Ireland may enact a SOPA-like law without much debate.
The Stop Online Piracy Act in America may be “dead” for now, but the United States isn’t the only country that wants to fiddle with the internet.
Net heads in Ireland are revolting against a proposal from Sean Sherlock, Minister for Enterprise, Jobs and Innovation in Ireland. His proposed law would curtail access to websites in Ireland by forcing ISPs to block sites that are reported to link to infringing content, according to StopSOPAIreland.com.
According to the site, Sherlock plans to enact the law by ministerial order rather than sending it to Oireachtas, which is basically Ireland’s version of Congress. It would be like the Obama administration making an executive order to implement SOPA without letting Congress have a say.
Officially, the law is “S.I. No. of 2011 European Communities (Copyright and Related Rights) Regulations 2011”.
Much like SOPA, site owners would be considered guilty until proven innocent — and that wouldn’t be easy:
Site owners faced with one of Minister Sherlock’s injunctions will have no legal recourse without a €30,000+ legal warchest. The new law mandates no warning process, no mediation and no appeals process outside the High Court. Smaller sites including individual blogs, podcasts and independent news sources who don’t have the money to mount the costly legal campaign needed to defend themselves will automatically lose out to corporate interests with deep pockets.
StopSOPAIreland.com has over 300 petition signatures less than one hour after being online.
Among the people raising awareness is Michele Neylon of Blacknight Internet Solutions.
jp says
So if somebody complains could they shut down a US .com website under the Irish law?
Andrew Allemann says
@ jp – no, they’d just force the ISPs operating in Ireland to block access to it.
Nissl says
Almost 3000 signatures now. Today Sean Sherlock (@seansherlocktd) has said on Twitter that blocking will not be involved and he will write a piece explaining the action. Let’s hold him to it.
Russ says
Afilias is headquartered in Dublin, so presumably we could see US Customs-style take downs of domanis in .info and their other tlds