Stop SOPA "Stop Online Piracy Act"
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| Stop SOPA |
What Is SOPA?.
SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy
Act, is another one of those bills that sounds like it's going to do something
mildly positive but, in reality, has serious potential to negatively change the
internet as we know it. It puts power in the hands of the entertainment
industry to censor sites that allegedly "engage in, enable or
facilitate" copyright infringement. This language vague enough to
encompass sites you use every day, like Twitter and Facebook, making SOPA a
serious problem. Here's how it works and what you can do about it.
How Does SOPA Work, and Why
Should We Care?
The idea behind SOPA sounds
reasonable. It came about in order to try to snuff out piracy online, as the
entertainment industry is obviously not excited about the many people
downloading their product without their permission. The issue is, however, that
it doesn't really matter whether you're in support of piracy, against it, or
just don't care. SOPA makes it possible for companies to block the domain names
of web sites that are simple capable of, or seem to encourage copyright
infringement.
This means that if Lifehacker
happened to have an article or two that could be interpreted as
piracy-friendly, our domain could be blocked so it's inaccessible by visiting
lifehacker.com. What the bill can't do is
block numeric IP addresses, so you could still access Lifehacker, or any other
site that could be censored, if you knew that address. This is important
because it means this bill can't do much to stop downloaders of pirated
content. If a domain name is blocked, everything will still work via the
numeric IP address. Basically, the bill will be no good at stopping piracy—what
it was apparently designed to do—but excellent at censoring any web site
capable of providing its users with the means of promoting pirated content or
allowing the process. This includes sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
Tumblr, and many more. If it's possible to post pirated content on the site, or
information that could further online piracy, a claim can be brought against
it. This can be something as minor as you posting a copyrighted image to your
Facebook page, or piracy-friendly information in the comments of a post such as
this one. The vague, sweeping language in this bill is what makes it so
troubling.
In the event of SOPA-based
censorship, any site can submit an appeal so long as they do so within five
days. This isn't a lot of time to handle a legal matter, and if you've ever
dealt with a copyright infringement takedown notice you know how
ineffective an appeal can be. When a threat of legal action is posed, a company
is generally going to prefer to err on the side of caution and remove
infringing content indefinitely. It's far cheaper to run the risk of removing
perfectly legal content than to battle the issue in court. If your web host
censors your site because of a SOPA-based claim, you can expect the same sorts
of problems.
If you want to learn more about
how SOPA works, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) posted a great overview. You can also view the exact contents of SOPA. For a quick overview,
be sure to watch the video at the top of this post.
What Can We Do About SOPA?
Currently Twitter, Google,
Reddit, Kickstarter, Tumblr, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, eBay, Zynga, Facebook, and
several other sites have spoken out in opposition of SOPA.
In the other hand, you should get
the word out. Post this article or any other information about SOPA on your
social media accounts. Send emails to friends and family. If you oppose the
bill, help others to understand why they should oppose it as well.
SOPA is on the fast track, so if
you want to fight it you need to do so today "Stop SOPA".
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