SOPA is the product of years of lobbying by the piracy-hit media, film and music industries and would make it easier for copyright holders and the US government to cut off access to websites accused of containing illegal films, music and TV programming.
Some Internet sites today are providing restricted service in protest to the American legislation known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). If made into law, it would give additional powers to the US law enforcement agencies and copyright holders.
These additional powers could ultimately take down innocent websites who provide information and reference material. More seriously, search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing may be asked to remove information from search results even if there is no proof that piracy is occurring on the destination website. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter may also be affected.
Though this legislation is American, it will affect users in every country, it is global and will have a devastating effect to the Internet. What you and I take for granted today, freedom to research and obtain information from a variety of sources will be crushed for all future generations.
Whether you just read a blog or two or use the web to seek customers for your business, or if you are a student who uses Wikipedia to write essays or a professional to write reports for your company, or if you use social media sites to communicate with your friends and family, or even if you use search engines, like Google, to find things. In short, everything on the internet will be subjected to the restrictive anti-free speech and anti-free information policies of SOPA, whether the sites are hosted in the United States or not.
A worst case scenario is a situation where the US creates a Chinese style firewall in which sites can get blacklisted merely on an accusation.
If you think US law relating to the Internet still doesn’t affect you, you need only look at the case of Richard O’Dwyer, a British Citizen who created a website called TVShack. This website held a comprehensive index of TV Shows, synopsis and reviews along with links to other websites where you could download the shows. It’s important to note that Richard, and his website do not infringe copyright at all. (The website he’s linking to is most likely the copyright infringer).
Richard is being threatened with extradition to the US over the alleged violations of US copyright law even though he is a British Citizen who lives in the UK and everything he did was on servers based in the UK, and those servers did not even host the copy-written material. There shouldn’t even be a case against him, let alone being extradited to US.
Do you think a British Citizen will get a fair trial in America at a time when they’re attempting to enhance their copyright laws? – (No, neither do I).
SOPA is opposed by over 40 internet giants, such as Google, Wikipedia, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, eBay, AOL, LinkedIn, Reddit, PayPal, Tumblr and The Huffington Post to name a few.
This is the most threatening piece of legislation which affects the Internet as we know it today, nothing like this has ever happened before. SOPA will severely inhibit people’s access to online information no matter what country you live in.
SOPA is a piece of badly drafted legislation that cannot stop copyright infringement (copyright infringers will always find a way)! SOPA’s wake will cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. SOPA will put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won’t have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn’t being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won’t show up in major search engines and this is the framework for future restrictions and suppression.
If you’ve read this far, thank you this post is a combination of text from several websites (listed below). If SOPA was already in, the article you have just read would likely illegal. Do you think I should be fined or go to prison for providing this information to you? SOPA will create huge barriers to research information online.
So now you know how SOPA affects the Internet, and how it may affect you. What are you going to do? Browse away or learn more about it?
H.R. 3261 – Stop Online Piracy Act (Full Text Of The Bill)
How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation
20 Ways SOPA Can Affect The Internet
Internet Companies Against SOPA
Internet Giants Act Against SOPA
Related articles
- SOPA Author Attacks Wikipedia, Schedules Debate on Bill (mashable.com)
- WebHostingBuzz to Blackout on January 18th in Protest of SOPA and PIPA (prweb.com)
- Catching up with SOPA (and Hello, IPKat Readers!) (ipkitten.blogspot.com)
- SOPA vs. PIPA: Anti-piracy bills, uproar explained (digitaltrends.com)
- SOPA / PIPA Will Destroy PC Gaming (gametwonk.com)
- Wikipedia 24 hour black out – a protest against SOPA and PIPA (liberatemedia.com)
- Why is there going to be a Wikipedia blackout and what is SOPA? (news.nationalpost.com)
- What is SOPA/PIPA and Why the Web is Going Dark on January 18, 2012 (aisjournal.com)
- Internet censure: the ‘anti-piracy bill’… (persvrijheid.wordpress.com)
- Everything Marketers Need to Know About SOPA (hubspot.com)
