Twitter, Facebook, Google endorse alternate online piracy bill

Eight of the largest Web companies have endorsed an online piracy bill offered by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) as an alternative to the unpopular Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart, Protect IP.

The OPEN Act would direct online patent infringement claims against foreign websites to the International Trade Commission (ITC), which would be authorized to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties with the rogue foreign sites.

That approach drew praise from the Web firms, many of which oppose the provisions in SOPA that would require search engines and other sites to delete links to sites deemed to be "dedicated" to copyright infringement. The online community argues such a requirement would result in censorship online.

"[The OPEN Act's] approach targets foreign rogue sites without inflicting collateral damage on legitimate, law-abiding U.S. Internet companies by bringing well-established international trade remedies to bear on this problem," wrote AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga in a letter to Issa and Wyden last month.

The OPEN Act has attracted strong support from Silicon Valley, but criticism from the entertainment industry, which claims it wouldn't effectively prevent piracy. The content industries have argued the ITC moves too slowly and its rulings often favor tech companies over content providers.

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