Antipiracy legislation that would dramatically increase the government’s legal power to disrupt and shutter websites “dedicated to infringing activities” cleared a major hurdle legislative hurdle Thursday.

Two weeks after being introduced, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced the package to the Senate floor.

The Protect IP Act, (.pdf) introduced by 11 senators of all stripes, would grant the government the authority to bring lawsuits against these websites, and obtain court orders requiring search engines like Google to stop displaying links to them.

The proposal, whose main sponsor is Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), is an offshoot to the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act introduced last year. It was scrapped by its authors in exchange for the Protect IP Act in a bid to win Senate passage.

Under the old COICA draft, the government was authorized to obtain court orders to seize so-called generic top-level domains ending in .com, .org and .net. The new legislation, with the same sponsors, narrows that somewhat.

Instead of allowing for the seizure of domains, it allows the Justice Department to obtain court orders demanding American ISPs stop rendering the DNS for a particular website — meaning the sites would still be accessible outside the United States.

Either way, though, the legislation amounts to the holy grail of intellectual-property enforcement that the recording industry, movie studios and their union and guild workforces have been clamoring for since the George W. Bush administration.

The new bill also gives content owners more rights than the old bill. It would allow rights holders to seek court orders instructing online ad services and credit card companies from partnering with the infringing sites — a power the government is granted in either legislative version.

Only the government gets the DNS blocking powers. And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already grants rights holders the ability to demand search engines to stop displaying search results linking to infringing sites.

Despite the new bill watering down the United States’ reach, the government has been invoking an asset-forfeiture law to seize generic top-level domains of infringing websites under a program called “Operation in Our Sites.” It began last year, and the Department of Homeland Security has targeted 128 sites.

Illustration: richard winchell/Flickr

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