The American Senate has officially begun holding hearings on the the ‘Internet Blacklist Bill,’ also known as the “PROTECT IP Act” or the “Stop Online Piracy Act.” It is potentially the most harmful bit of Internet censorship legislation to date, and you should know what’s going to happen if it passes.

Yes, this is American legislation, and as such won’t immediately effect the things that those of us outside the U.S. can see – but it will severely handicap the kinds of websites and services on offer in a very short space of time.

So heads up; this is important.

In brief: the act, if passed, would hand proprietary control of the Internet over to a handful of corporations, allowing them to sue and shut down any website that even links to copyrighted material. By which I don’t just mean torrents, or YouTube videos that use copyrighted content; under the act, websites could be shut down for linking to other websites that contain unattributed text or images.

Depending on the whim of the copyright holders, ISPs could be forced to block social media sites, search engines could be required to delete results, and startups could lose their funding — all apparently in the interest of “preventing piracy.”

Which is especially nice, because the bill does nothing to stop actual privacy. Slightly more effort would be required to illegally download stuff, but not that much more. What the bill does do is hand control of information on the internet over to a couple of self-interested corporations, free to censor or promote whatever content they deem acceptable or otherwise, in the interests of “protecting IP.”

[Source: FFTF]