COICA – What you need to know

The “Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act” (COICA) is another censorship act to establish the “Great Firewall of USA” similar to the one China has. This is just plain bad business for any country.

The following is from the EFF, “This is a censorship bill, with a blacklist and everything. Hollywood’s previous adventures with blacklists were a dark period in American history. This time, it’s not people suspected of being too communist, it’s websites suspected of being too “piratical.” Senator Leahy is leading the government into the swamp of trying to decide which websites should be blacklisted and which ones shouldn’t, and they’re going to discover that the line between copyright infringement and free political speech can be awfully murky.”

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) copyright enforcement provisions give copyright owners the relatively narrow power to remove just their copyrighted content from a website. Even then, there have been numerous mistakes, mishaps, and abuses of that narrow takedown system to censor legitimate speech online. Now imagine the mistakes, mishaps, and abuses we’ll see with COICA’s broader, government-initiated, domain-wide takedowns.”

For more on this and the calamity it will cause — Electronic Frontier Foundation

(UPDATE)
The Chamber of Commerce has even more to say about this horrible piece of legislation.