It's A SOPA Opera

Today marked a very interesting new-wave kind of protest, as several popular sites like Wikipedia and Reddit purposely took themselves offline to call attention to the Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA) bill that is before Congress. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, allow me to sum it up: SOPA's intent is to curb people from illegally downloading movie and music from the Internet. On the surface, it sounds pretty good and fairly straightforward. It is not. Since most data-sharing sites are based outside the U.S. what the bill intends to do is block those sites from appearing on search engine. As if that didn't sound shady enough, the problem is that like most things Congress does it is far too reactionary and is very-ambiguously written, leading to all sorts of loopholes which could be taken advantage of by people who are looking to do just that sort of thing. For example, one of the provisions in the bill states that social media sites are responsible for what the people on their sites post and movie and music companies could sue sites like Facebook if people are posting illegal videos and Facebook refuses to edit that person's page. If this bill passes it would essentially allow and encourage censorship of social media. I know taking certain things off peoples' Facebook page sounds like a good idea, but even stupid people have the right to show people how stupid they are.

Also, the bill includes heavier lines such as companies being able to sue any site that even so much as links to copyrighted material. In addition the bill would allow companies to sue any advertisers associated with the site. Since we all know what strong moral standing advertisers usually show in the face of a lawsuit, it would take about four seconds for them to pull advertising from that site. If you can't make any money you can't stay in business, meaning this bill also basically makes it legal for companies to sue each other out of business for just linking to an unauthorized video. Put it to you like this: because I like to post a song every Sunday this blog could be sued if I used a video that was not officially licensed to use from the company that owns the rights. Since I obviously don't have the money to hire a team of lawyers to fight a giant corporation, I would be taken off the internet without much of a fight, all because I just wanted to come up with a gimmick which would allow me to do my weekend posting by Friday. People swear it would only be enforced in extreme cases, but where is the line? It certainly isn't clear in the bill, so what's to stop one company from suing a start-up it sees as competition under false pretenses just to drive them out of business? Answer: the moral compass of studio executives. Awesome. And people wonder why the entire internet thinks everything about this bill kind of sucks.

Some people think that laws like SOPA are necessary. To some degree they are. It is absolutely the right of anyone who creates something to protect that creation from being distorted and also making sure they can make some money off it. It would suck to work really hard to make something you are proud of, only to have people take it from you and pass it out without giving you the proper credit. The thing is we already have anti-piracy laws on the books. They were created so that entertainment companies could go after the major file sharing websites like Napster and Kazaa and sue them out of business. What happened instead is that these same people decided to start going after individuals to make an example out of them, which is how we ended up with 12 year-olds getting sued for millions of dollars and videos of babies playing having to be taken off of YouTube because there was a copy-protected song playing in the background. The point is that if these companies are going to twist laws like that to go after a few individuals there is no telling what they would do if given the opportunity with a bill like SOPA. If they can stop one website from showing up on a search engine, what is going to stop them from blocking hundreds? And keeping information from people is a dangerous and slippery slope, one that the lawmakers in this country should never make easier for people to go down.

Which leads us to today's online protest, designed to show the kinds of websites which could be affected if this bill passed. Other than all the funny posts made up from the Tweets of students complaining about how they are going to unable to do their homework tonight without Wikipedia (the scarier posts were the ones made up of all the teachers who didn't know how they were going to do their lesson plans), I actually think this was a fairly effective protest. It wasn't over-bearing or over-dramatic, it just made its point and will be done within a certain amount of time. That's what makes for a good protest: it makes people aware of an issue it thinks is wrong, but doesn't get in your face about it. It may have inconvenienced some people, but that inconvenience was minor and if those people really needed answers from the internet I'm sure they could be found using another route. And, unlike the Occupy movement, today's actions actually included a clear message as to what the protesters wanted. Most sites replaced their usual content with information about SOPA, why they were against it and contact information for your local Congressperson to voice your opinion if you agreed. If nothing else, it got people talking, which is almost all you could ask for. I for one hope it works.