A few weeks ago, Congress quickly shelved the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) after incurring vocal public outrage led by Web giants such as Google and Wikipedia. SOPA and PIPA both sought to require the blacklisting of websites that facilitate online piracy. For example, search engines would have to exclude offending sites from search results and third-party payment processing companies like PayPal could not do business with them.
As originally drafted, the laws would have required Internet service providers to block offending websites — an Internet “death sentence.” The controversy over SOPA and PIPA puts into focus the tension between intellectual property rights and First Amendment free speech realities that many general counsel should bear in mind as their companies navigate the high seas of the Internet Age.
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