MPAA Won’t Give Up on SOPA Replacement but Will Negotiate Terms, Says Executive
SAN FRANCISCO -- A new copyright-enforcement law ought to emerge from negotiations between opponents and supporters of the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and companion PROTECT IP Act, and it probably will, a top MPAA infringement fighter said Wednesday. “I see this as round one, and I can assure you that the MPAA is not going to give up,” said Larry Hahn, the association’s director of U.S. content protection.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
Surrender is not an option after the Web uprising last week that forced supporters of the bills into retreat, Hahn said at the IQPC’s (International Quality and Productivity Center) Anti-Counterfeiting & Brand Protection Summit. “The online rogue sites” engaged in mass infringement of entertainment copyrights “are a direct threat to American innovation” and will inflict much greater economic harm if not fought more effectively, he said. “The good thing” is that the uproar “brought focus on a very important issue,” he said.
Misconceptions must be cleared up, Hahn said. “The lawmakers need to clarify that these new laws are not framed on invading privacy or blowing up the Internet,” he said. And “there’s due process involved in these laws,” Hahn said. No effort has been made to give prosecutors or rights holders enforcement powers unchecked by due process, he said. Opponents contend otherwise. Speaking with Hahn, Marcella Ballard of the Venable law firm noted that the day after a massive online protest, the Department of Justice came down on MegaUpload and its founder with all the enforcement tools in current law that critics of SOPA complained about in the bill, including domain-name seizure.
"A lot of the bigger cyberlocker sites have withdrawn from the Internet” after the bust of MegaUpload, probably the largest of the type, Hahn said. “So at least for now it’s had some really good ramifications.”