The US Government, which was founded on the basis of a constitution, is about to give more of the powers that its revolutionaries claimed they fought for to Hollywood. In a bid to prop up Big Content's flagging business model, the government is about to bring in the Protect IP Act.

This will give  copyright holders and the authorities the power to disable access to so-called rogue sites. Coppers can seize domains, block ISPs, enforce, search engine censorship, and cutting funding of sites that the movie and film business claim is infringing websites. In short it is the sort of censorship that not even China has and it is tossing out all its Consitutional freedoms in the name of the Movie and Music trade.

We have seen the signs for a while now. The US government has seized more than 100 domain names it claimed were promoting copyright infringement.

But the Protect IP Act will give total control to the Movie and Music Industry to quash websites they claim are facilitating copyright infringement.  Rather than the movie and film industry having to deal with a registrant or owner of a domain name that accesses a foreign Internet site, or the foreign-registered domain name it will be the cops that will do it for them. If a domain is not registered or controlled by a US company, the authorities can also order search engines to remove the website from its search results, order ISPs to block the website, and order ad-networks and payment processors to stop providing services to the website in question.

As the law stands Big Content will just have to obtain a court order to prevent payment providers and ad-networks from doing business with sites that allegedly facilitate copyright infringement. However if they want to block sites it is probably better that they get the police too do it for them.