[caption id="attachment_1612" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Wikipedia is one of numerous web sites to go black today in protest of SOPA and PIPA."][/caption]
You may have already noticed by now, but some of our favorite Web sites such as
Wikipedia,
Craigslist, and
Google have gone black today, protesting the
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). There's a lot to be said about both bills, and surely a lot more to protest.
Lifehacker.com couldn't have said it better:
SOPA and PIPA are two bills that sound like they have a mildly positive aim but, in reality, have serious potential to negatively change the internet as we know it. Both SOPA and PIPA put power in the hands of the entertainment industry to censor sites that allegedly 'engage in, enable or facilitate' copyright infringement. This language is vague enough to target sites you use every day, like Facebook and Google, making these bills a serious problem.
The idea behind these bills sounds reasonable. They came about in order to try and snuff out piracy online, as the entertainment industry is obviously not excited that many people are downloading their products without payment or permission. The issue is, however, that it doesn't really matter whether you're in support of piracy, against it, or just don't care. The methods are ineffective. Here's what they are and why they're problematic:
1. SOPA and PIPA were initially designed to make it possible for companies to block the domain names of web sites that are simply capable of, or seem to encourage copyright infringement. This would have been bad for everyone because such a measure doesn't actually prevent piracy. The reason that blocking a domain name isn't effective is because any blocked site can still be accessed via its numeric IP address. In fact, before the bills were even supposed to come to a vote, tools were created to automatically route domain names to their IP addresses to completely render this measure of SOPA and PIPA useless. As a result, the IP-blocking provisions have been removed from both bills.
2. The other, still-active measure present in the SOPA and PIPA bills would allow rights holders to cut the source of funding of any potential infringing web site. This means any other companies doing business with this site would have to stop. Whether that means advertising, links in search engines, or any other listings would have to be removed.
While the Obama administration has come out against SOPA, effectively shelving it indefinitely, the very similar PIPA bill is still alive and well.
As stated before, there's a ton of information out there in regards to SOPA and PIPA. The best way to protest these bills is to become informed and to
contact your congressperson via phone or mail. Let your voice be heard and help keep the internet free!
