Without any objections while activists waging for a free Internet advocate against the possible passing of the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA, the US court system is already favoring bug business by thwarting third party competition. The US court system has attacked websites that employed unauthorized usage of a major label’s branding, specifically True Religion clothing, Channel cologne and Philip Morris. By the Cigarette giant, prosecution for Morris lobbied to have several websites and their contents and funds seized and transferred without the defense ever able to present a case. Without a just trial ever being carried out as Congress debates the provisions that could make up the controversial SOPA bill, it looks as if the US courts are already shutting down websites for what could be considered unauthorized use or infringement.
A District Court judge Nevada, in the case against websites advertising allegedly counterfeit Chanel products. With the legitimate manufacturer to seize around 600 domain names that were related to, but not affiliated. Restraining orders and injunctions were handed to the biggest search engine and Web companies in the world barring sites including the Google and Yahoo from indexing or linking to the sites in questions. The federal judges allowed Channel to seize the domains and transfer them to US-based registrar GoDaddy without any say from the defendants. With the real due process the kind of result would not happen. The website Techdirt.com has been following the cases and note that to see the excessiveness in the cases, one does not have to go much further than to realize that based solely on the declaration of a Philip Morris employee, the court is ordering the full transfer not just of websites, but of any funds being sent to a website.
Techdirt calls it essentially a kill switch for the allegedly-guilty websites in the case of True Religion court ruling, which were found at fault with once again no due process. The Congress is debating whether it should impose a similar cloak over the Internet as a whole, causing for any site to allegedly broadcast copyrighted material to be seized and the administrator to suffer from immense fines and jail time. In court irrespective of the legislation, the fight against SOPA may be a red herring in some ways, writes Balasubramani, since IP plaintiffs are fashioning very similar remedies. Even if SOPA is defeated, it may turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory opponents may win the battle, but may not have gained much as a result.
REFERENCE:
http://rt.com/usa/news/us-court-sopa-morris-203/
http://www.democraticunderground.com/100258156
http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/njv2d/us_courts_already_enforcing_sopastyle_shutdowns/
http://www.mymarketingfile.com/courts-already-enforcing-sopastyle-shutdowns-rt/
http://victorspost.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/us-courts-already-enforcing-sopa-style-shut-downs/
http://inagist.com/GreeGreece/149300357095374850/
