Stop SOPA now
This banner was posted by the US government after a lawsuit involving megaupload.com, which was recently shut down due to allegations of money laundering among other illegal acts. If SOPA passes, this banner might become an all too common sight.
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Justin Perry, Photo Editor
February 8, 2012
Filed under Commentary, Top Stories
Right on the heels of the Occupy Everything movement, the internet community is spinning a new web to put an end to the SOPA act.
House bill H.R.3261, The Stop Online Piracy Act (affectionately nicknamed “SOPA”), attempts to add one more hit to the mounting blows against our American freedoms.
SOPA is a bill designed to protect the rights of major copyright owners by putting an end to the sharing of intellectual property online. In short, the bill will allow corporations to ask the government to shut down and blacklist websites which knowingly host, or link to, pirated or streamed movies, songs and other media. While the act is designed to only target web sites overseas, it would indirectly include everyone’s favorite sites such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, eBay, WordPress, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. If this law passes, it has the potential to effectively destroy the free flow of content on the internet forever.
I must admit that at first I thought that the protestors were only spreading hype. After all, isn’t it the right of the copyright owners to fight to protect their property? As a digital artist myself, I’m totally aware of the need to watermark and protect my images, and will sue to the full extent to do so. However, that’s the problem: companies already have to means to protect themselves; the power to police the internet is a power no government should have.
It is the corporations’ right and duty to attack sites, such as youtube, which host stolen content, but not the governments’ right to shut Youtube down. That is called censorship; the government is indirectly censoring all the legitimate content that law abiding citizens have uploaded. Not to mention that if site owners are scared of the possibility they could be shut down, the amount of self censorship will increase. The Internet is designed as the ultimate medium for free speech, not a platform that should be accompanied with fear.
For example, imagine that a student creates a Tumblr or WordPress blog, and posts a link to a copyrighted song. Or perhaps they actually upload that song to their blog. Under SOPA, the record label could not only ask the government to remove that blog, they could also ask that Tumblr itself be blocked in America. Oops. Or suppose that Adobe or Disney chooses to actually attack websites such as the Pirate Bay, which everyone knows hosts stolen content. Not only would I lose access to all my stolen programs, I also lose access to a very good way to back up my legitimate files.
Or what about Microsoft, who allows users to upload and share documents? One complaint by say, Sony, and there goes not only my email provider, but many students wouldn’t be able to share files for school.
Major websites such as Yahoo and Facebook are already protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which says they alone have to power to remove content that users post if they think it is stolen. youtube does it all the time, and they have a very good method for finding illegal content and removing it. That’s called trust, between the corporations, the government and the web user. It has worked so far, but if SOPA passes, the question will not be whether the media corporations can trust us, but whether we can trust our government.
By the way, don’t believe we are safe just because SOPA has been “suspended” as some like to call it. Obama has promised to veto any piracy bill which is too vauge. I personally think that that promise is a little too vague.
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