censoring the web? for now, not so much.
if you’ve stumbled your way over to facebook today (shame on you, by the way. i know you did it in class), i’m sure you were bombarded with status after status about sopa/pipa and you probably feel informed. if there’s one thing i’ve learned about facebook, it’s a whole lot of monkey see-monkey do.
here’s the gist of what’s going on. sopa (stop online piracy act) works something like this:
the beating heart of sopa is the ability of intellectual property owners (read: movie studios and record labels) to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim. if warner bros., for example, says that a site in italy is torrenting a copy of the dark knight, the studio could demand that google remove that site from its search results, that paypal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and—most dangerously—that the site’s isp prevent people from even going there.
sopa in its original construction lets ip owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off. all it required was a single letter claiming a “good faith belief” that the target site has infringed on its content. once google or paypal or whoever received the quarantine notice, they would have five days to either abide or to challenge the claim in court. rights holders still have the power to request that kind of blockade, but in the most recent version of the bill the five day window has softened, and companies now would need the court’s permission.
this is an excerpt from a wonderful description found on gizmodo, a prominent tech website, and i strongly encourage you to read it in its entirety. the article intertwines a strong summary between paragraphs that reads:
sopa is an anti-piracy bill working its way through congress that would grant content creators extraordinary power over the internet which would go almost comedically unchecked, to the point of potentially creating an “internet blacklist” while exacting a huge cost from nearly every site you use daily and potentially disappearing your entire digital life while still managing to be both unnecessary and ineffective, but stands a shockingly good chance of passing unless we do something about it.
there are a few videos out there that also go on to explain how sopa/pipa will affect sites like youtube – the ultimate in user-created content – in such a way that the cute 6-year-old belting out a selena gomez jam in front of a webcam can be sued for copyright infringement. blogs, social networks, the lot of them, are all subject to the worst kind of abuse by the major players promoting this bill (hollywood, the music industry, etc.).
but it looks like, in light of everyone freaking out over not being able to do their research on wikipedia today, people have missed an important bit of news.
a few days ago, the white house released a statement (again, i strongly recommend you read this. it’s very, very important and i will not cover it nearly as extensively as the language found in the statement) that basically says that sopa/pipa, in it’s current form, will not receive the support of the president.
here’s the bottom line – if sopa passes in the house of reps, and it’s counterpart pipa passes in the senate, and their committee irons one consensus copy, it all likelihood obama will veto that sucker when it reaches his desk. vetoes aren’t the end all-be all, of course, but in most cases they are pretty damn ironclad.
extreme edits will have to be made, to both bills, for it to have any chance to see executive approval. in cases like these, regulation seems almost necessary. letting hollywood run wild on the internet, shutting down sites as they see fit, will never end well. the white house was adamant in conceding that piracy is real problem and they are open to taking measures to preventing it as best they can, but sopa/pipa is not the answer.
so for now, we’re safe. we’ll all be able to use wikipedia tomorrow. we’ll be able to post music to our blogs, upload youtube videos, and go ham on twitter. and while i felt like the reaction on social networks to sopa today was overblown, there is one thing for certain – congress has noticed. it’s impossible to deny it, and for that, i’m thankful for status update after status update. all i’m saying is don’t worry about a thing, cause every little thing is gonna be alright.
