SOPA/PIPA

 

On January 18th 2012, many of the largest Internet sites in the world either became inactive or had a message of protest about two bills being voted on in congress. Google, Wikipedia and Reddit being some of the largest to join in. It was an unprecedented event of Internet uniformity. The two bills were the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011, also referred to as the PROTECT Inellectual Property Act (PIPA). Both bills represent real threats to the freedom of speech, future innovation and the very nature of global communication system that has defined the turn of the century, the Internet.

Although they were brought up separately in the Senate and House , U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) respectively, the two bills share a lot of the same language that primarily focus on making a distinction between what is a domestic and a foreign site. Their proposed goal is to prevent online piracy of music, movies, TV shows and other copy written content, however the drafting of the bills lack clear definitions, understanding about how the Internet works and doesn’t effectively stop piracy. Instead it creates a system where the government can shut down any website it feels may be engaging or facilitating the infringement of copyrighted content. Every website within the US would be subject to its legislation, and responsible for the inevitable cost of policing it’s users.

The bills approach stopping piracy in a few ways. They attempt to make a distinction between what is a foreign and what is a domestic site. Essentially all they say is if a website has a “domestic domain name” registered within the United States it is a domestic site. Examples of these would websites ending in a top level domain like .com or .org. A foreign site is anything not defined as a domestic site. This is a bad definition because it’s common practice to use foreign domains for American sites like “.me”, used because of it’s appearance of looking like an english word. It is actually the domain used for the the small southern European country Montenegro. On the flip side wikileaks.org which uses a US domain is hosted in Sweden. Such a poorly defined wording would leave it ripe for unknown exploitation.

Another half-hearted attempt at stopping piracy is done through forcing Internet Service Providers to black list websites they feel are infringing on their copyright through the Domain Name System (DNS). The DNS takes human readable names like www.google.com and converts them into an Internet Protocol address (IP) that a computer uses to connect to websites. This can simply be worked around by typing the websites IP address (74.125.224.72 for Google) directly into the address bar. It’s laughable that this is honestly written in the bills as anybody with even mediocre knowledge of the Internet would be able to access websites that offer pirated content.

The legislation also states that plaintiffs can petition the US District Attorney to send a notice or court order to any “domestic” website that engages or “facilitates” copyright infringement. This blanket statement could mean if a sharing website like Facebook, tumblr, Reddit and so on were to have somebody post something the plaintiff feels infringes on their copyright that website would be responsible for the users action. If the cost of policing individual users on Facebook was a single dime, at 500,000,000 users as of the end of 2011 the cost would be incredible. Start-ups with user bases a fifth that of Facebooks would go bankrupted trying to cope with such legislation. Clay Shirky, a teacher and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, said in a TED talk, “You can’t share until you show us you’re not the sharing something we don’t like.” The website is guilty until it proves it’s innocence. In the face of the constitution companies like MPAA and RIAA, who are major supporters of these bills, want to take away the rights that have made this country what it is and what helped make the Internet what it is for the world at large.

The Internet has long been a place of open discussion and sharing. With the convergence of social media into every day life, sharing has really come to the forefront of the Internet and the way it’s used. More and more today people are making their own content for each other, examples of this can be found on 9gag.com and memebase.com, popular meme based websites. Memes have really come into their own over the last couple years. A meme is an idea or concept that spreads from person to person through the internet. A lot of meme’s involve copyright film captures and celebrities. This kind of user created content is exactly the kind of stuff that can be targeted by SOPA/PIPA and similar legislation.

The “entertainment industry” is desperately biding for attention in a world where they see themselves becoming less relevant and less profitable and it really could be their own fault. A recent study done by the University of Minnesota examined bittorrent, a method of pirating, and movie sales and found an interesting correlation. It turns out the only time pirating actually affected movie sales was when movie studios delayed the foreign release of their films. People basically got antsy to see the film and opted to download it instead of playing the movie studios silly box office games. One solution to the revenue lost to pirating would be for movie studios to release their films with a limited window in between foreign and domestic.

People that own copyrighted content should be entitled to the revenue earned from that content. That is why we have copyrights. SOPA/PIPA is not the way to accomplish this. What should happen is Representative Smith and Senator Leahy need to pull themselves out of the mounds of cash paid out to them from lobbyist and go back to the drawing room. They need write in technically viable definitions and get advice from people that work in the technology sector. Why would you even attempt to write such a thing without input from technologically apt people. If they did in fact, they need to hire different ones.

While we wait for our congressman to not be greedy you can do something in the mean time. Call or write your current Congressmen and women with info provided below. At the writing of this, SOPA/PIPA have both been indefinitely shelved, but similar legislation is rushing through. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), A multi-national agreement that shares parallels with SOPA/PIPA has been signed by 31 countries including the United States. It has provisions that would make it possible for border guards and security personnel to possibly search your computers and iPods for pirated content. There is also the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 and the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2012. All these proposed bills represent threats to the freedom of the Internet.

The freedom of speech on the Internet represents much more than, at it’s core, an in-alienable right of a human being. It’s our generations frontier to be made. There have been a lot of events in the course of human history that people have felt were worth fighting for. WWII, Civil Rights and the abolition of slavery [that’s a stretch maybe]. The Internet is relatively young, especially in the sense that we know it today, and even more so for the younger generation of Internet users. There’s still a lot more potential and what the potential holds is something bigger than anyone can imagine today. But none of that will happen if we let government regulation take over the Internet with bills like SOPA/PIPA or their kin. Don’t you want to be able to say that you were there to help protect the rights of future generations of Internet users, or would you rather just tell them about when you used the Internet you had absolute freedom of speech but that’s not the case anymore.