Russia recently passed a new anti-piracy bill set to come into force on the first of August 2013. Under the new legislation, copyright holders will be allowed to ask courts to block access to websites which hyperlink to material which is allegedly pirated. This is very similar to the whole SOPA/PIPA fiasco which happened in early 2012.
For those of you who don’t know, hyperlinking is a method used by most websites when referencing a source. It directs the reader of a website to another website if they click the text. The potential issue here is that websites which have legitimate function, like Wikipedia, may be taken down by the Russian courts for alleged piracy.
I’m somewhat unclear whether the new provision under this bill applies to direct hyperlinks to pirated material or hyperlinks to websites which may contain pirated material. The difference is that the latter is a much wider scope; an author of one website might not necessarily know that the other website he is linking to has some pirated material.
Regardless of what the provision means, this whole thing is ludacris. Hyperlinking is so commonplace on the internet now that taking down or even considering taking down websites which link to pirated material is simply inane. What are search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo supposed to do? When you search something on a search engine all the results hyperlink to websites. Are they expected to go through nearly every website on the internet to make sure that none of the websites they link to have pirated material? What if somebody sends a link to pirated material through their Facebook account? Is Facebook expected to monitor what their one billion users are linking to on a daily basis?
Its worth pointing out that there is also the slight concern that the Russian government and judiciary may use copyright and this bill as a means of censoring websites (this was the big fear with SOPA/PIPA).
Source: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/russian-wikipedia-faces-ban-due-to-anti-piracy-law-director-says/482960.html
