The entertainment industry is at it again. They fought against VCRs, MP3s, and MP3 players. Now, with the help of congress, they’re taking the fight to the internet itself. The House introduced a bill, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA), and if passed, will stifle innovation, weaken online security, and potentially wreck the economy.
SOPA and the Senate equivalent, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), will require service providers to screen for copyright infringing activities. If a user of a particular website posts copyrighted material, the entire site can be taken down. Here’s how it works. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), if a copyright holder feels that his or her work has been infringed, the rights owner can send a notice directly to 
payment agencies (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, etc.) and ad networks (such as Google Adsense). Once the notice is received, these companies have 5 days to shut off the website owner’s income. A counter notice can be filed in appeal; however, payment agencies and ad networks are not required to respond. Internet service providers (ISPs) and search engines can also be ordered to block access to sites guilty of copyright violations. To top it off, the proposed law makes streaming copyrighted material a felony. As Cnet reports, this will even apply to music playing in the background of a YouTube video.
The EFF also notes that the criteria that must be met to fall under SOPA/PIPA’s knife is quite vague:
- be directed toward the US, and either
- allegedly “engage in, enable or facilitate” infringement or
- allegedly be taking or have taken steps to “avoid confirming a high probability” of infringement.
And here’s the kicker: This all occurs without due process.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m all for protecting copyrighted work. And there’s a law already in place that does just that, The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In short, the DMCA allows rights holders to notify service providers, such as YouTube, when unauthorized copies of their work shows up on a website. The site responds by taking down the offending post(video, song, etc.). So rather than carpet bombing an entire site, the DMCA can surgically remove a specific violation. The DMCA is not perfect, but it has allowed the internet to grow while protecting copyrighted materials.
If passed, the implications of SOPA/PIPA will be huge:
- Government orders to block “offending” websites amounts to censorship.
- According to Security experts, attempts to block sites could destabilize the entire internet.
- Investments in new online ventures would dry up out of fear that the SOPA and PIPA provisions will crush startup companies. This could stamp out the innovation that brought us Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other popular online services.
- Websites that allow users to share information generate billions of dollars in revenue. SOPA/PIPA could cripple these sites costing jobs and damaging an already unstable economy.
If we follow the money, it leads us to the root of the SOPA/PIPA evil, greed. Movie and TV studios along with record labels want to squeeze as much money out of every song, movie, and TV show as they can get. And if they violate our rights and wreck the internet in the process, so be it. But in order to do that, they need Washington on their side. The entertainment industry spent $94 million on lobbying so far this year. Whereas the tech industry spent only $15 million. And last year, big entertainment contributed almost $19 million to congressional campaigns. The pay off? SOPA and PIPA.
It should come as no surprise that a litany of tech giants, including AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter,
Yahoo!, and Zynga are fighting hard against SOPA/PIPA. Yet SOPA and PIPA are so bad, I doubt they’ll see the light of day, but only if the opposition continues to be loud and clear.
