[Article first published as The Day the Web Went Dark on Blogcritics]
A lot of Internet users today are checking in with their
daily websites to find that those websites aren't up and active. They're
instead finding that some of those sites have gone dark, putting a halt to
their operations today to raise awareness on two bills currently in Congress:
H.R. 3261 and S. 968, known as the "Stop Online Piracy Act" and
"Protect IP." For those of you that don't really follow news in
the tech world, these are two bills whose aim to stop online piracy. OK. Fair
enough. The problem arises when one actually sits down and reads the language
of the bills - SOPA and PIPA are so overreaching and broad in scope that they
threaten the web itself, inadvertently targeting websites that thrive on
user-generated content. Sites participating in a full blackout are Wikipedia, Reddit,GamePolitics and
others. Other sites like the EFF and Ars Technica have
changed their sites to a dark blackout theme in solidarity. While this
argument has been going on for months, it's something that the mainstream media
is just picking up now, so please don't think that this is some new thing that
just started. SOPA in particular has already gone through a round of markup
hearings in the House Judiciary Committee (showing us the huge disparity
between knowledge and power) late last year and PIPA has also been making the
rounds, with a vote pending on January 24th.
For those of you that aren't familiar with what the
overreaching methods I discussed are all about, let me give you a quick
nutshell. SOPA and PIPA more or less state that ISP's (Internet Service
Providers) can be compelled by court order to block user access to websites that
are accused of either infringing or supporting the infringement of copyrighted
material. "Accused of." This hands copyright holders
(i.e. MPAA, RIAA and other big media) a kill switch the internet. Sure,
it'll work, but at the cost of censorship, an active web
blacklist, the 1st Amendment, and the very nature of the internet itself.
All it would take is a good faith belief that a site is infringing on
copyrighted material and a court order can be obtained to not only take it
offline but choke off payments to it via PaypPal and other payment methods.
Now while recent alterations soften the language a little bit, the spirit
of the bills stay the same.
Some of you who may not follow technology news may not
really think that this is such a huge thing, but it affects every internet
user. How does a world governed by SOPA and PIPA affect you, the everyday
internet user? Let's go back to the meat of the bill - if it's thought that any
part of a website contains infringing material, the entire website can be blocked.
Think about those cloud storage services you use to keep all of those
photographs and videos you share with your friends and family. Think about
Facebook. Reddit. Twitter. Tumblr. Think about everyone that blogs through blog
services like Blogger and Wordpress. And I don't even want to think about a
Google Images search gone awry. If this goes through, wave bye bye to your
digital presence.
There are other reasons why these bills are pointless. The
DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) which is already in place seems to be
working. I'm sure many of you have gone to YouTube or other video sites only to
see that a "video removed" message replaced the content. See how they
did that? They removed the copyrighted content without blocking the user's
access to the site, as SOPA/PIPA would do. Secondly, these bills were
originally written to target foreign sites supporting piracy. Foreign sites.
If that's the case then why are those made to pay the consequence American
users? Do you think the Pirate Bay is scared? I guarantee you they're not, and
still running their torrent service like they always have been. Plus, anyone
with even a shred of internet knowledge can go around DNS and get where they
want to go through an IP address (Internet Protocol in this case, not
Intellectual Property).
So what can you the user do about it? The most
important thing that you can do is to be heard.Contact your local politician
and tell them NO on SOPA and PIPA. Don't know how to do that? Don't
worry, you know I've got you covered. Google has also started a petition to
stop SOPA and PIPA, and put it better than I ever could – End Piracy,
not Liberty. Check the following links:
Here are some other resources so you can get more
information on SOPA and PIPA:
Also, here's a handy guide to where Representatives and
Senators stand, complete with campaign contributions: http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/
Sometimes change has to start with We the People.
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