If you haven't heard of SOPA in the past few weeks, you must be living under a hard drive. SOPA has been all the Internet rage as of late. It's been talked about non-stop and for a lot of people, it isn't really clear what it even is.
0So you're probably thinking, how will this whole SOPA and PIPA nonsense affect my everyday web browsing?
If this bill were to be passed, movie studios and record labels would have the ability to tear down foreign websites that infringe on their copyrights. For instance, suppose Warner Brothers learned a site is making their movie Where the Wild Things Are available to be torrented (or illegally downloaded). They could demand that Google remove everything from that website from its search engine, make advertising companies no longer deal with that site, but most importantly, they could have the site made no longer able to be visited.
The SOPA bill would not only target illegal downloading sites like Pirate Bay or uTorrent, it would affect sites like YouTube. In fact, this past week, Megaupload has been removed from the web. It was a site where you could download limited movies, music, TV shows and user-submitted content for free -- or you could buy a membership and have access to its vast selection. Founder Kim Dotcom, CMO Finn Batato, co-founder Mathias Ortmann, programmer Bram van der Kolk, graphic designer Julius Benko, head of business development Sven Echternach and programmer Andrus Nomm have been accused of taking home more than $175 million while causing $1 billion in damages. Megaupload and affiliated sites have hosted prime content like movies, TV, ebooks and software for more than five years.
The timing of the shutdown of this website couldn't have been better. The Megaupload shutdown proves we don't need anti-piracy bills such as SOPA and PIPA.
Essentially, SOPA would create an Internet blacklist.
A document published by Wikipedia said: "The bill's 'vigilante' provision gives broad immunity to any provider who proactively shutters sites it considers to be infringers. Which means the Motion Picture Association of America just needs to publicize one list of infringing sites to get those sites blacklisted from the Internet."
I think the scariest thing about this bill is that it's written so that if they wanted to blacklist YouTube, they could just do it, and they wouldn't even have to have a court date. YouTube could fight back, but at great cost while its business was essentially stopped.
SOPA could also hurt your social-media life. If you created a Facebook status that linked to an illegal download, Facebook would be legally required to remove it from Internet existence. Think about all the fantastic blogs you read, all your favourite people you follow on Twitter, all those Tumblr accounts you follow... They could all be removed just because they posted a piece of content that has infringed on someone's copyright.
Rage and uproar about this bill have been expressed by my many tech and social-media moguls, evidenced by Twitter and Facebook pictures that now have a black bar beneath them that says STOP SOPA. Web entrepreneur Kevin Rose tweeted this: "didn't shower today, avoiding all things SOPA sounding.. #StopSOPA."
So where do I stand on this? I am completely with Rose. The Internet is supposed to be a place of freedom in my opinion -- but not everyone agrees with me. GoDaddy -- the domain and web-hosting company -- announced it was supporting SOPA and quickly an Internet event was organized in which 72,341 people transferred their web domains off GoDaddy onto other competitors. GoDaddy's CEO later that week announced his company is in full opposition to SOPA -- that was quick! Not only have people protested, but large companies like Wikipedia, Boing Boing, WordPress and Twitpic all shut down on Jan. 18 to protest SOPA.
Well, I guess all the social-media protests and all the websites going dark helped, as SOPA has officially been put on hold; but who knows when the next anti-piracy campaign will come a-knocking? But I know when it does, people will be ready. Stay strong Internet, stay strong.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 22, 2012 $sourceSection0
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