SOPA

The Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA. This bill will protect intellectual property without consequences to the masses, right? Wrong. Like everything Congress has been up to recently, this bill is terrible. Its purpose, to protect copyrighted materials, is noble. Its methods, however, are harmful and wrong. This act is an attempt to control and corporatize the Internet and should not be passed.

Let me explain about some of the details of this bill. For example, take an average Joe’s blog. If Joe puts up a video from Fox News on his blog for discussion, and one small allegation about the clip is made, Joe’s clip is gone, and his entire blog might go, too. If the Justice Department deems Joe’s blog as “rogue”, the Justice Department can go to Joe’s Internet Service Provider with a court order to shut down Joe’s blog. What is “rogue” defined as? It’s any connection to a site known to contain pirated materials. If a random commenter posts a link to a piracy site on one of Joe’s posts, his site is defined as rogue. These punishments could also include fines and jail time.

SOPA is so incredibly broad in wording that it threatens every corner of the Internet, not just piracy sites. Did you know that only 1% of Americans are hardcore pirates? Instead of looking at the big picture and realizing that not every cent needs to go in Sony’s or Paramount’s pocket, they focus on every lost sale and decide to punish the American people. A Twitter user joked, “Under SOPA, you could get 5 years for uploading a Michael Jackson song, one year more than the doctor who killed him.”

Any Internet user knows this bill shouldn’t have support. But it does. The Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, movie studios, video game companies, trial lawyers, senators from both parties, and even pharmaceutical companies support this bill. Why? To make money. If this bill is passed, large companies will have monopolies over small Internet companies. If this bill is passed, a new lawsuit will begin every week, which means a new job offer for a trial lawyer. If this bill is passed, you can’t buy pills from out of the country so the pharmaceutical companies of America can have a monopoly. The level of avarice without regard to consequences is staggering. While large companies like Warner Bros. and Nintendo get to crush pirate sites and accomplish their missions, they crush homemade blogs, fantastic sites, and even informative and educational tools.

Who’s in opposition to SOPA? All the big Internet sites we visit every day: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, eBay, Amazon, Mozilla, and Blogspot. Just a few years ago, this support would have meant nothing. But now, these sites hold sway in the hearts of the American people and in the hearts of some senators. Microsoft, the New York Times, and NBC oppose this bill, knowing the consequences to their business if passed. Ron Paul opposes this bill, as do many other senators of both parties. Senator Ron Wyden plans to filibuster SOPA by reading over a million signatures from an online petition. Those are the senators who don’t accept money from studios and business conglomerates to take out competition. Those are the senators who represent the American people and American freedom. Many artists also oppose the bill. P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg, and Kanye West are all going to support a site known for its piracy through a song. From all spectrums of the media affected by piracy, we can see opposition to SOPA.

Everyone likes going on Facebook, right? Imagine if your posted pictures, videos or statuses had to be filtered by a huge team of moderators before it would be approved to post. Or even worse, if you couldn’t post pictures or videos at all. What if your YouTube account and all of your videos were deleted for showing a movie poster in the background for less than a second? What if you had to pay huge sums of money just to use a thirty second music clip in a video? What if your blog was shut down just because someone posted a link to a file-sharing site that was “rogue”? No one wants to be inconvenienced, harmed, or censored like this.

Unfortunately, this would be the Internet if SOPA passed; one of the most important inventions in human history being gutted because of corporate greed. This system isn’t capitalism. This isn’t competition between businesses. This is who can donate the most to senators to control their monopoly. This is just corporatism. This bill spreads corporatism into the one facet of life we hoped wouldn’t affected by government.

Bibliography

http://twitter.com/#!/sschillace/status/143071667734847488

http://www.webpronews.com/does-anyone-support-sopa-2011-11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE5WlyQRvaM&feature=player_embedded#!

The Other Internet – Beyond China’s Great Firewall. Perf. Weiliang Nie. BBC, 2010. Internet.