Brewing Anti-Online Piracy Bill in the Philippines

TechLocal.com reports that there is a brewing plan for a bill to combat online piracy in the Philippines. A group is said to be lobbying in congress and the senate to pass a bill similar to SOPA or PIPA.

This move aims to help protect copyright owners from having their content being pirated by others, either as a hobby or for profit.

The most likely materials are movies, music, software, photos and other IP-protected content. Of course, since the record labels and the movie producers are the ones heavily affected by online piracy, they’re the ones who are doing much of the lobbying.

We already have the Business Software Alliance that’s doing the rounds in helping curb software piracy and the OMB (Optical Media Board) raiding shops and stalls selling fake CDs.

This Anti-Online Piracy proposal will bring the fight to the internet along with the coordination of concerned sites and internet service providers. The proposal is just that — still a proposal and could be patterned with the SOPA and PIPA in the US Congress but with some finer adjustments to adapt to local settings.

This might include any or all of the following provisions and penalties:

• Shutting down of local websites illegally distributing pirated software and apps.
• Closing down of local sites that provide downloads of unlicensed songs or movies.
• Blocking off international sites that are known to openly assist in illegally distributing copyrighted materials.
• Imposing penalties on local websites that uses copyrighted materials without proper consent or attribution.
• Imposing penalties on individuals or groups that openly share or distribute copyrighted content.

This could mean the end to a lot of local sites — sites that offer streaming TV shows (telenovelas, news, etc), blogs that offer downloads to cracks and hacks to software, forums that provide avenues for users to share copyrighted content like songs or mobile apps, and many more.

In hindsight, this proposal could also help online publishers and bloggers as well:

• A blogger can now easily have another website or blog shut down for illegally copying articles, photos and videos.
• A blogger can now claim damages against news portals illegally lifting their copyrighted videos and photos. We’ve reported on a number of similar cases where TV networks and online news sites taking content and photos from bloggers without prior consent or compensation.
• Bloggers can report sites that scrape their RSS feeds and have local ISPs block these sites.
• Web designers can run after 3rd parties that copy their designs, logos and artworks and implements it on their own website or sell them to others.

A lot of bloggers have asked me how they can protect their content from being used by others without their consent and my usual advice is for them to enable a number of technical safeguards (prevent hotlinking, watermarking, reporting to Google AdSense, filing DMCA complaints).

Having this proposal enacted into a bill will provide a lot of benefits to bloggers, website owners, independent artists and web designers.

However, and depending on how this proposal is worded, it could also have far-reaching effects on how we use and enjoy the internet. We’ve already seen how MegaUpload was recently shut down by the FBI (and according to news reports, the Philippines helped the FBI in their investigation).