You may have heard about recent online protests of pending federal legislation with regard to the fight against piracy and intellectual property theft. Google recently blacked out the logo on their home page and Wikipedia completely took their site offline for twenty-four hours. These actions were performed in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). SOPA is a bill that is written with the purpose of targeting foreign websites that traffic in copyrighted material without compensating the owners of the copyright.

Supporters of the anti-piracy legislation, which includes the entertainment industry, say that operators of sites that distribute copyrighted material without compensation to the copyright holder is a threat to the economy and causes the loss of jobs here in the United States. If a foreign site is suspected of infringing, the law requires that a judge determine if the site should be blocked and that any company sever ties with that site; such as search engines not linking any search results to that site. Another method of blocking access to the site would require internet service providers to change DNS settings to prevent name resolution to the IP addresses of the infringing site.

Despite the bill’s seemingly good intentions, opponents of the legislation point out the vagueness of what would be considered infringement. Even though the bill specifies foreign sites, it could also affect domestic sites as well. A technical problem with the law is the requirement that internet service providers change the configuration of their domain name servers (DNS) to block access to sites accused of infringing on copyrighted material. DNS is the foundation of the internet and any changes can affect the security and stability of the internet.

After much uproar, the bill has been pulled for now. But you can expect the bill to come back again in another form. Hopefully it will be changed to balance the concerns of both the content creators and consumers.