Online piracy Rights and wronged

An American anti-piracy bill tries to stem the global theft of intellectual property
Nov 26th 2011 | NEW YORK | from the print edition

ILLEGAL copying and sharing of copyrighted material is hard enough to stop within a country. But when the internet takes traffic across borders it is almost unmanageable. American-owned intellectual property, say, may be uploaded in one country and downloaded in a second, via a website whose computers are in a third, operated by anonymous enthusiasts (or criminals) from goodness-knows-where. So whom do you sue, and in which courts? The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), now before America’s Congress, is the latest of many recent attempts to defend property rights on the internet.

The bill aims to cut off Americans’ access to foreign pirate websites by squeezing intermediaries.

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