The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) are two bills that have the potential to change the internet as we know it. SOPA (introduced in the House of Representatives), and PIPA (a Senate Bill) have caused an uproar on the net this past month with internet giants such as Google, Ebay, and Wikipedia leading the protests, with action from sending written testimony to the House and Senate, to going to the extreme of staging a “black out” their websites. Both bills claim to give copyright holders the power to put a lid on foreign websites that are engaging in “infringing behaviors.” How? By requiring DNS blocking, forcing search engines to disable any hyperlinks, and enforce legal action against advertisers and any third party businesses supporting the offending site. This extreme bill was proposed as a follow up to the current anti-piracy and copyright protection bill DMCA, which passed in 1998, which copyright holders say does not go far enough to protect their content. While both bills have been shelved for the time being, the issue of online piracy must be dealt with eventually.

SOPA and PIPA differ from the current DMCA laws by seeking to expedite the process of removing sites that are infringing on copyright. Currently it can take months or years to go through the legal motions of shutting down an infringing website. In the online space, speed in shutting down a site is crucial. However in this rush, the right to due process is skimmed over. This has the potential to invite large companies and their representative organizations (for example the MPAA and RIAA) to, without substantiating evidence, shut down websites they feel are infringing. Civil liberties experts are also concerned about the constitutionality of SOPA/PIPA, given that they can violate due process and limit free speech.

Without due process, websites can be shut down even if they are not violating copyright of any kind. Sites that simply link to suspected content would be seen as “enabling or facilitating” piracy. Being an accessory to the crime of internet piracy is also defined as doing business with pirating sites, and providing information on how to access blocked sites. While combating internet piracy is the cause of money and jobs lost, shutting down websites that are not engaged in piracy is too heavy-handed of an answer.

Furthermore, the costs of enforcing these bills are astronomical, estimated at $12 million a year by the Congressional Budget Office, and there is no assurance that they will actually meet their intended goal. While it will restrict access and cause major annoyance to everyday internet users, dedicated users with strong internet knowledge will easily find a way around the imposed restrictions on alleged infringing sites, and could easily create a virtual black market to help normal users access blocked sites. Just in case you forgot what generally happens when you restrict access to something strongly desired by a huge chunk of the population, feel free to Google “back-alley abortion” or “organized crime and Prohibition.”

SOPA and PIPA contain loose wording that leaves too much up to interpretation by companies eager to bring down competitors. It punishes certain parties for their innovation, and provides a cushion for those who have failed to keep pace. While the voting on these bills has been postponed for now, they both need to either be completely scrapped or revised, so that ordinary citizens sharing non-copyrighted content and websites unknowingly linking to pirating sites don’t get caught in the dragnet.  

What are your thoughts about SOPA/PIPA?

By Lauren W. and Malikah Kelly