Please take a few minutes of your day and visit this site: the COICA Fact Sheet on DemandProgress.com. The S. 3804 — “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) Bill” — was, I’m ashamed to say, introduced by Vermont’s Sen. Patrick Leahy, along with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). It’s currently being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee:

The bill creates a blacklists of Internet domain names which the Attorney General can add to with a court order. Internet service providers, financial transaction providers, and online ad vendors (everyone from Comcast to PayPal to Google AdSense) would be required to block any domains on the list…

Sites like YouTube could get censored in the US. Copyright holders like Viacom argue that copyrighted material is central to activity of YouTube. But under current US law, YouTube is perfectly legal as long as they take down copyrighted material when they’re informed about it — which is why Viacom lost their case in court. If this bill passes, Viacom doesn’t even need to prove YouTube is doing anything illegal — as long as they can persuade a court that enough other people are using it for copyright infringement, that’s enough to get the whole site censored.

The broad terms of the bill are vague; the power that the bill puts in the hands of the attorney general (as well as the corporations who choose to take advantage of a bill that bases guilt on finger-pointing) sidesteps due process and innocence until guilt is proven.

Please read this page. Sign the petition. And donate a few bucks to fight this thing.