Senate bill amounts to death penalty for Web sites

A new bill backed by movie studios and other large copyright holders takes a novel approach to curbing access to piratical Web sites: an Internet death penalty.
That’s a good way to describe the approach adopted by the legislation introduced today, which specifies a step-by-step method for making Web sites suspected of infringing copyrights or trademarks vanish from the Internet. It’s called the Protect IP Act.
The U.S. Department of Justice would receive the power to seek a court order against an allegedly infringing Web site, and then serve that order on search engines, certain Domain Name System providers, and Internet advertising firms–which would in turn be required to “expeditiously” make the target Web site invisible.

It’s not entirely clear how broad the Protect IP Act’s authority would be. An earlier draft (PDF) of the legislation would have allowed the Justice Department to order any “interactive computer service”–a phrase courts have interpreted to mean any Web site–to block access to the suspected pirate site.
But the final version (PDF) refers instead to “information location tool.” That’s defined as a “directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link,” which would certainly sweep in Google, Yahoo, and search engines, and may also cover many other Web sites.
This is the main process through which the Internet death penalty is imposed. The Protect IP Act says that an “information location tool shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible, to remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order.” In addition, it must delete all hyperlinks to the offending “Internet site.”
In other words, the targeted Web site would start to vanish from the Internet in the United States.