ReadWriteEnterprise

In September 2010, the U.S. Senate debated the latest draft of a bill for combatting online piracy. You may think you've heard of this bill, but there's a good chance you haven't. It was called COICA. It had a provision that seemed strange, as though it belonged to another era.

It called for the creation of some type of site or service that would publish a list of Web sites suspected of trafficking in illicit or counterfeit intellectual property. The hope was that someone might write a plug-in or a browser patch that would act the same way anti-porn filters work, by denying users access. The concept was denounced as a kind of blacklist.

We do this dance at least twice a year now, and we're starting to get the steps so well memorized that once we hear the familiar tune, we start stepping to the beat without a moment's thought. It's the Anti-piracy Shuffle, and one defining element of its choreography is that we always end up right where we started.

Here's how it goes: You can't run an Internet server that trafficks in illicit content to American clients, from American soil, without violating American law. Makes sense. The magic of the Internet lets someone in America run a server in another country, whose domain may be registered in yet another country, that sends illicit content to American downloaders. It's impossible to prosecute one downloader without prosecuting all of them, otherwise you run into the selective prosecution defense.