The Stop Online Piracy Act: Big Content's full-on assault against the Safe Harbor

The latest offensive in the content industry's never-ending war on copyright infringement is the Stop Online Piracy Act, which was introduced in the House two weeks ago.

It incorporates key provisions of the Senate's Protect IP Act as well as another Senate bill that makes unauthorized streaming a felony. But it also includes new provisions that go beyond the language in either of those bills. If passed, it would be the most sweeping overhaul of copyright law in at least a decade. Supporters of the legislation say it's needed to combat "rogue" websites hosted overseas. Such rogue sites deliver infringing content to American consumers while remaining out of reach of American law enforcement. A series of bills, starting with last year's COICA legislation, have tried to shut down these sites by going after intermediaries, including DNS servers, payment processors, search engines, and ad networks.