Ok, I know I am a little late to the game with this piece, but I feel this needs to be said therefor I am saying it. The subjects I am going to talk about are the now infamous SOPA and PIPA bills that have yet to be presented in Congress. Luckily SOPA has been set on the back burner for now while congress tries to figure out a way to change the language so that it is not as intrusive as it is in its current form. At least that is the story that is being fed to us. I believe that Congress is just waiting for our short term memories to forget about SOPA so that they can try to pass it again under a different name. PIPA is still up for a vote soon unless something drastic happens. Hopefully, the internet wide protests that occurred when SOPA was about to be brought up will have had an impact on PIPA, if not, then maybe we will have another protest only wider spread. Ok, I guess since not everyone out there keeps up with current events, I need to start out by telling you all what SOPA and PIPA are.
I will start with SOPA, which stands for “Stop Online Piracy Act”. Of the two bills, SOPA is the more extreme in its language and potential execution. It intended to help fight copy right infringement on foreign websites. One of the tools SOPA provided allowed the U.S. Department of Justice could seek court orders requiring Internet service providers such as AOL, Comcast and Charter to block the domain names of “infringing sites”. For example, Comcast could prevent its customers from accessing megaupload.com. Luckily, this was one of the parts of SOPA that was dropped due to the opposition as well as the impracticality of actually enforcing it. The other tool would allow rights holders to seek court orders requiring payment providers, advertisers and search engines to stop doing business with an “infringing site”. Because of this, the rights holders would also be able to request for funding to be cut off from an “infringing site”, and that all search links leading to the offending site be required to be removed. Then site in question would have five days to appeal any action taken against them. Also, SOPA defines an “infringing site" as any site that is "committing or facilitating" copyright infringement, this blankets both domestic and foreign sites.
Now on to the subject of PIPA. PIPA stands for “Protect Intellectual Properties Act”. For the most part, PIPA is almost identical to SOPA with the main difference being the language. As I said before SOPA is the more extreme of the two. Whereas SOPA is very broad in its reach when it comes to a site that is committing or facilitating" copyright infringement, PIPA only target sites that have “no other significant use other than copyright infringement”. What this mean is, if any website has any purpose other than providing copyrighted material it should be safe from the ramifications of the bill, though a site will still have to prove that it is for other uses other than pirating. Sites that fileshare such as Rapidshare should, in theory, be safe from prosecution because they remove copyrighted material as soon as the owner of copyright requests it, while sites like Megaupload and PirateBay would be targeted due to their attempts to obstruct any attempts to force the removal of copyrighted material.
Speaking of Megaupload… want to see something that should terrify you? Go to megaupload.com and then come back here, I’ll wait… See? That is terrifying. Why? Because, Megaupload is based out of Hong Kong and the owner of the site was arrested from his home in New Zealand when the FBI had the site brought down. Yeah, anyway, Megaupload is supposedly NOT a victim of the fallout from upset bureaucrats over the dismissal of SOPA, yet I find the timing very suspicious. But I digress.
Now that I have given you some info on SOPA and PIPA I am going to tell you about my opinion of these two bills. SOPA and PIPA both are good in their intentions, they are. The main problem with them comes in the language that is used in the bills. I am all for protecting an individual’s intellectual properties, I am, but this hits a little close to home with me in the aspect of writing, therefor I am going to approach this from that viewpoint. After all, if someone stole the novel I wrote and distributed it without my permission and I, then, was unable take make any money off of it due to that, I would be upset. I know some people think that authors that get published make tons of money on their books, but unless an author is extremely prolific or well sold, such as Stephen King, they are not going to make a lot of money off of their writing (unless they are very lucky). When someone takes their book and uploads it to a site so that it can be distributed illegally that cuts into the sales of the book which cuts into the profits of the publisher and the royalties of the writer. Lack of sales creates lack of prints which then, if taken to its ultimate end, creates lack of work for the author. There are some companies that have found a way to profit from allowing books to be downloaded free of charge on select titles (Baen is one of them) but once again I digress.
SOPA and PIPA, like I said before are written with good intentions but they take the anti-piracy laws that we currently have and hype them up on steroids creating monstrous blanket laws that will infringe upon everyone’s life negatively in some way. I don’t care who you are, once these laws go into effect no one will be safe from them, and if taken to the extreme that everyone is afraid they will be taken to, even the owners of the properties that these laws are meant to protects will be harmed by them. Imagine an internet without ANY copyrighted material on it. That is the most extreme that these laws could potentially be taken too. I doubt they would go that far but dumber things have happened, after all look at who we currently have as President.
A realistic example of what is most likely to come out of either of these laws being passed is something along these lines… If you like to read or write fan fiction (fan stories based on intellectual properties such as popular books, games and TV series), you would no longer be allowed to write and distribute your stories nor could you receive and read the stories of others. Sites like YouTube and Deviant Art would have over 90% of their content stripped from them if there were not shut down. You could no longer read movie or book reviews online because they are based off of intellectual properties. Keep in mind, this is a realistic scenario. Sites that offer services like Netflix could be shut down at the whim of someone who thinks that they are not getting paid enough for the rights to be displayed by those services. The internet as we know it would go away.
SOPA and PIPA don’t need to just have the language changed; they need to be completely retooled in order to help strengthen our current anti-piracy laws instead of trying to override them with blanket laws that are so vaguely worded that they can be interpreted however anyone wants to interpret them to suit their desires. As it is, the laws we currently have are not effective, but I would take what we have over having our freedoms online striped from us almost completely. When we go down the path that SOPA and PIPA inadvertently will place us on, we will be brought that much closer to a communistic society.
Here in America we should realize the value of freedom and work to defend that freedom. For too long we have let the politician that sit in Washington slowly strip us from our natural born freedoms while telling us that it is for our own good. Hell, we currently have 32% of the population of this country who are happy with a President that has effectively said he wants to be our Dictator and will do what is necessary to become said Dictator (more on that in my next post where I tear apart Obama’s State of the Union speech.) if re-elected. We need to stand up and tell Washington DC “NO MORE!” and then start pushing for a real change that preserves and restores our freedom to where it should be.
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