SOPA protests, Other Disturbing Copyright-related Legislation

In our last class we talked a bit about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and its possible effects. Tomorrow, in fact, Google and Wikipedia will both be taking actions to protest the proposed legislation (see here and here). Google will be putting up an anti-SOPA announcement tomorrow on its search page. Meanwhile, as everyone on the planet now knows, on Wednesday, Wikipedia, Reddit and other popular sites will be staging a one-day blackout to draw attention to SOPA and the threat it poses to the web-as-we-know-it. It has become a major national and international news story.

Yet despite this groundswell of opposition, it turns out that Congress is considering even more ill-conceived copyright-related legislation : an act would make it illegal for Federal agencies to require free access to research and publications funded with taxpayer dollars. In essence, if passed, the law would force the public to pay TWICE for, say, the latest cancer study: first, they'd pay for the research (through an NIH or CDC grant) and then they'd be forced to pay to read about the research in a privately owned medical journal. Sigh.