Posted February 1, 2012 - 3:40 pm
It's easy to turn a deaf ear to the controversy surrounding recent copyright protection bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or the PROTECT IP Act, which threatened to curtail free speech on the Internet by allowing the U.S. Department of Justice to blacklist and block access to websites suspected of copyright infringement. Most of us don't visit websites suspected of illegally distributing copyrighted material, so blocking us from accessing them seems harmless. But should your ISP ever be legally obligated to prevent you from accessing restricted websites, it will have to find a way to monitor your online activity, and that could cause your