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  3. No mater what, the "content-should-be-free" crowd says, copyright theft robs artists and businesses of their livelihoods. Creati

No mater what, the "content-should-be-free" crowd says, copyright theft robs artists and businesses of their livelihoods. Creati

admin2015-01-31  42
问题     No mater what, the "content-should-be-free" crowd says, copyright theft robs artists and businesses of their livelihoods. Creative industries employ millions of people in the advanced world . The damage may be less than the annual $135 billion that the entertainment and publishing industries claim. These firms could change their business models to reduce the pirates’ profits, especially in countries where an album costs a day’s wages. But mispricing does not justify crime.
    So far, attempts to stop online piracy have largely failed. Lawsuits did shut down file-sharing services such as Napster and Grokster, but others have taken their place— such as Pirate Bay and the new "cyberlockers".
    Congress is now considering the Stop Online Piracy Act(SOPA)which would let copyright-holders take action against the intermediaries—such as payment services, search engines, and internet service providers(ISPs)—that supply money and traffic to pirate sites. If the intermediaries do not cut these sites off, they will face lawsuits.
    In principle, the move is a good one. Content companies need more effective legal methods against piracy. And the thrust of the bill is sensible. Search engines direct users to pirated content and make money from the ads that appear next to the search results. The threat of lawsuits might encourage them to do much more to ensure that a search only brings up legitimate online music services. And putting the burden of enforcement on the private sector has advantages: the victimized party will have a better idea than the state whether a copyright infringement is worth pursuing.
    But the bill has problems too. The loose definition of infringement in SOPA could include sites that unwittingly carry comments linking to pirated material. It could discourage people from setting up new sites allowing users to post things. Large firms can cope with the extra bother, but the fear of lawsuits could stifle smaller companies and start-ups.
    A second big defect is that SOPA obliges ISPs to put filters in place to prevent their customers reaching pirate websites easily. That risks damaging the internet’s vital internal addressing system, which lets people use words instead of numbers to access websites. And the bill’ s vague wording leaves open the possibility that American ISPs might have to set up more intrusive forms of filtering, with the costs, performance problems and privacy issues that would inevitably cause.
    Yet SOPA’s flaws are not, as its opponents claim, fatal. The bill should be improved and tightened—by defining more narrowly the kinds of websites that intermediaries can be asked to block—to ensure that it makes life harder for pirates without damaging the internet or imposing unreasonable costs on the law-abiding.
What’ s the topic of the passage?
选项 A、The spread of illegal websites.
B、Online piracy.
C、Content-should-be-free.
D、Stop Online Piracy Act.
答案D
解析 主旨题。本文主要围绕《制止网络盗版法案》的缘由，其利弊之处，以及如何改善它展开的，所以主题就是这个法案。因此，正确答案是D。
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