take them to court if they're doing something illegal, not just hide them.

Look it up. It's all over the internet right now, and groups of people are petitioning to have this bill stopped.