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.