SOPA – Whose Side Are You On?
Recently various high-profile sites, most notably Wikipedia, made very public protests in reaction to the Stop Online Piracy Act – A bill put before the US House of Representatives whereby if enacted (in its present form) the legislation would significantly expand the powers of law enforcement in fighting trafficking in copyrighted and counterfeited goods. The bill proved controversial.
Why the big uproar? You may ask. After all there is a real problem with online piracy. There are many sites and services that for ideological reasons are contemptuous of copyright and other forms of intellectual property which, according to the U.S Chamber of Commerce, one of the most largest supporters of SOPA - “attract more than 53 billion visits a year and threaten more than 19 million American jobs”.
Other supporters include the Motion Picture Association of America and it’s easy to see why – tackling piracy is not easy as one of the defining properties of digital technology is that it’s easy to reproduce and distribute whilst retaining perfect quality.
With broadband, servers and operating systems getting faster and faster we are able to download films and music, for instance, in a fraction of the time it takes to hit the shops and buy them, also at a fraction of the cost.
However, corporations already have the power to take down specific content, such as copyrighted material on youtube and sue peer-to-peer software companies (remember what happened to Napster?) - This is where the trouble begins.
The Internet is one of the worlds most robust and growing industries, it enables free and open communication among billions and has been the backbone for the latest protests and media coverage around the world. SOPA and Protect IP (SOPA’s senate cousin) will broaden the power private corporations have over the Internet. With the new acts in place they be able to shut down or block national and international sites that they consider to be infringing on copyrighted material. Inside of the states, they will be able to block access to directories, forums and cut off funds to sites even containing just a link to infringing sites.
Much of the controversy is due to the potential collateral damage – they would permit US law enforcement agencies to block websites at the “domain” level rather than the level of the allegedly infringing site. In that way, SOPA would interfere with the domain name system (DNS), which is at the core of the Internet.
If DNS is barred from providing the address of a particular site, the site effectively becomes invisible. As most sites are cited under umbrella domains, such as blogger.com with thousands of individual blogs, one contravention and their entire blogging network could disappear. This spells trouble for link builders and also potentially means that the whole idea of freedom of speech is at risk, which is why some opponents, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn believe the bill contravenes the US constitution.
The broad coalition of industry, activist, engineering and lobbying groups in opposition has seemed to knock US legislators for six – questions are being asked about where they could go from there, if SOPA was passed then what’s next? If illegally sharing a file could land you five years in prison then how many years until tighter restrictions on content, including photo sharing, opinion – which at times could be deemed as slander, and simple online discussion.
Over 75,000 sites went dark for 24 hours, Google blacked out its logo, even Mark Zuckerberg tweeted about it (his first for over 3 years). As a result over 15 million signatures against the new legislation had been gathered. Wikipedia announced that over 162 million people viewed their message about “...a world without free knowledge...”. As a result The White House recently issued a statement on the bills, announcing it would oppose SOPA.
On Friday, the Senate and House of Representatives shelved votes on bills to enable a rethink.
The Internet’s power to generate a protest has apparently overcome exactly what threatens to devalue this very asset. One thing’s for certain, The States’ major corporations will not stop their war on piracy. We have not heard the last of bills such as SOPA, PIPA or Protect IP, they will return with more expert ways of dealing with infringing sites, variations on legislations, reasoning and of course... acronyms
To be continued...
Joe Burford
SEO Consultant
