SOPA

What is SOPA and why are so many people against it? To get to the bottom of this we must first have a basic understanding of the proposed bill. SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act. It essentially gives content creators (e.g. Warner Bros.) supreme power over the internet. It is designed for these content creators to be able to “block” websites that offer pirated content. This is where the term “internet censorship” became associated with SOPA. I am strongly opposed to the SOPA bill as it will grant extraordinary power that is undoubtedly to be abused.

Now that we know what SOPA is, let’s review the process in which a website gets “blocked”. If SOPA is passed, it will grant content creators the power to effectively remove sites from Google searches, PayPal payments, etc. that they believe have infringed upon their copyright agreements. The thing that is astonishing is that in its current draft, SOPA does not require any court appearances or judicial sign-offs for content creators to obtain before they are able to “pull” sites from the internet. Congress is relying on a “good faith belief” that content creators will not abuse SOPA.

Large internet companies (AOL, EBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga) have written a letter to congress expressing their concerns about SOPA. Under SOPA these companies would be forced to monitor what users upload and link to, to make sure it does not contain copyrighted material. Facebook alone has 800 million active users which would be an astronomically impossible task to monitor each and every upload and link posted. If they didn’t abide by this, you know the drill, content creators make a claim against Facebook and it would be “blocked”.

The overwhelmingly infuriating part of SOPA is this simple fact: it won’t work. All a site must do after being “blocked” is simply change their URL and poof, they are back to providing the same copyrighted material, only under a different name. On the other hand, it will cause huge penalties for the websites listed above because of things they simply cannot control.

Today, January 18, 2012, we received a taste of what it would be like for one of these major sites to have been “censored”. All day today Wikipedia went black. If you traveled to the website, it would not let you access it vast collection of encyclopedic entries. Personally I use Wikipedia daily, and even though it was only shut down this one day, it proved to me that we cannot let internet censorship block our most frequented websites.

Although the purpose of SOPA is not to block these mainstream websites, but in reality it is an inevitable side effect of the increased pressure placed on piracy websites under SOPA. Also do not get me wrong, I am fully against online piracy, but SOPA is not the way to combat it. SOPA grants too much power to content creators in a way that will essentially censor the internet. It is for this reason that I take up a strong position opposing SOPA and the imbalance of power it grants to content creators.

"More about SOPA and PIPA – End Piracy, Not Liberty – Google." Google. Web. 18 Jan. 2012. https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/sopa-pipa/.

Barrett, Brian. "What Is SOPA?" Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide. Web. 18 Jan. 2012. http://gizmodo.com/5877000/what-is-sopa.