Lately you may have heard some buzz around a new
bill in congress. Or you may not have, if you get your news from the main
network providers. But if you don't, and instead stay up to date by roaming the
internet, then there's no doubt that you've heard of it. The ultimate
censorship bill, SOPA
has created quite a stir by effectively promising to create an internet
blacklist and using that to block sites based off copyright terms. But the
funny thing is,
SOPA won't really be all that effective
against piracy. Piracy on the internet will always find a way and the
measures the bill proposes would not be all that effective against it. However,
they would be effective against many large, popular sites that people visit
everyday. Sites like YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Google, and more would be
immediately affected. Why? Because all of these sites would be host to at least
one copyright-infringing document or video or picture. This would be enough
for, if a suit was filed (Which a suit can be started just due to a complaint),
then these sites would be blacklisted. This means basically any social
media-sharing site would be subject to censorship by the
government. While sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and more
may be large enough to put up a decent defense, other smaller sites would not
be so fortunate, and would either be censored, or have to pay substantial legal
fees in order to challenge a suit.
Even large sites would not be totally invincible
from the act. Links anyone would post on any media-sharing site would have to
be processes and then censored if deemed as 'copyright-infringing'. Email
providers would start censoring emails for these infringing links, and would
remove any found. That cute cat video that you were going to send to your
grandma? Too bad sonny, that's technically owned by this one website, so
there's no way granny will ever see it. Ultimately the implications from this
bill are even worse. Ad traffic would be significantly affected, and if any
website was censored in any way, the ad revenue for that website would
immediately drop. Websites would start going offline because they weren't
making profits, and any new startups would think twice before trying to set
themselves up in that kind of atmosphere. That means SOPA would get rid of
potential jobs. Oh my, the all-mighty J-word. And we all thought politicians
loved that.
But one of the things that really bothers me about
this bill is the pure hypocrisy behind it. For years the US has been in support
of those in repressive countries and has aided them in getting around these
regime's controls. In the Arab Spring the US government fully supported
protestors and helped them to bypass these regimes firewalls to get their
message out and voices heard. We even support programs that allow people to
bypass these types of censorship, and one of the most notable causes is in
China. The Great Chinese Firewall, as it is called, has long been the bane of
internet free speech for Chinese citizens, and the US does not support it due
to this fact. So why do so many of our politicians support this bill which
shows remarkable similarities to China's
own internet censorship?
It may be due to the fact that many of these
politicians show an anti-internet bias, which is nothing new. These are old,
white men we're talking about, many of whom see the internet as a place where
people post everything illegally and where it is a lawless pit of despair. No
wonder the bill is the way it is then, as it was written in such a way to be so
legislative-languagey that normal citizens and businesses would have a hard
time understanding all the legalese. To add to this, the bill shows a
disturbing lack of understanding when it comes to the internet, both in its
fundamentals and specifics. The case against SOPA is huge, the bill poorly
written, and the consequences enormous. But the backing of it by those in power
has kept it alive and well. Hopefully this time those in power will be thwarted
before something drastic is achieved.
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