Why Should South Africa be so scared and up in arms about SOPA which is based in America? Is it going to Affect us too?
Sopa takes a guilty until proven otherwise approach. Sopa wants to allow an "intellectual property owner" to do two things:
1. Take your DNS, i.e. change your registrar's record of who your authoritative DNS is and change it, effectively removing your presence from the internet.
2. Tell payment companies (VISA, MasterCard, AmEx, Paypal, etc) to stop payments to you.
Now, let's say you run an on-line fashion shop. You sell the finest brands - the real deal. Let's say you have it a .com registered with a provider Key-systems (the registrar who's been keeping the piratebay's domain out of the authorities' hands). You host with IS or MWEB. Let's say you take payment from all the major card providers, PayPal, and Google Checkout. Let's say, like Amazon, you allow your users to comment on and/or review the products you sell. You're cautious about spam, so you only allow people who have actually purchased the product to comment.
So one day, a spammer comes along, signs up to your site, buys a Louis Vuitton bag. Then a few days later, said spammer writes a review which basically consists of a link to his site which sells counterfit Luis Vuitton bags. And as it is your unlucky day, an eagle-eyed LV employee sees it.
In today's world, the legal route for LV is to send you a DCMA takedown notice. This means they request that you take that link off your site. If you were based in the US, you would be obliged to, but since you're based in S.A., you can tell them to get lost. They can then up the stakes and complain to your payment provider or hosting company, who undoubtedly have a acceptable usage policy that says you shouldn't link to sites facilitating illegal activity. One of these two will then tell you to remove it or face suspension of their services.
So the long and short of it is, you'll be notified first.
But if PIPA and SOPA pass, it will play out this way:
One day you fill find that you're not getting any orders. Or any e-mail to your company address. You'll point your browser to the admin/back-end area of your website to see what's up, and instead you'll see some US CIA/FBI/ICE page telling you that this site has been suspended for facilitating criminal behaviour of some variety. What will actually have happened is the following:
1. Your domain is now registered to Godaddy, not to you.
2. Godaddy is now the owner of your domain, not you.
3. Your NS records now point to Godaddy instead of your hosting provider.
4. You don't have MX records any more, so you're not getting business mail.
5. Your payment providers have suspended your accounts. Not because they wanted to, but because they're forced to by US law (and they're all US based).
So in effected, your business just evaporated. It doesn't exist anymore. Even if you also had a .co.za domain which brings you some traffic, you still can't take payment, because all the credit card providers are American companies.
The above scenario has already happened to domains that were mis-identified as infringing. In one case, it took two years to get their domain back. In another case, it was a site allowing bands to distribute songs for download (all legitimate). RIAA had their domain ceased, alleging that one of the songs available for download infringed on their copy right. Turns out, it was the record company itself who had sent them the song and given them permission to use it. This site took several months to get back on on-line.
The difference to how things are now is, you can avoid having your domain ceased, and even if it happens, you have recourse, however slow. With SOPA and PIPA, you won't have recourse.
It looks like they're getting canned though, thanks to all the outrage. But they'll come along with something new, sooner or later.
Does GoDaddy Allow you to close down your domain and refund you money??
You can migrate your domains (I did all mine) but you don't get your money back. Make sure you remove your credit cards from their system. If you have pay pal set up, go to your paypal account and remove the godaddy entries. They *will* bill you again, even if you let things expire.
