According to Nate Cochrane in The National Times in 2005, and after two years of legal wrangling, Australian Federal Court judge Brian Tamberlin, since retired, handed down a guilty verdict against Stephen Cooper and his ISP Comcen for Cooper's website MP3s4Free.com linking to allegedly infringing music. Tamberlin ruled that merely linking to potentially infringing content was itself illegal, and this rule has informed the decisions of media companies generally when reporting such issues ever since.

The US US House Bill 3261 Stop Online Piracy Bill, or SOPA goes further, as it cracks down on internet piracy and counterfeit goods with what critics say are draconian penalties. It proposes that search engines blackball sites alleged to have infringed on copyright and for internet service providers to bar users from getting access to them. It does this in a way that undercuts a new security standard that thwarts malicious redirects of web traffic, which often go to criminal and phishing sites.

The Bill asserts that this kind of crackdown to combat the theft of U.S. property, will prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Silicon Valley disagrees. The proposed congressional legislation they argue poses a stark, existential threat to the core architecture of the free and open Internet.

Though rampant abuse of intellectual property is indeed flourishing online Hollywood, the music industry and the publishing industry reckon that that their old business models will be rescued by tighter enforcement that ensure the centralization of authority and control and disenfranchisement of consumers. They've gone too far.

In The Atlantic David Sohn and Andrew McDiarmid argue that SOPA's breathtaking scope means that:

To protect themselves, platforms of all kinds would be pressured to actively monitor and police user behavior. This new de facto duty to track and control user behavior would significantly chill innovation in social media and undermine social websites' central role in fostering free expression. It would also set the dangerous international precedent that governments seeking to block online content -- be it infringement, or hate speech, or political dissent -- should look to online communications platforms as points of control.