This all comes as the cyber industry is protesting American legislation proposed that would reign in freedom.

The USA has dissolved it's interest in controlling the domaine names used in address bars to locate websites. This was Newt Gingrich's answer to that decision. So, all this additional stuff going on with Sony will be misinterpreted by American legislators that sometimes believe the internet is a set of pipes. If there is adverse legislation completely inappropriate that results from all this I would expect the cyber industry to sue through the courts to remove the restriction on freedom.

December 18, 2014
KPCC staff
Google spoke out (click here) Thursday against efforts the Motion Picture Association of America, the film industry's lobbying group, was reportedly involved in trying to push an approach to combating piracy that was previously defeated legislatively — and, as part of that, attacking Google. The information about the MPAA, which represents studios including Sony, came out in information released by hackers from the Sony hack.

"We are deeply concerned about recent reports that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) led a secret, coordinated campaign to revive the failed SOPA legislation through other means," Google senior vice president and general counsel Kent Walker wrote in a blog post on Google's Public Policy Blog, "and helped manufacture legal arguments in connection with an investigation by Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood."

The Stop Online Piracy Act, aka SOPA, was a piece of congressional legislation that included provisions that would block websites seen as being involved with piracy. Google, citing statistics from an anti-SOPA nonprofit, notes that 115,000 sites participated in a protest against SOPA and that Congress received more than 8 million phone calls and 4 million emails regarding SOPA.

"One disappointing part of this story is what this all means for the MPAA itself, an organization founded in part 'to promote and defend the First Amendment and artists' right to free expression,'" Walker writes. "Why, then, is it trying to secretly censor the Internet?"