Corporations don't have to wait for the SOPA bill
to pass to start censoring the Internet, it turns out. Under a ruling just handed down by a federal judge in Nevada, hundreds of websites accused by Chanel of selling counterfeit goods are having their domains confiscated and their names removed from search engine results
, with scanty evidence of the accusation's validity. The SOPA, or Stop Online Piracy Act, which you can read more about here
, is backed by Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and others and is intended to stem piracy. However, numerous tech companies and civil liberties groups have pointed out that it's a sledgehammer approach to a delicate problem, since it allows corporations to have the government remove sites from search engines and take other actions that create an Internet blacklist, similar to the Great Firewall of China. These actions, in fact, would be very similar to ...
