Taxpayers in the United States could soon be stuck footing the bill for
some very costly copyright infringement enforcement. For those that
don't know, the PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to
Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 or
Senate Bill S.968) is a piece of controversial legislation introduced on
May 12, 2011 intended to force private ISPs, search engines and other
parties to censor websites accused of facilitating copyright
infringement. The bill is supported by a large number of infamous
IP-protective agencies, including the MPAA, Viacom, SAG, the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, and others.
The legislation is a re-write of the Combating Online Infringement and
Counterfeits Act, which failed to pass in 2010. Opposition parties, such
as the EFF, Google, eBay, and Human Rights Watch, decry the legislation
because of fears that it will place free internet in danger. The bill
focuses on websites not registered in the United States, and would give
the U.S. Department of Justice the power to seek a court order against
websites that have been cited as infringing on copyright law, and then
to demand "information location tools" (terms borrowed from the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act) to make the target website invisible,
basically by "pruning" websites from domain name servers inside the U.S.
The bill does not specify what constitutes an infringing website, and
allows for an injunction to be issued without notification to the
allegedly infringing site.
Based on estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, the enforcement
of PROTECT IP will cost taxpayers just under $10 million a year. The
majority of the money would be spent simply hiring new DOJ employees
and agents for support and to take legal action against infringing
websites, working out to $47 million over five years just for the new
hires. This is assuming that the estimates have not been down-played to
speed up the bill's passage.
Another important, and yet conveniently ignored, concern with the bill
is just how much it could cost the private sector. While the CBO is
legally required to estimate whether proposed legislation will cost the
private sector more than $142 million, in this case the CBO has refused
estimates because of "uncertainty about how often and against whom the
Department of Justice or copyright holders would use the authority" that
the legislation will give them.
Essentially, this leaves ISPs, search engines, and credit card networks
in the dark as to how this legislation could affect them financially.
The constant updating and enforcing of blacklists across hundreds or
thousands of firms would surely not be cheap, and brings into question
just how well any money recouped through enforcement (which is a
debatable issue in and of itself) would off-set the costs of the
enforcement to begin with.
