Remember 2012, when there was that giant Internet backlash against the Stop Online Piracy Act that, amazingly, Congress listened to and hence the content-industry-backed legislation died a loud death?

Well apparently the Motion Picture Association of America didn't get the memo that SOPA failed. SOPA provided for DNS-redirecting of blacklisted sites. It gave the Justice Department the power to seek court orders from search engines like Google not to render search results of infringing websites.

What's more, the failed proposal also would have codified that content owners like the MPAA and Recording Industry Association of America have the legal backing to seek court orders demanding that judges require financial institutions and ad networks to stop doing business with sites that content owners prove are dedicated to infringing activity.

According to Mitch Stoltz, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the MPAA is invoking SOPA-like powers to take down sites dedicated to infringing motion pictures:

...the studios are asking for one court order to bind every domain name registrar, registry, hosting provider, payment processor, caching service, advertising network, social network, and bulletin board—in short, the entire Internet—to block and filter a site called MovieTube. If they succeed, the studios could set a dangerous precedent for quick website blocking with little or no court supervision, and with Internet service and infrastructure companies conscripted as enforcers. That precedent would create a powerful tool of censorship—which we think should be called SOPA power, given its similarity to the ill-fated SOPA bill. It will be abused, which is why it’s important to stop it from being created in the first place.

The MPAA suit against MovieTube and its dozen affiliated sites, demands:

4. Ordering that third parties providing services used in connection with any of the MovieTube Websites and/or domain names for MovieTube Websites, including without limitation, web hosting providers, back-end service providers, digital advertising service providers, search-based online advertising services (such as through paid inclusion, paid search results, sponsored search results, sponsored links, and Internet keyword advertising), domain name registration privacy protection services, providers of social media services (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) and user generated and online content services (e.g., YouTube, Flickr and Tumblr), who receive actual notice of this Order, shall within three (3) days of receipt of this Order, cease providing or disable provision of such services to (i) Defendants in relation to the Infringing Copies; and/or (ii) any and all of the MovieTube Websites. 5. Ordering that in accordance with 15 U.S.C. § 1116(a), 17 U.S.C. § 504(b) and this Court's inherent equitable power to issue provisional remedies ancillary to its authority to provide final equitable relief, Defendants and their officers, servants, employees, agents and any persons in active concert or participation with them, and banks, savings and loan associations, payment processors or other financial institutions, payment providers, third-party processors and advertising service providers (including but not limited to AdCash, Propeller Ads Media, MGID and Matomy Media Group), who receive actual notice of this Preliminary Injunction Order, shall immediately locate and restrain any accounts connected to Defendants' operations or the MovieTube Websites; and shall not allow such funds to be transferred or withdrawn or allow any diminutions to be made by Defendants from such accounts, pending further order of this Court or notification otherwise by Plaintiffs.

Kate Bedingfield, an MPAA spokeswoman, strongly defended the suit in an e-mail to Ars. "The MPAA has filed a civil suit against MovieTube.cc and a ring of affiliated sites whose explicit purpose is to illegally distribute and stream stolen copies of the latest movies and television programs for a profit," she said. "Shutting down sites like MovieTube.cc helps protect the livelihoods of millions of film and TV workers worldwide and ensure the continued growth of a legal and vibrant creative marketplace."

Stoltz said there's a larger issue at hand:

If the court signs this proposed order, the MPAA companies will have the power to force practically every Internet company within the reach of US law to help them disappear the MovieTube websites. Regardless of whether those sites are engaged in copyright infringement or not, this is a scary amount of power to confer on the movie studios. And it looks even worse at scale: if orders like this become the norm, Internet companies large and small will have to build infrastructure resembling the Great Firewall of China in order to comply.

Stoltz added that US judges apparently haven't gotten the SOPA-didn't-pass memo, either:

So far this year, entertainment companies have used these SOPA-like orders to take down a site that promised to stream the recent boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, and another to make Blu-ray ripping software disappear. Another case would have forced the content delivery network CloudFlare to filter its service for any sites that had the word "grooveshark" in their names. CloudFlare and EFF were successful in getting that order modified to take away the filtering requirement.

A hearing has been set for August 18 in New York federal court. The operators of the MovieTube websites have not been located.