SOPA/PIPA Explained: Why You Should Care
Also See: 3 Unintended Consequences of SOPA/PIPA
The current SOPA/PIPA legislation slithering through Congress is probably one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation we’ve seen in recent history. Both bills threaten free speech in America and can ruin the internet as we know it.
SOPA/PIPA will also be job killers. A lot of the commerce, innovation and business revolves around the internet. If SOPA/PIPA is passed, it will become all but impossible for this growth to continue. In fact, many prominent venture capitalists have said they will stop investing in online start-ups if this legislation passes.
SOPA Basics
For those of you not very familiar with SOPA/PIPA, here’s a quick rundown. The law will give content producers, like movie production studios, music studios, newspapers, magazines and the like, the power to have any website taken down if they think the site is “pirating” their work.
For example, Youtube relies on user-generated content. If one user posts something like a movie clip, Youtube could be in violation of SOPA. The worst part is that Youtube could be taken down without any sort of due process.
Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? Not quite. As it stands now, websites with user-generated content are not responsible for what users post. Here’s a good explanation from a Huffington Post article:
Under the current law, if you leave a comment that contains the entire Harry Potter saga, you and you alone are responsible for infringing on that copyright… you also have too much time on your hands. As it stands, Huffington Post would have to remove the comment if the copyright holder contacts them, but it is not their fault that you posted the copyrighted work to their website. This is known as the Safe Harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
And here’s a very easy way to understand how this works:
It’s the equivalent of saying you aren’t personally responsible for murder if a random person kills someone on your property.
With SOPA, the website is responsible for any user-generated content that might be considered copyright infringement. This is where it gets a little tricky. Once again, the Huffington Post article does a good job explaining:
What these Acts will do is make websites liable for any content that appears on them. The bills will create a way to cut the link between the name of the website, like HuffingtonPost.com to the place where the website actually lives — a web server with a seemingly non-connected numerical identity. The server will still exist and contain the website, but typing in the human friendly ‘.com’ name will no longer connect it to the IP address. Don’t fret though, it only took the online community a couple microseconds to create a Firefox plugin that ignores that problem. The end result? Pirates will go on their merry way and never look back, but legitimate websites will be stuck with the consequences.
The bigger problem is that, in theory, a company could take down a competing website by claiming copyright infringement. And the accused website would have little recourse. Even scarier is that websites could be taken down because someone doesn’t like the site’s political leanings. This is why this legislation is a free speech killer.
Isn’t SOPA Dying A Slow Death?
Over the weekend President Obama stated that he does not support SOPA/PIPA in their current form. He has vowed to veto them if they cross his desk. Rep. Lamar Smith, the brains behind SOPA, says he’ll remove the DNS blocking language from the bill. Some are claiming that SOPA is effectively dead. Don’t start celebrating yet.
President Obama also threatened to veto the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) because it allows the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely without due process. Then he the legislation and issued a signing statement saying, “I don’t like this law but will sign it anyway because I don’t have a backbone.”
While the tide is turning against SOPA, with it being temporarily shelved in the House, it’s not dead yet. It can be brought back up at anytime. Further, the Senate version of the bill, PIPA, is still alive and well. This is why the free-speech loving public needs to continue this strong campaign against these two bills. We don’t either bill to be changed or revised, we want both bills dead and in the grave.
I don’t want to get too political here, because that’s not the point of this blog. I write about technology, eReaders, ebooks and so forth, not politics. However, I think much of Congress is so out of touch with mainstream America they might as well live on another planet.
And many in Congress aren’t that internet saavy. Take SOPA author Lamar Smith, for example. He has a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet and piracy. The guy is also a Christian Scientist, the nuttier brand of Christianity that doesn’t believe in using the wonders of modern medicine to fight off diseases – even basic ones, like the flu. If he doesn’t understand the basics of medicine, why would we expect him to understand the internet?
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[...] recently gave a quick overview of SOPA and PIPA, the two bills in the House and Senate, respectively. The legislation can kill the internet as we [...]